Christmas 2008

Since my husband works all the time, and I've pretty much decided that I may never get our Christmas pictures off of his computer; I thought I'd write a little about how our Christmas was. Maybe down the road I'll add a picture or two!

So our Christmas was extraordinary this year. It was so calm and relaxing (not words I normally use to describe Christmas). Frankly, I loved it! The kids got waaaaayyy too many gifts, despite our efforts to "downsize" this year. Things didn't really work out as planned. It's really super hard to not give your kids every possible thing you can give to them. I think one of the problems was that we forgot about a couple gifts, and realized how much they were actually getting as we wrapped everything on Christmas Eve.

Christmas morning was wonderful...we all slept in! So, we made our way down to the Christmas tree around 9 a.m. I was afraid of that 5 a.m. wake up call, so sleeping until 9 was heaven! We opened gifts....which was fun and exciting. The best part of Christmas is watching the faces of your loved ones when they receive something they've been hoping for. We had a wonderful breakfast made by my great husband and played with some toys. Then we took a nap! How incredibly fantastic! To have a nap on Christmas day....there was no one at our house to entertain, and we weren't somewhere that we would feel uncomfortable taking a nap. After some refreshing sleep, we played games, got dinner started, then we all went out to sled. (Thank you Paul and Sara for the new sled, we used it well!) As many of you know, we got plenty of snow on Christmas day...it was a beautiful white Christmas. I guess it was the perfect day for sledding (or sitting inside drinking hot chocolate). We had a couple fun filled hours of sliding down a gigantic hill, in the perfect weather. Peyton had the privilege of being hit by an out of control sled. He flew in the air, did a flip and landed face first in the snow. He survived, thankfully, and only cried for a minute or two. Other than that we avoided accidents! When it got too dark, we headed home and had a wonderful dinner. No pressure getting everything done in time...we just got it done and ate. No turkey this year, just ham. I think it saved us a lot of time and hassle....not to mention, it was delicious! We played some more games as a family, and probably stayed up way too late. It was such a wonderful day to just be a family and enjoy each other. We realize how blessed we are, and we are truly thankful for Jesus who gave us such a wonderful day to celebrate.