Picture Overload

I love taking pictures and feel like I have to capture every moment. I took over 100 pictures. Don't worry, I didn't post them all. :)

One of our Christmas traditions is gingerbread house building. In passed years I have done real gingerbread and added a gingerbread train. But this year I had no motivation to do either. So we went with graham crackers. Mike constructed the house and I decorated it. Now tell me, isn't this the COOLEST graham cracker, gingerbread house EVER?!?! I think he did a pretty stinkin' good job building this thing. Seriously...have you ever tried making the gable (triangle)part out of graham cracker before? I have, and it's not easy. And he made 4 perfect gables. Too bad I got the doors off center under that gable. hahaha.

Here are our stockings hanging on our awesome train stocking hooks. (Thanks Heidi!) Another tradition we have, which started the first Christmas Mike and I were married, is to hit the dollar store Christmas Eve, split up and pick out fun, crazy, weird, etc stocking stuffers for each other. We always get pretty interesting things for each other. lol.

And this is the tree right before we headed to bed. We left the gingerbread house down where the kids could see and pick at it. haha. Jacob was the first to wake up. Here he is with his typical breakfast banana, checking out his stocking. Once he figured out there was cool stuff in his stocking he abandoned his banana and forgot about it. We let Jacob open his gift first. He doesn't really get the concept of unwrapping things yet. He just looked at it like, "okay, it's a colored box...what do I do with this??" Lizzie figured it out though and started ripping paper off for him. After that he decided to help unwrap it.

I have been dying to give him this since I ordered it a few months ago. He LOVES my vacuum. But it's too big for him to push around. Still he is always begging me to get it out so he can play with it. So, as you can imagine, as soon as he got it out of the box he was pushing it around non stop. I wish it really worked (supposedly it does, but you can imagine how well a toy vacuum would work with 3 c cell batteries) cause if it did, we would not have one speck of dirt on the carpet anywhere in the house. He loves it.

I think Lizzie's favorite toy is this stuffed bear that she got in her stocking.

She wasn't real interested in unwrapping her own gift. She played with the bow for a bit then...

made a bee-line for the gingerbread house. Unfortunately, she couldn't get any candy off. It was stuck on pretty good. So she decided to go back to her present.

This time Daddy helped her a little bit.

So did the boy.

Then the boy discovered the gingerbread house. He was able to get some candy off and thought it was pretty cool.

And Lizzie found Jacobs abandoned banana. Yummy!

I've been trying to talk Mike into getting a minivan before we move, and the other day he mentioned that he wanted a foosball table. Soooo...

Voila. Minivan for me...

foosball table for Mike. Both from the dollar store. Who'da thunk?! Don't we both look awesome first thing in the morning. haaaaaa.

Mary was so nice and sent us a couple fun gifts. This one was my favorite though. It's a book called Mud Pie Annie and it is the CUTEST book!! I love it. I'd never read it before. I can see it becoming a favorite for the kids. Here are Lizzie and Jacob playing with their stocking stuffers. Lizzie got some little bracelets. She thought the were pretty cool. But she kept trying to put them on her head. Jacob got a punching balloon that he loved almost as much as his vacuum. Unfortunately he kept hitting it into the tree despite our repetitive warnings and it met its demise rather loudly.

Their big combined gift was a little table and chairs. Here's Mike trying out a chair.
Jacob decided to have a tea party on it. Mike decided he wanted to join in on the fun, English accent and all. He said he felt like he had joined "the finer things club". hahaha. (That's from 'The Office' in case you were wondering.)

We spent the rest of the day watching Christmas movies, calling family, and just hanging out. We had a nice family dinner together which consisted of fettuccine alfredo, an awesome salad that was as good as Olive garden's salad, bread sticks and apple-pomegranate sparkling cider. It was so good, we decided that it would be our traditional Christmas dinner from here on out. :)

Jacob had so much fun, he was tuckered out by the time we finished eating. He was in bed, asleep by 7:30pm. All that vacuuming would wear anyone out. :)

It was a fun day. Thanks everyone who sent us gifts and helped to make our little family Christmas special and fun. I hope everyone had a excellent Christmas. BRING ON THE NEW YEAR!!