The Last of the Christmas Posts

Almost a week overdue but here it is, our fun little Christmas.

Every Christmas Eve, right before bed, the elves come to our door, make lots of funny sounds and scratching noises. The kids hear this and rush to open the door and this is what they find:
PJ's made by the elves! Fresh from the North Pole!
Then, after the kids go to bed, mom and dad get to wrapping presents. This is what happens when it's after midnight and you have run out of enough of each kind of wrapping paper to sufficiently cover a box and don't care anymore.
Christmas morning, Dale makes the kids close their eyes and walk in to the living room where the tree is.
Santa came! Santa came!
Tabby's exited about her new crown. Check out her lip gloss application skills.
Tabby's big gift was a princess vanity. She keeps calling it her princess "unity." Close enough.
Rex's big gift was a train set with a remote control. Totally a big deal for him. I haven't been able to pry him away from it since.
Ella Rose had lots of fun opening her gifts.
Dale loved his awesome new Sun Devils hat.

Then it was off to Grandma and Grandpa's With the Cat (that's the nickname the kids gave them to help differentiate from the other sets of grandparents.)

After our annual face stuffing breakfast, we opened even more gifts.

Grandma and Grandpa got Ella an Abby Cadabby doll which she sleeps with every night now.
Grandma and grandpa also got Tabby the princess dress that matches her new crown.
Aunt Magi got Rex this awesome hoodie. I love that he's using the wrong fingers to do the pitchfork sign. I just don't think his little thumbs are long enough to reach is ring fingers to hold them down so he improvises.
Cousin Madeline. So cute!
Merry Christmas!

New Tradition

We have started a new Christmas Eve tradition in our family. It involves hitting the ground really hard, getting soaking wet, freezing our cans off and laughing the whole time. We went ice skating! My OB (remember the sorta bed rest) would have really disapproved! It's cool though, I went really slow and I never fell. Same as walking, right? I will just have to attempt a triple loop next time. The ones falling were the kids. Kids on ice are hilarious. Ella was hopeless, we never got a picture of her because she lasted about 1 minute out there. She couldn't even do it with us holding her up. She ended up sitting with Grandma and Grandpa the whole time. Rex got around a few times by holding on to the wall and shuffling along.
He looks just thrilled, doesn't he? He decided it was more fun to play arcade games with Daddy. And a big thanks to the Polar Ice employee who gave us 50 tokens FOR FREE!!!

Tabby had the most fun out of all of us. Or maybe I had the most fun because I got to skate with her. She started out pretty rough, falling all over the place and hanging on the wall. Her older cousins were there and they helped her along and before I knew it, she was skating all over the place without any help.
She even chased down Santa for a treat.
Grandma got some great pics too.
See how she holds her hands out all dainty like? She runs like that too. So cute.

We all had a great time and I love our new Christmas Eve tradition.

Christmas Actvities

Here's what we've been doing to get in the Christmas Spirit.

Last weekend, Dale and I took all the kids and my parents to look at Christmas lights around the valley. We find all the crazy decked out houses from a map online and drive to all of them in the hopes of being amazed. And amazed we were. Just look at some of these.

This lady had several huge plexiglas cases full of Christmas village pieces. They were in her driveway, garage, and front porch. There must have been thousands. Holy crap.
And she had a SUPER CREEPY collection of animated robot dolls.
Then we went to a few others that were good but this one was particularly out of control. Every inch was covered with lights. The owners were showing Christmas movies in their driveway with a projector and they were serving popcorn and hot cocoa. Rex drank a whole cup of it so of course we had to make a pit stop about every 10 minutes.
The last place we went was a street called Upland Dr. in Chandler. Every house was done up to the nines.
So many people were there walking around, it was really a fun place to be. Here are Tabby and Rex telling "Santa" what they want for Christmas.
Then last Monday night, we decorated a tree for Family Home Evening. It wasn't just any tree. It was our pure tree. We talked about what the color white means in regards to Christ. We told the kids that red and green are the colors of Christmas but when it comes to the Christ child, the color of Christmas truly is white. So we made some white snowflakes and paper chains to put on our Pure tree. Do we not have snowflake skills?
Rex had his Preschool Christmas program and he was the cutest darn Rudolph you ever did see! How funny that he's wearing the same shirt that he has on in his ornament picture. Doesn't surprise me though, that's been his favorite shirt for quite some time now.
That same day, Tabby had "Polar Express" day at school. She was instructed to wear PJ's to school so they could be all cozy while they watched the movie and drank hot cocoa.
She was super fired up to wear her cupcake robe and her girls rock guitar slippers.

