The Day/Night Before Christmas

 

I was pretty good at time management this Christmas (thanks to all the party planning throughout the rest of the year), so we actually had a really nice Christmas Eve Day, mostly just me and the girls while Steve ran around on different errands. I had made a whole bunch of sugar cookies with the girls earlier in the week and so our major activity of the day was to decorate some of them. It was a lot of fun. This might actually turn out to be an age that I really really like with Kalea. She's finally calming down enough to sit and do some of the things that I have planned for her- it's refreshing! Kalea and Brynlee were equally determined to decorate their cookies unassisted and that made for some very interesting looking cookies, but I'm sure the recipients didn't mind. Oh and yes, we actually did give some of theirs away, it was pretty fun for them to see me wrapping up some of their cookies to take to our friends. Too bad upon delivery that night both kids fell right asleep, I had grand plans of standing them on friends' porches to sing Jingle Bells or Frosty the Snowman, instead I was the delivery person- not quite as fun! Oh well...

 

This year we spent Christmas Eve at Steve's parents' house. It was so fun to see all the cousins together and get to pig out, make gingerbread houses and enjoy some meaningful moments together. I'm sad I never got a picture of our gingerbread house though, it was so cute, and the landscaping was pretty stellar, not that I had anything to do with that... Anyways, we enjoyed the fact that spending an evening with cousins tuckers our kids out, and appreciated them falling asleep en route home that night. It made it so much easier to get them into bed, the only thing they didn't get to do was put out a plate of cookies and milk, but I did it for them later. I don't know why that's such a big deal to me, I mean, all they noticed was the half eaten cookie by the fireplace and then they fought over who got to eat it! It was a much more relaxed evening for Steve and I than it usually is. This was the first year that we didn't have any really huge last minute wrapping to do, we took care of stockings right away and we were in bed by 10:30, no kids woke up in the night, we didn't have any babies to worry about. It was AWESOME! Next post, *CHRISTMAS!

*life keeps interrupting my good intentions to post these quickly so bear with me*