Christmas Eve and Christmas Day Part I

Since I'm so far behind, I'm just going to post the pictures that I eventually want to end up in the book that I'm making--I'm turning my blog into a book--one for each year or so.

Anyway, we spent Christmas Eve at my mom's house. We went over a little before dinner time. We snacked, played, opened presents and dined on my mom's homemade chicken and noodles. There were several sides--broccoli with Hollandaise is my FAV! I need to eat that more often (SMILE)!

This is our Christmas tree. It finally looked like this on Christmas Eve!

Small things are truly entertaining

Snack table (with little hands in the food)

Auntie feeding the babe

The pose before the chaos begins

Some of the chaos

New robe, goofy doll and slippers--spoiled much?

Oh, the girl loves her some MICKEY!

Brownie added to her Strawberry Shortcake collection

This ice cream has been a real hit at home

For their first Christmas, my sister always makes the girls a chair. I thought this zebra chair looked great.

 

 We also make our Santa cookies. Well, actually we decorated the gingerbread cookies we made the day before.

Hmm.. what should she do with her frosting?

We left my mom's around bed time and headed home. We set out cookies for Santa, forgot to read "Twas the Night Before Christmas," and got ready for the next morning/day! 

 

 Believe it or not, Santa came!

We have three entrances into our kitchen/hearth room, and two of them were blocked off by Santa. 

This was to hold the kids back, of course!

Here is what they came downstairs to on Christmas morning. 

She was thrilled to get her "American Girl Doll." That's what the older girls wanted, but these were dolls from Target. Super cute and more age appropriate. 

Peach got a Happy Feet game. And behind her you can see where Santa blocked another entrance into our kitchen/hearth room where his gifts were.

She loves Tangled and she loves the Wii--could it get any better?

Daddy helping the baby open her gift. 

She loves her Cinderella dress

Look what Santa left... a note for the girls, an empty cookie plate and mug, and his paper streamers.

The girls are waiting to come in to see what Santa brought. 

They loved their Santa toys!

After our morning at home, we went to Gram and Papa's house. I was so caught up in getting out of the house on time, I forgot some items at home. Most importantly, my good camera. So all pics I got of Christmas afternoon are on my iPhone. Those are coming next. I just need to dump them onto the computer!

The Week Before Christmas

The rest of the week leading up to Christmas...

Tuesday was my last MOPS meeting for 2011. My sis came with me, and it was fun getting to introduce her to some of my friends. But we could only stay about 50 minutes because we were going to watch Brownie and Bug's preschool Christmas program. There's no recording or photos allowed (boo!) of the actual performances, so we always do a picture by the Christmas tree after the show.

Baby Scrunchie--her little headband needed to be fixed in this picture, but I didn't have access to her at that time

The Irish twins posing in front of the Christmas tree at their school 

 

Posing, post concert

Wednesday was fun-filled as well! My sister and I went to Peach's school to work their Christmas party. Another mom and I planned about 7 games and a craft for the kids to do during their party. I think they had a ton of fun, but I have no photographic proof. When you are in charge of the party and directing little 5 and 6 yr olds, it's kinda hard to snap photos with your good (big) camera as well. It's so weird to actually do some mom things that I've been looking forward to since I knew I was going to be a mom--IE coordinate a class party!


This is when the week got super exciting because I finally had all of my kiddos home with no real schedule to stick to. Love that! Peach was feeling rather worn out from her very first semester of school, so I promised her a day full of cartoons, movies, baking, and eating cookies--and maybe some other treats. I really don't know who was looking forward to it more--her, or me (SMILE)!

Thursday night the seven of us sat down to make our own ornaments. In years past, we head out to the hobby store to find an ornament that represents us for that given year. Well, we decided to head into nature to find some items that we could make an ornament out of this year. The family loved this activity! I loved that Daddy thought it up and led the "hike" and crafting part! 

