Christmas (x2) and Happy Birthday Jesus!

After spending all day the day before celebrating DH's birthday, it was time to celebrate Christmas and Jesus' birth! We had traveled to Dallas on the 23rd to visit DH's parents and 2 brothers and spent Christmas Eve Day tooling around town, touring each brother's house and then back to the parent's house for lunch and presents. The kids had an absolute blast hanging out with all of the family and both of them especially loved getting to spend time with Baby A, their one year old cousin:



After a yummy lunch and plenty of presents, we loaded up and headed back to East Texas, along with Auntie M, and got home just in time for our Christmas Eve traditions (except for going to church...we didn't make it in time for that!). The kids got back into their Christmas jammies (made by Mimi, complete with matching slippers and jammies for their Bears!), we read The Night Before Christmas, spread out some reindeer food, and left a note to tell Santa not to wake up K-girl when he arrived.



The next morning, they were up bright and early and were shocked to see that Santa had let Rudolph into our house and he made quite a mess! Daddy wasn't too happy with the reindeer food that Kitty Maddie munched on and then proceded to puke up all over the couch (there's nothing like cleaning up cat puke on Christmas morning!), but the kids were beyond excited to know that Rudolph AND Santa had been to our house!

K-girl reminded us all that we needed to put Baby Jesus in the manger (thank goodness I remembered where I hid Him!) and then we opened presents. Later, Mimi and Paw-Paw joined us and after that, Busha and Ja-Ja (DH's parents) arrived. We ate an awesome dinner, if I do say so myself, and I can brag like that, since I was the cook, and had fun with Marshmallow guns, S*illy S*ring, and new toys. And then, we had our birthday party for Jesus, complete with a cake, decorated by Auntie M and K-girl:



A beautiful cake, on a beautiful day...celebrating the birth of the tiny baby who brings hope, light and mercy to the world. Thank you God, for the birth of your son, and thank you for blessing us with wonderful friends and family. We love you and we are so grateful for your grace!

Pics at the Stink-Bug Park

Every other year, we do a 'family' picture all together around Christmas-time. In the past, we've always gone to the mall to have the pics taken and, although the results have been great, I was really wanting to do things different this year and get some more relaxed shots of us being a family together outside. So, I called my friend, who has a sister that's a photographer, and we set up a time to meet at the local park that we affectionately call, 'The Stink-Bug Park.' (more on how the park was named in my next post!)

It was a beautiful fall afternoon when we met and the resulting pictures were AWESOME, to say the least! Our photographer, Charity at http://www.asuwishphotography.com/ did such a great job of putting all of us at ease, and I just love how 'natural' all of the pictures look.

She was especially great with Chooch and K-girl and they enjoyed being models for her! The task of picking out our favorites to order as Christmas gifts and use on our Christmas card was NOT easy because there were so many great shots. I'm sure you will agree! Leave a comment if you want to see more of the great shots...Charity has uploaded the best of the pics to her website and I can send you the password. Thanks!