Merry Christmas

Wishing your family many blessings this Christmas season and in 2010!

We had a lovely Christmas here!  It was our first Christmas with all 9 of us at home, so it was very special.  

These all loaded in reverse chronological order, and I don't feel like taking the time to fix them, so here is a 

White Elephant gift exchange

Our cousins from out of state and their children came to visit.  :)
All of us went out for lunch at a Chinese buffet on Sunday.


This is how the girls spent Christmas afternoon.  
Opening presents at home on Christmas morning





The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would be there.


Listening to The Night before Christmas after the Christmas eve service at church
The lake froze!  We all went ice skating. Sarah-Grace did awesome for her first time on ice skates, and Kai figured out how to skate backwards!

Decorating the Christmas tree

So after waiting a week to get around to it, we began to mutilate our beautiful Christmas tree.  Snow flakes made out of lace? Yup! Rudolphs made out of cloth pins?  Yup. But wait...  Isn't there only one Rudolph? Well we have about 12 so.....  Plenty of angels and ball ornaments and anything else 27 years of having kids can get you.  So after plenty of help,

  

Our tree is now mutilated and we still have 2-4 boxes of ornaments that we couldn't fit on!

Christmas trees

So this last weekend we all got in the car and begain the epic journey for a christmas tree. My parents decided it was a great idea to take a two hour drive  so we could cut down a tree with my sister. After a stop for a snowball fight,
We headed over to a tree farm with what seemed like 20 million trees. Gladly it was cold outside so we didn't spend long in deciding on a tree. 
It was then killed by having it cut by daniel,
and Dad
And Daniel some more and I left out Sarah Grace and kai who needed a try

We then loaded up and went to my sisters apartment for lasanga. 

It was  great day and lots of fun. It was also cool because it was Sarah-Grace's first snow.