Christmas recap.

Tyler and I had a great Christmas this year, and trust you did too!  Here's some of the highlights...

Tuesday we left for Columbia and arrived right around dinner time.  The night was spent practicing our nursing home music, playing a game, and watching a christmas movie.  Mom loved watching my belly move and loved seeing her grandson kicking... we had lots to catch up on regarding the baby since earlier in the day I had an appt.  Here's proof of the belly obsession... my sister snapped a picture of my mom checking it out. 
{don't mind the chihuahua... she makes her way into every picture!}


Wednesday (Christmas Eve) both my Mom and Dad had to work so Tyler and I took full advantage of that and slept in.  Once we woke up, we had a really lazy morning, consisting of sipping on coffee, wrapping a few leftover gifts, and ran to Best Buy to check out a video camera we're looking at buying. (gotta catch all those cute baby keith things on video!)  Once my Mom got home we spent the afternoon baking... sorry, no pics.  We made lots of Christmas goodies, including a delicious pistacio dessert... one good enough that I'll be making it again soon! 

That night we went to my parents church for our usual Christmas Eve service... it was good.  A little long for my taste, but still beautiful none the less.





After the service my Dad took us to drive by what was named "the prettiest Christmas tree in Columbia".  It definitely lived up to its named.  This baby is called "The Magic Tree" - it has 75,000 lights on it... no joke!  A guy has this set up in his front yard... you should have seen the traffic!  Lots of people driving by just to see it.  $20 bucks says the neighbors can't stand the guy... haha.



Christmas morning we woke up and did the usual... opened our stockings to see what "Santa" brought us.  One thing I wanted for Christmas was for it to be a "white Christmas"... but no such luck.  It was more like a "upper 40's-50's kind-of Christmas".



One tradition we have as a family is every Christmas we go to a local Nursing home and bless the residents there with some music.  We play our instruments, and sing lots of fun vocal arrangements.  This year we went to the same place that we did last year... it was fun recognizing some of the faces we saw last year.  It is always such a blessing to me when we do this... such an easy way to bless so many people.  So many of these people spend Christmas day cooped up in their rooms, and it's spent just like any other day of the week.  No family comes to visit them, no one stops in to give them a gift... nothing.  It is so sad and makes me cry every year when you see their faces light up.  I love that my family does this every year.  It is one of the quickest ways for me to snap right into the holiday spirit... by giving to others.  And check out this sign they had posted all over the nursing home!!  They were super excited to have us back again!  (but seriously, who wouldn't be?!  juuuust kidding!!!!)


Chad and Kaela and the kids arrived Christmas night so after we had a delicious dinner, we recited our Christmas verses (everyone in the family has a section of the Christmas story from the Bible that we have to MEMORIZE and recite before we can open gifts) and then opened our gifts.  Christmas night was spent laughing endlessly and playing the new games we received. 


My parents beautiful tree!


The whole fam!

Friday we shopped till we dropped... never again will I step foot in a mall the day after Christmas!!  It was by far worse than Black Friday.  And the evening was spent ... you guessed it!  Playing games.  (My family is sorta obsessed with this, as you can probably tell!)

Saturday morning we made Perogies.  If you know what perogies are, you win a gold star for the day.  This is one of my Dad's family's old recipes that my family never makes because it is soooo time consuming.  However, when you make a "train" and have a different person doing each step of the "train", it goes by a lot faster.  In fact, we whipped these perogies together within about 30 minutes, when it would normally take hours to do with 2 people.  Saturday afternoon we went bowling which was a blast!  Here's a couple pics of the all-star bowler... my 3  yr old nephew!  He was actually pretty good.


Isn't he cute?!


He held this pose the entire time the ball was going down the lane each time!  It was hilarious.

We left Columbia to head back home on Saturday after dinner (after enjoying those delicious perogies!!!)  We got home late Saturday night and spent Sunday relaxing and catching up on housework.... gotta love being an adult ;)

 Hope you had a Merry Christmas and was able to celebrate the birth of our Savior... the real reason for Christmas!!!

Happy New Year!

{Stay tuned for a 32/33 week baby update... I have lots to share!}