Happy Christmas

I'm SURE you're on the edge of your seat wondering how the aprons I made for my sisters & nieces went over. Well, they loved them! Between the fussy newborn and camera-hating one-and-a-half year old, our group shots didn't turn out so well. But here's the littlest one enjoying her first "cookie day". She was most excited of all.


For some reason we ended up buying a fake tree this year. We went to Menards to buy a ladder and came home with a fake tree (we got the much-needed ladder too). It was like in the movies. We were wandering around and all of a sudden we both stopped dead in our tracks looking at this tree. We HAD to have it. It must have been meant to be because it was on sale and it was the last one. Once the kiddos are old enough to enjoy going to the tree farm and cutting down a real tree, we'll go back to the real deal, but for now, it's fake for us. We finally took it down yesterday.

What do you buy for a 2-month old for Christmas? All they do is sleep, eat, poop and cry. This one in particular loves to be held and bounced. But how do you get stuff done while holding a baby? With a sling, of course! I thought it would be a great gift, for both mother and baby, so I bought a yard of fleece and sewed my first sling. It really works, and here's the proof!

It's no secret that Lola loves to be held. LOVES IT. As a breed, pugs are very affectionate lap dogs, but with her separation anxiety Lola is the double-whammy loves-to-be-held pug. I decided to test out the sling with her, and she was in pug heaven all the way. She didn't want to get out.


Our Christmases are always very busy--we do lots of running around since we have to cram it all in 2 days. It was fun though, I just wish I had time to enjoy it.

We spent Christmas Eve late morning/early afternoon with Andy's parents and brothers. Had lunch with them, and opened presents before we rushed off to my parent's house. We barely made it in time for church where Anika gave a very moving performance as baby Jesus. She was really nervous, but performed like a champ.


After church we tortured the poor thing by putting her in this stocking I made. The ornament strings look a little funny all scrunched up like that, I guess I should have glued them down. oh well! She didn't like it, but it made for a cute photo.Christmas morning my sisters, nieces, brother-in-law, 3 dogs, my parents, Andy and I all opened presents at my parent's house.

Some dogs chose to sleep the festivities away,
Some chose to watch presents being opened,
And some thought it would be best to help open presents.
The littlest one slept them away. I think she was still recovering from her big performance the night before.
There were so many presents, it took us over 2 hours to open them! When we finally finished, we packed everything up in our respective vehicles and drove the 1 hour to celebrate with my mom's extended family. We had lunch there and opened presents. When we were eating it started to snow. By the time we got on the road to our next Christmas celebration, the roads were covered with a good inch of snow and it was incredibly foggy. What should have taken us a half hour, took about an hour to get there. Thankfully we made it in time, but by now were were absolutely exhausted. I couldn't even tell you who was there or what we did. This photo is a good representation of the evening.

I was so tired I didn't realize I had my camera on like a 20 second shutter speed. A picture speaks a thousand words. Here's Andy to tell you how his night was.

A couple days after Christmas I was going through my photos and thought that one looked strangely familiar. Turns out I have one almost identical of him from last year making the same face. This is always our last gathering of the day and needless to say we're very tired by then.

For New Year's we went to my sister and brother-in-law's. We've gone there for the past couple years and I guess it's a new tradition. Just my sisters, the boys and the babies. Next year we'll have a baby to add to the mix!

They have Rock Band, so we pretty much played that all evening (and the next morning too). Nadia was really getting into it.

She loves her Uncle Andy so much, she just crawled up onto his lap and sat there while he played the drums.When she wasn't playing, she was dancing to the music.

And one last one since it's just too cute.