Christmas (1)

The very first Christmas we had was OURS!  We wanted to kick things off from home.  The weekend before Christmas, we had nothing, so decided to make Saturday our Christmas day.  We started with our traditional snowman breakfast, sang Christmas songs together, read the Christmas story, did presents, and the kids played and played and played and played, and we had our fancy Christmas meal.  It was lovely.

Our snowmen breakfast.

The kids with their gifts.  They usually get three, but some reason ended up with four this year.  Oops.  :)

Ruby had a blast with all the wrapping paper!

New John Deere shirts for the farmer boy.

Layla was thrilled with her rescue heroes!

"Carharts...just like Daddy!"

Oh, this ambulance.  She loves it!

Maleah got a "mommy and me journal."  I got this idea from a Hearts at Home Conference.  The idea is that after we write to each other, we put it under the other one's pillow.  It can be once a day, once a week, once a month, and sometimes may be more frequent or go for awhile with nothing.  We each have our own pen color, and the photo on the front is fairly recent.  I hope to have boxes of journals when she graduates high school, each with a picture on the front of that stage of life, relatively.  I hope when she squirms at the thought of asking me a hard question, she will write it down.  There may be things she may never want to talk to me about, but maybe we can have a conversation via journal.  I've written in there about things that make me proud of her, and things I want her to work on.  So far, it has been so great.  I can't even begin to describe how delighted she was to receive this gift.  It is so special to her, and me.

Ruby would have been happy with only boxes this year!

Origami has been fun for Maleah to get into.  Very frustrating at times, for both of us, but a good thing for her to work on with her hands and mind.  She loves this kind of stuff.

It was a great day.  The kids seemed really grateful for their gifts, although now I have to remind them of all their new things they could be playing with (following me around the house is not one of those things!).  It certainly was a Merry Christmas!