That night it was my turn to have some fun so I went (just me, yay!) to my mom's house to make some Christmas cookies. We were too lazy to make a bunch of different icing colors so we stuck with light blue because we thought we could make it accommodate any type of cookie cutter shape.
This guy is bummed cause of his runny foot.

Saturday night was our annual Porter (Dale's grandparents) Family Christmas Party. We are too big a family to fit in any body's house nowadays so we held it in a church this year. A house can get pretty claustrophobic with 85 people in it. That's how many showed up! And there were still a lot more who couldn't make it. I didn't take any pictures, dang it!

Another thing I didn't take pictures of was my kids in their Christmas church clothes. We were in such a hurry to get out the door and get there on time, it slipped my mind. And they looked so cute too! The girls had pastel colored glittery tu-tu skirts with glittery pink princess shoes. Oh, it was adorable. While we were getting ready, I started to feel bad because I didn't get anything for Rex to wear. When I said that Dale went back in Rex's room and fished out his tie he used to wear when he was a baby. I have to say it looked a little silly on him because the tie was extra mini (kinda like fat guy in a little coat) but Rex was really happy to be wearing something "special" so I left it on. I am straight kicking myself for not taking any pictures. No worries, I'll just dress them in the exact same thing next week and take pics then. No one will be the wiser!

And bringing up the rear in this marathon of a post, we went to see the Mesa Arizona Temple lights last night. It's not Christmas if you don't go see the lights! No earth-shattering lights photos here. Just a quick snapshot in between chasing kids.

Here we are all bundled up.
Ella looks so snuggly!
Who does Rex look like to you? You know, raccoon hat and bomber jacket? Any guesses?
That's right! Scut from A Christmas Story! I almost made him touch his tounge to this flagpole to see if it would stick to it.
Totally unintentional but hilarious!

Ca-Ravings!

Oh, the cravings have begun! Weird random things at any given time of day or night. Lucky for me, I have a husband who wants to see his sick chubby prego wife happy so he gladly goes off to the store for whatever it is that I must have right that second.

This is what I was DYING for the other night:

This

Plus a little (okay a lot) of this

And some of this

Equals temporarily happy hormonal house frau!

Christmas Decorations

I finally pulled my sick body off of the couch and finished up my Christmas decorating. I sound so full of the Christmas spirit, don't I? I put up what I felt like doing, and left the rest (about half) in the boxes. It's no fun putting up decorations when you feel nasty so I only used what I really liked and will be able to stand looking at until February because that's probably how long it's all gonna stay up at this rate. Here's some pics of it all:
You know when you buy something on clearance the day after Christmas and you put it away and forget about it? Then you open up the box a year later and you are totally surprised?
That's what happened with these flower lights. Actually I don't even remember getting them. But I LOVE them. Good job, me from last year!
This over sized ornament is my fave thing this year. The were on sale at Target for a steal and I got two.
I hung it on my Eiffel tower.
Here's the other one. The awesome Jamie Poulsen GAVE me this mirror! Sweet girl. Thanks Jamie!
The only nativity scene I have is one my mom gave me. It's the one we had in our house growing up. I think her mom got it in a hardware store in Montana. So bourgeois!
The only place I could find space to display it was scattered on my ledges.

***Update: This is what my mom has to say about the origin of the nativity set: "My mom saw the nativity scene at Graham and Ross in Great Falls, Montana in 1961. I think it was Italian. She waited until the price went down just before Christmas and paid $3.97 for it.

She set it out spread around the house and moved the shepherds and the wise men and their animals closer and closer day by day until everybody was all together on Christmas day. Merry Christmas!"

Cute story, huh? I'm totally going to do the spreading them out and bringing them closer and closer until Christmas thing. I had no idea my grandma did that.

There's only about a million Christmas crafts I have been wanting to try but they are gonna have to wait until next year. I just don't have the Christmas crafting bug. Shocker! I know. Non-stop nausea will do that to a gal.