Christmas

We spent Christmas Eve at Brian and Joyce's new house. We had a very nice dinner.

 

 We opened up presents. Brielle helped everyone open their gifts.

 Aunt Jamie and Uncle Pete were able to come out from New York to join in the festivities.

 Graham got a new tool for our attic project. (Graham and my dad are building out our attic into a play room.)

This is a picture of us setting out cookies for Santa. 

Both kids really wanted to eat his cookies. 

 This is our family picture from Christmas Eve.

 Here is the tree the next morning after Santa had come.

 The stockings were hung by the chimney with care...

 and filled all the way up!

The kids enjoyed a morning of opening presents from Santa and us.

Liam loved the first gift he opened and ended up playing with it for 10 minutes before he wanted to open anything else. 

We didn't have snow, but we had a beautiful sunrise. 

Brielle ripped all of her presents open and loved every minute of it.

Liam got the remote control truck he asked Santa for.

Brielle got the vacuum she wanted. Now she can vacuum just like mommy!

She also got the stroller she asked for. She is constantly trying to sit in it.

 Liam got the umbrella he asked for too.

 We had our families come join us for gift exchanges and Christmas Dinner.

So Sweet!

Daddy and the kids showing off the shirts I got them. A great time was had by all. It was the best Christmas yet. We enjoyed every minute. Our only complaint was that it was too short.

Unfortunately, we had to take our tree down the next day! We got it so early this year it was completely dried out. It was a huge mess! It took us forever to get all of the needles out of our house.

Christmas Preparations

Here we are decorating our tree. This year it was over 10 ft.

Liam loved the Superman ornament the most!

We went to visit Santa multiple times. Liam loves Santa! Brielle didn't want to go anywhere near him. She liked to wave at him, but that was it. 

Here we are at a Christmas parade. They were throwing candy canes on the street and Brielle got one. She was so happy! She had never had any candy before.

We got to have breakfast with Santa this year too!

 I love this picture. Liam is just taking it all in and carefully touching Santa's hand.

 We went to a special Christmas program. Brielle played in this chair for at least 15 minutes.

This is Liam getting ready for his preschool Christmas program. 

Here he is singing on stage. It was the cutest thing he has done yet. He did all kinds of dance moves and sang loudly.

My sister and niece came up to visit and they took Liam to make a reindeer at the mall. He loved it!

While my family was in town we had an early Christmas party at my parent's house. 

Everyone received great gifts!

We did our annual gingerbread houses.

I took on the task of making all the gingerbread myself this year. It was a lot of work, but they turned out great.

Liam had some friends over to make Christmas crafts and they did a gift exchange. 

We had our annual Christmas Party. It was the best one yet. We did a white elephant exchange this year and I ended up with a vintage light up Santa for the front porch. I love it!

We also took Liam ice skating. He did surprisingly well again this year. He thoroughly enjoyed it.

Thanksgiving

We had an amazing Thanksgiving! We were very thankful for getting to spend it with our parents and some of our best friends. The Moss Family came up and spent the week with us. Dinner turned out great and we had a lot of leftovers. It was the best turkey yet!

That night Megan and I hit the stores for Black Friday shopping. Our first haul was from 8 PM - 2 AM. Then we got back up at 7 am and kept shopping until noon. We got a lot of great deals and had a lot of fun!

Saturday we got our Christmas tree. We set a new record this year: it only took us 30 minutes to pick it out. Unlike last year it took us 2 hours!

 That night we went to dinner with the Moss Family at Olive Garden. One of Megan and my favorite restaurants.

The next morning the kids exchanged gifts. We had such a great time with them. We wish they still lived here!