Merry Christmas!

I know I have other updates to do, but for the moment . . . wishing you all a merry Christmas!

Because of the chaos in our housing situation right now, we opted to have Christmas at my parents' house this year. And to further complicate things, in a part of the country that almost NEVER has snow until January or later, it snowed on our way to my parents' house on Christmas Eve. And the forecast was for more snow starting during the night tonight, so we adjusted our plans, and headed home late this afternoon instead of coming home tomorrow as we'd originally planned. . . Still we had a nice time at my parents' house (but it re-emphasized to me why we usually do Christmas here, it's a PAIN to have to pack and unpack and load and unload all the kid-stuff!)

We got to my parents' house yesterday afternoon and the girls helped Mama decorate the Christmas tree, then they got to decorate Christmas cookies!

After supper the girls opened their traditional Christmas Eve presents of nightgowns that Mama made (see pictures further down of the big girls wearing theirs, Little Bit's ended up being a little too big and she's not big on clothes anyway. She's doing better about staying dressed at our house, but since my parents' keep their house quite abit warmer than we keep our house, it's a real challenge to keep ANY clothes on her there LOL) and a game and video. This year, the video was a Leapfrog Christmas video, so Little Bit enjoyed that while the big girls and I played their new Farmer's Market game. Then we headed to bed.

Christmas morning started with stockings . . . we had to improvise, since the girls' stockings are packed in a box somewhere in our mountain of boxes, but mom found some stockings that would work (as long as we didn't worry too much about the names on them LOL).

After stockings, we had breakfast (Mama's more ambitious than me, so she made Hungarian Breakfast Cake instead of the monkey bread I usually make, YUM!!!), and I read the girls the final chapter of Bartholomew's Passage (our Advent book this year. They enjoyed it, though there were some things I didn't like about this one), then we got started on presents.

 Little Bit was having great fun passing out gifts as quickly as possible, and THEN she figured out where to look on the tags to see who the gift was for. She can't read much yet, but she CAN read her name, so from then on, she just looked at the packages until she found one with her name on it, then opened it LOL.

Once everything was opened, she was happy to sit down and play with things.

Later in the day, Rodney's sister and her husband, and my brother all joined us for dinner.

After dinner, we exchanged gifts with those who weren't there earlier. Little Bit was funny, it took her a minute to realize she really did get another gift, since, we'd told her the presents were "all done" when she'd opened the last of hers during the morning presents.

The girls also had to show Aunt Lynette & Uncle Dave their play house. Dave & Lynette were duly impressed, hee hee.

Then, thanks to the coming snow, we had to load everything up and head out.

And that was our Christmas, 2012.