Christmas Wrap Up

I can't believe it's almost February and I am still wrapping up Christmas and 2011! Please don't give me a hard time for being so slack....I already have major blog guilt for being so behind! :-) I am going to try to bang out a lot of posts over the next week to get caught up. I have been spending my spare seconds creating a photo book for 2011. I am going to try to do one of those each year since I don't have time to scrap book and haven't printed out a picture since MB was three months old. For shame!

Let the final Christmas update begin! I can already feel the stress lifting as I type!

We hosted the Merritt Christmas at our house this year and had such a great time. It is soooo hard to get these cousins to pause long enough to get a picture so this was the best I could do. MB misses having her cousins around, they have so much fun playing together.

I now understand the beauty of having a kids table for family gatherings. The kids did so well together and the adults actually had a chance to finish a sentence for once. It was awesome!

Papa loves his grandbabies so much!

I love this picture of Ben and G-Mother on Christmas Eve. We were the first ones to arrive and were able to spend a few minutes alone with her before the whole gang arrived.

G-Mother had all of her nine great grandchildren together! Ben and Mason are the 2011 additions. G has a necklace with little people on it that represent her children, grandchildren and greats and that thing is getting heavy!

All of the grandchildren and greats, minus Matt. Such a fun group!

This was the first year that we spent Christmas morning at our house. It was strange but wonderful at the same time. We felt so grown up! Dan and I set our alarms so we could be up and ready before MB and Ben woke up. Well, we could have slept in because MB didn't wake up until 9:45 and Ben woke up after 10:00! They were exhausted from the Christmas Eve celebration I guess. We couldn't get over it! The morning lasted for an eternity waiting for them to wake up. We ended up going ahead and opening presents from each other in the quiet of the morning and it was so relaxing.

The salt and pepper shakers were a big hit. I'm sorry to report that three of the four tea cups have already broken so I had to remove all of the breakable items from the kitchen this week. I don't want to find anymore ceramic shards in her bedroom. I'll put up the other breakable things until she is a little older but for now the plastic tea cups are hanging in their place.

Helping daddy sweep up the needles with her new broom and dust pan. Every girls dream gift, right? She was in heaven!

Isn't he a little doll? He really is this happy most of the time!

Happy feet! MB is normally opposed to wearing shoes inside but we sometimes can talk her into wearing her new slippers. Our floors are always cold and we can't imagine why we have to fight with her to get her to wear shoes inside. Crazy girl!

Trying out the new jump rope. She mainly just whips it around so you have to give her plenty of space or you will get tangled in her web.

When MB opened up this nativity set she shouted, BABY JESUS' HOUSE! It was absolutely adorable and we loved her excitement for it. She played with that thing for so long and she was concerned that the hay just wasn't comfortable for baby Jesus. The next thing we knew she was marching through the living room with her baby pillow and baby Jesus had a new bed for a few days.

After nap time we went to the Milam's to celebrate Christmas with them. As you can see, Ben was whipped from all the excitement!

MB got a Mustang convertible from mimi and papa and she loves it! She was so excited and ran straight to the passenger side. That is one thing about having older cousins, you are used to being chauffeured around. She didn't know what to think about us putting her in the driver's seat. She loves playing with the radio and dancing to the 15 second sound bite. We are still working on the steering but she is going to get it in no time.

She probably was trying to talk Owen into driving her at this point. We were cracking up.

Ben is loving this jumpy thing and he almost can reach the ground. We joke that this is a laxative for him because he often has a blow out while he is in this thing. MB had a similar thing with Target. You could almost count on her having a diaper blow out ever time we walked through the automatic doors. I'm not even kidding.

This is just your average Tuesday morning around here. She had to wear this hat to brush her teeth that day, she definitely has a mind and style all her own.

Ben and I waiting on MB to brush her teeth, oh how I love him!

I love this video of MB saying good by to baby Jesus' house. She called the three wise men, Golden, Myrrh and Frankincense.

When I started taking the ornaments off of our tree, Dan took the little tree out of MB's room. She came out and said "I sad" and I couldn't help but agree. We had such a wonderful Christmas and loved celebrating for the entire month of December.