HaleyWe had a wonderful three days celebrating Christmas with my side of the family. (We celebrate with James’ side this weekend). It was perfect to spread celebrations over three days so that it wasn’t too much for the kids.
We spent Christmas Eve’s Eve at my Grandmother’s house. It was a smaller than normal gathering due to some sickness and some family being out of town, but my kids had an absolute blast playing with Gigi, cousins and great uncles.
On Christmas Eve, we celebrated with my brother and sister and her family at my parent’s house. The kids had a fun leisurely morning opening gifts and playing with each other. Scarlett is in love with Baby Easton, who is only 8 months old but weighs two pounds more than she does. She hugged him relentlessly and he loved pulling her hair.
Our church didn’t have childcare for the Christmas Eve service, so I took James Michael as my date while James watched the other two kids. We sat with my parents and brother at church and James Michael was very inquisitive, especially because there were several baptisms that night. After the first person was baptized and stood up wet, he proclaimed, “They just dunked him in a bucket.” I’ve been getting a lot of questions from him about heaven and death and now baptism and what it means to believe in Jesus, as well as “why did God make” questions (such as why did God make germs?). It’s made me realize that I need to start thinking about kid-sized answers to these adult-sized questions.
Later that night, James and I spent hours trying to get our over-excited Rowdy boys to bed so we could assemble this 60-inch trampoline. We finally finished at 11 p.m. and realized we forgot to add the padding around the middle bar, but there was no going back at that point.
My boys were so excited Christmas morning. James Michael first noticed that Santa drank all his milk. They loved the trampoline and their little gifts from Santa, which included a game, a book, a puzzle and an activity to help keep them occupied this winter. James Michael said he must have been a good boy this year to get so many gifts. I just laughed and told him he’s a pretty good kid.
I took absolutely zero photos on Christmas Day–hence the weird quality of the screen shot taken above from a video on James’ phone. I was feeling a little under the weather with a short-lived stomach bug, but thankfully none of the kids caught it.
On Christmas afternoon, we went back to my parent’s house for lunch with my mom’s side of the family and spent most of the day outdoors enjoying the unusually warm weather. The kids rode riding toys, played with the neighbor next door, drove the electric four wheeler and played nerf baseball. It was a wonderful Christmas spending time celebrating with family.
