New Years

We were so happy Adam and Meghan could stay for New Years, and I have to say I love the way we celebrated!  

 The kids all got roller skates for Christmas and they had so much fun figuring them out in our storage room.  Uncle Adam was a good sport and joined in on the fun.

 That night, we celebrated the new year with a series of games.  Above, team one, below, team two.

 One of the highlights of Christmas was flying Andrew's remote control helicopter.  I don't know why I don't have more pictures of this, but most nights, Mike would sneak into Andrew's room and retrieve the helicopter so we could see who could land it on the landing pad of Owen's police/fire station!  Hours of entertainment!

 Here's the whole crazy crew moments before ringing in the new year (at 7:30, so we could put kids in bed!).

Happy new year!!

More Christmas Break

We love working vacation days so that Mike can be home from Christmas Eve to New Years.  We had fun playing in snow (multiple sledding trips), playing lots of games (we even played Settlers in the middle of the afternoon!), visiting a museum, reading books, making food together, and playing with new Christmas toys.  It was so much fun we even convinced Ryan and Alisa to stay a couple days longer than planned, awesome!

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

I know this is super picture overload, but this is our family record and I want to document what a wonderful and perfect Christmas we had!  We were fortunate enough to have Adam, Meghan, Ryan, Alisa and kids join us.  They were such perfect guests- meaning they made themselves right at home!  We had our traditional Christmas Eve dinner, followed by the reenactment of the nativity, opening new Christmas jammies from grandma and grandpa, and then singing Christmas songs by candlelight.  The kids couldn't have been sweeter and their genuine excitement was palpable!

These kids were so excited!  They could hardly wait for Owen and Olivia to make it upstairs.

The first time Ryan and Alisa came to visit us in this home, Alisa was so cute and walked to the top of the stairs and said, "This is the perfect Christmas morning staircase!"  It's true, the staircase overlooks the front room and you can see these cuties looking over the railing to check out what Santa left for them.

I felt like we really stayed on top of the mess, but the areal view tells another story.  We did have three families in one room.

Adam and Meghan were so great to just sit and watch kids open gifts.  They were incredibly sweet with the kids and genuinely excited to see their joy with each gift.  We love these two!

All the excitement was a little much for this sweetie!  We love our Clark!

These pics are out of place, but it's too much work to rearrange them.  Alisa had some great shots I didn't want to leave out, so here they are!  Amelia and Owen are such cute buddies- actually, Owen is a great cousin friend with all our kids.  They love when Owen comes to visit and our Christmas break was no exception.  

It was a perfect Christmas!  I kept telling Mike I want to freeze time and keep our children at these ages. They're just so sweet and everything seems magical to them!