Christmas 2011

We had a great Christmas despite being far from loved ones in Utah.   Jake had to work both Christmas Eve night and Christmas Day night we had a rather low key celebration, but fun nevertheless.  I don't have many pictures of Christmas Eve, but we made cookies and skyped with family back in Utah.

The kids got there traditional new jammies and went to bed without too much drama.   Wish I would have gotten a picture of them in their jammies.  Then Santa made his promised visit...  We told the kids that if they could hear dad home from work, then they could get up and come upstairs.  So we actually let our kids get up super early so that we could open presents with Dad before he went to sleep for a few hours.  Otherwise it would have been 3:00 pm before we could have opened presents and I didn't want to have to think of ways to entertain the kids all day with such a temptation right in front of them.  So here we are at 6 am seeing what santa brought and opening all of our other gifts.

 Abbie got a dollhouse

 and Ashton and Lexie got Legos (the present of choice this year at our house)

Abbie got her much loved "Jack" blanket 

and Ashton got more Legos...

more Legos here too....

this was the way our table looked for most of Christmas Day (and the next and the next)

even Abbie got in on the building fun...

Abbie and Ashton got play dough, which Abbie was much more excited than Ashton and while the older kids built and built she rolled 

and rolled 

and cut up play dough.

Wait I need to backup a little bit, after we opened presents we said goodnight to Dad and we had breakfast (waffles) and got ready for church, we had a really good spiritual sacrament meeting.  Here are the kids all dressed up after church.

We got even more Legos (I must have been crazy when I thought this many Legos were a good idea) but only in the form of a game from Uncle BJ and Aunt Holly.... Creationary.  It was one of the most fun games I have played in a long time, here are a few of the things that we created

and here is Ashton acting excited for me after I took this picture and told him that he looked bored to tears....

One of the things that Lexie asked for and got was some patterns to sew.  She has taken a great interest in sewing in the past few months and is basically teaching herself because I only have very basic sewing skills myself. A few days after Christmas we went to the store and got material and she made these aprons for them so that they have something to wear when it is their turn to help me cook.  I thought they turned out great for her first real sewing project all by herself.  She did everything start to finish by herself.  

(they each got to pick out what material they wanted.)