Christmas Eve

Oh, the anticipation of Christmas this week has been so fun!  I finished the quilts at THREE a.m. Thursday morning and felt so relieved to have that project completed!  It was a relief to have them done and to have the time to concentrate on a few other loose ends for Christmas.  We didn't have any family traveling to us this year, so we traveled out to Mitch and Elaine's for another holiday!  They are our adopted family and we love them so much!  Amanda was begging us to come out on Thursday so we could just get there already!  We finally did leave on Friday morning/afternoon with both cars packed full of gifts, food and ice fishing and hunting gear.   Between all of the girls, it was decided that were going to do a simple dinner of Cafe Rio sweet pork, cilantro rice and amazing dressing.  Oh, it was so good and so nice to not spend the day cooking.  After we had dinner, it was time for a Christmas Eve "program".  First, we had a few family/group pictures while our kids were somewhat cooperative and awake.  Ella was fading very quickly.

Morley was the narrator for the reading of the story of Jesus's birth and he did a great job.  Mitch was King Harrod, Matt/Joseph, Ella/Mary, Drew and Brayden were the wise"guys".

Then, the traditional opening of the pajamas on Christmas Eve.  I was surprised with my own pj's from the girls, so I didn't get any pictures of my kids opening their gifts.  How fun that I was included in their fun tradition too!  These girls are just so much fun!

They have a tradition of watching The Christmas Oranges and then sharing a chocolate orange.  It was a neat story and brought a wonderful spirit of sharing and service to Christmas.  Finally after we wrote Santa a letter and left out some cookies and snacks for the reindeer the kids were off to bed.  The kids remembered to leave our "Santa key" outside on the door so he could find us since we weren't at our house.  Somehow even with arriving with nearly everything totally wrapped and ready to go, Elaine and I were up until 2am.  The OLDER girls warned us that they will be up bright and early in the morning.  If they beat the kids up...it is going to be really early!  They have the cutest little "cowboy" theme tree in the basement!  There were SO many presents with both of our families combined, it was very exciting!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!