Everybody getting ready to make their ornaments

Daddy's creation

Peach's completed ornament

Daddy providing some instruction

Crafting the night away

Boushka measuring out ribbon for her ornament

Friday was that wonderful, glorious day I had set aside for all of us girls to be bums for the day. We watched an insane amount of Christmas movies and baked a lemon loaf and made two different kinds of fudge.

We're getting ready to make our treats

Our chocolate-peppermint fudge up front and regular chocolate fudge in the background

Boushka is sifting away

The makings of our gingerbread cookies

Lemon Loaf (apparently it's quite similar to a certain Star quality coffee shop)

These ended up being our Santa cookies. Peach had been asking to make gingerbread cookies for Santa for a few years--and we finally did it

We also snacked on some truffles my sweet friend Heather dropped by. She even included a little "mom and dad" gift in there to help us stay up late--but not too late--- on Christmas Eve. Can you tell she's a graphic designer! Seriously talented and apparently a fantastic truffle maker!

Love her little booklet she made to accompany the treat!

Mmmm... truffles!

The mom and dad gift

I'll end the post here for obvious reasons--there are several Christmas Eve/Day photos, and I think they deserve their own posts! So, maybe by next week I'll be all caught up for 2011 posts. HA!

Weekend before Christmas Weekend

Christmas, and the weeks leading up to it, have been moved to the back burner much too long--actually, blogging in general has been moved to the back burner for much too long. There's so much fun that happened, and I really want to get it all out there before I forget it all!

It was a week before Christmas that we bundled up the seven of us and headed out to look at Christmas lights.

I guess I was too concerned about packing a candy cane, cookies and a cup of (not too) hot chocolate for each of the four older girls to remember our camera. But we had so much fun going around town to all the neighborhood displays and a special light show our town does every year.

The Saturday a week before Christmas, my mom took the girls and me to see Little House Christmas! I know the girls were excited to see this, but I'm so glad I was able to see it as well! Our family has been reading the Little House books for a couple years now, so this was a fun Christmas present for us all!

The girls wore their new shirts I made for them (with matching bows of course)! Caroline taught our MOPS group how to make these prints--and they're totally adorable and fairly easy!

And right before the play, the girls went with grammy to pick up Auntie. She was able to spend the week leading up to Christmas with us. We were so happy to have her here! That first night she was in town, we celebrated Autnie's birthday. We ordered in Italian food and watched her open presents while lovin' on some sweet girls.

During all the celebration, we discovered a crying baby. Turns out she had a bite mark shortly after an interaction with our 2yr old. We've never had a biter, and I can't believe she did this. I did ask Boushka why she bit Scrunchie and she said "Well, I was trying to be nice because I only bit her a wittle bit!"

On Sunday we went to my friend, Lynette's house. She made several gingerbread houses --one per guest--from scratch. She used no kit! I was amazed at this! We each brought some candy and then we had some frosting from the hostess, as well. I took the three older girls and they had a blast. Of course, I had fun hanging out with my friends, too!

That night, I decided I better finalize all Christmas related gifts, party stuff, etc for the week. So I made some gifts--these are lemon hand scrubs. Yes, it came from pinterest!


I was a co-organizer for Peach's class party, and somehow I had also signed up to bring one of the three treats. So I got busy making Oreo Balls--per Peach's request. They were a hit!

And if you've been a reader of mine for a while, you'll probably remember that we don't do Elf on the Shelf (mainly because I didn't feel like spending the $30 when I discovered it a few years ago--cheap, I know), but instead we do Penguin Man. He is similar to EOTS because he's Santa's helper who watches over the girls, and now he also "interacts" with them. So Sunday night he left them this note.

And they found him in the fridge with green rice milk and red almond milk. He's quite the ornery guy--especially without arms!

This catches us up for the weekend before Christmas. There was so much going on this week before the big day, that I'm breaking the Christmas posts up into several posts. Better late than never!!!