Christmas Morning!

So, another Christmas has come and gone! This post is kind of long, so if you don't really care about seeing lots of videos of my kids, you might just want to skip this one! I will start out with some pictures of the decorations around the house!

So many of my pictures turned out blurry! I don't think I am meant to live in a technological age! But here is kind of a wide shot of the living room. I wish it was clearer. Sorry! (Of course, to Mommy it probably looks totally normal! Hahaha!)

Meggie gave me the idea of hanging ornaments from the mantle. It only cost about $4 and I really like how it turned out!

Tristan took this picture of Alaina, and I just thought it was cute!!


My kids are like every store Santa's dream come true! Alaina ran over to him so fast and jumped up on his lap and gave him the biggest hug! They all love seeing Santa!

This is video of Christmas Eve night. All of the videos are really dark, and I couldn't get them to lighten up any. But that's okay, as the best part is hearing Tristan squeal with delight! Also, notice in this video how quickly Tristan strips out of his old jammies to put on his new ones.


Alex asked me to "take a picture of Alex happy" after he got his new jammies on.  Tristan was sooo excited to get new "slip and falls", as he calls footed sleepers (because his others are so old that he can run and slide in them). Well, of course these being new, they still had the non-slip grip on the bottoms of the feet. After trying to fall a few times with no success, he came to me very disappointed. I told him that if he would just wait a while these would be slippery, too. He looked longingly at his old, holey jammies and asked, "Can I change back into my old ones?" Ahhh, kids! He also asked me all night long if it had been long enough for them to be slippery yet and then would run into the kitchen to test it out. By now he has accepted that they won't slip yet, and is very happy to wear them. ALL the time.

Alex's "happy" picture

Everyone in their new jammies

After jammies, we read the Christmas story and had a fire. After we talked about Christmas and what the scriptures mean, Tristan asked, "Mommy, is the baby Jesus in your belly?" Maybe we need to go over it a few more times.
Christmas morning before the kids came in. Compare this to the picture later of "after".

Going through stockings. They got candy, oranges, bubble bath, flashlights and bouncy balloons in their stockings. They really loved the balloons a lot. That's what Tristan is practically screaming about in the next video.

Of course, the moment we have all waited for, for the last year. Alex getting his "red dinosaur"!! Alex was all business, but I thought Tristan was going to have a heart attack!! I wish I could have got a video of Tristan when he opened "Up".  He literally screamed. It was great. I think Seth thought it was worth coming just for that.

I need to let you know, that after Alex opened his dinosaur, he would not touch another present. We tried to get him to open others, and he would just say, "No, thank you," and keep playing. He even kicked a present out of the way that was in the path of Spike.  I did get him to open one other present, and as he was opening it he said, "Open present, then you can play with the red dinosaur," as if it was some torture he had to get through so that he could get back to what was really important! He absolutely loooves his dinosaur and plays with it nearly nonstop until the batteries run out, and then he sits as though it is someone's death bed, watching and waiting for the light to turn green, meaning that it is done charging. It takes about 4 hours, so this took a lot of time the first couple of days. Now he will go and do other things while he waits for it to charge. Today he let Alaina hold the remote control for about 2 minutes, which was the first time anyone else has gotten to touch it. Except for Danny, of course, who played with it quite a lot on Christmas Eve before we wrapped it!


One of the many fun uses we have found for Spike, the dinosaur. :)

We all had such a great Christmas and really felt the Christmas spirit this year, I think. We loved having Seth here with us! We loved having Ben and Linda over the night before and seeing so many others on Christmas Day. We were sad to not see everyone. I hope sometime soon we can all get together! We were really sad that night when everyone was gone. :(  Where did all the fun people to do things with go?

So, here are a few things I have learned this year:
1. The best thing about working is having a day off.
2. You should always wear gloves when stringing and unstringing lights from alpine trees. They hurt!
3. It takes 30 minutes to unstring the lights on one alpine tree and 5 minutes for the new lights you put on to stop working.
4. Alex can find many things to do with a string of white lights, including but not limited to- taping them to his snowglobe, stringing them around his mom's head and attaching them to a large, inflatable beach ball.
5. It doesn't matter how much you prepare, it is written in your eternal destiny that you will have to go to Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve.
6. There will still be something you forgot to buy come Christmas Day. And when you break down and run to Walgreens to get it, they will tell you that someone just came in and bought all the last of it.
7. The amount of presents doesn't matter. Unless you are Danny. And then more is still better.

8. The Christmas Spirit is real and it is still fun as a grown-up getting things for people and getting little things from people you love. Somehow it still makes me feel all warm and cozy inside, just like when I was a little kid.

9. Possibly the best part of Christmas is after eating too much, with warm fuzzy socks on, laying there while the kids play and people talk all around you and drifting off to sleep and feeling that all is right with the world.

This was the last picture we got before the camera memory was all full.  I love how oblivious all the kids are to the total destruction around them. And frankly, us too.

We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, too and felt the spirit of Christmas in your homes and in your hearts! Here's to another wonderful, exciting year in life!!