Christmas Day

Tyler and I had a hard time sleeping Christmas night and were officially awake by 4 AM waiting for the kids to get up and see what Santa left them.

I made the mistake of telling Rilyn all week that Santa was coming to visit, and she took that literally.  So we spent most of Christmas Eve trying to explain that Santa would not actually be at her house when she woke up he would just drop off a present.

As Tyler and I watched repeat episodes of the Office, Rilyn slept the morning away.  At one point, she came out of her room at about 5:45....looked around...and then went back to bed until about 6:30.  Of course, she has never slept passed like 6:05!

When she did finally come out we couldn't help waking Ryder so we could get our Christmas morning started.  Rilyn loved opening gifts and has been enjoying playing with everything for the past couple of days.  Ryder couldn't really care less about opening gifts.  I was surprised he wasn't interested yet, but that is just sitting still for too long the little mover.

After naps, we went to Stacey and Jason's for more gift-opening, dinner, and family time.  Ryder loved trying to learn how to take a step down without falling on their entry way stoop and Rilyn loved playing with her aunts and uncles.  We sang Happy Birthday to Jesus at Rilyn's request.

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve was restful and fun-filled.  We made red and green chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast and waited for Ty to get off of work!  The kids and I met Yvonne and George at church, came home and enjoyed some delicious appetizers, and watched Christmas movies.  After the kids went to bed Tyler and I watched "It's a Wonderful Life" with hot cocoa like we always do.

I love our slow and meaningful traditions on Christmas Eve.  Probably my most favorite night of the year.

 Rilyn leaving cookies for Santa

 And then I caught her stealing sprinkles off the top and told her Santa wouldn't like that!

Pre-Christmas

So, I'm going a little out of order here but I didn't get all our pre-Christmas photos on the blog before I posted a couple Christmas Eve photos.

We had a lot of fun leading up to Christmas!

We baked and frosted cookies for the second time, but this time with Tyler and Kendall.  The kids ate a lot of frosting, Kendall broke most of the cookies he tried to frost, and I had one huge mess to clean up!

Kendall and Tyler had a Payton Manning frost off....little did we know Rilyn was paying attention.  Frosted her own Manning and snuck in the picture.

We also did quite a few Christmas crafts leading up to Christmas and Ryder even got to join in on a few.

Merry Christmas Eve

December Happenings

It's been a fun and busy month around here.  I've been working more than usual with the break coming up so we've been trying to fit fun activities in around that.

After nap snuggles and TV watching.

Christmas cookie decorating/eating with friends

We also finally got some outside time!  Ryder ate a lot of dirty snow and Rilyn spent a good hour making "oatmeal"

Other than that we've been doing some crafts, learning about Christmas, having sleepovers, watching Christmas movies!

Christmas Decorating and Larkspur Celebrations

The weekend after Thanksgiving we decorated for Christmas.  I was pretty excited since Rilyn is really old enough to help and we could talk about our different ornaments and decorations.  We didn't do tons of decorating since Christmas is in about 2 weeks, but enough to make us crazy with these two little nuts!

Also, Rilyn only lasted about 15 minutes on decorating the tree and Ryder has spent the last 2 weeks trying to take it all down!

Yep we do the whole fake tree thing.  As much as I love real trees they are way to expensive to just throw in the trash a month later!  But I do really wish we had a real tree!

Rilyn setting up her nativity.  She really loves baby Jesus right now and is excited to hold him when he is born.  Yep, not quite getting the whole idea of it already happening.

Decorating the doll's chair

Rilyn's favorite thing to decorate with is candy canes apparently.

Ryder pushing all the nativity pieces around in the stroller

All those candy canes are now at the top of our tree for obvious reasons.

Trixie getting in the Christmas spirit

After decorating we braved the cold (very cold 2 degrees at the time we left the house) to see Santa and enjoy our local Larkspur tree lighting.  They have a huge bonfire and a tent with heaters so we thought we would be okay.  We spent about an hour bundling up and less than 20 minutes there.  Ryder would not stay out of the snow so he was frozen and miserable a.k.a screaming bloody murder for a good 20 minutes.  We think his hands were what got too cold.  He didn't have super warm gloves on but it's hard finding gloves a 16 month will wear.  Especially one that sucks his thumb.

Enjoying a candy cane after the meltdown was over.