Category: Our Family

We had Kyle’s family over for dinner tonight, and of course, Liesl took lots of pictures. 🙂

We decided to do breakfast for dinner. So we made up a couple of pans of baked french toast. I usually use my large glass baking dish for the baked french toast, but this time I decided to try using my nice new cookie sheets. They worked PERFECTLY! For one each sheet can hold more than the glass pan can, and for two the tops turned out crispy, not soggy like what sometimes happens in the glass pan. I am very happy with the result and I’m loving my new cookies sheets. 🙂 Liesl brought some fruit and then helped in the kitchen making some waffles. We boiled up and browned a huge amount of sausage links and fried up a few pounds of bacon. We decided to skip the idea of crepes. Kyle wanted to make those too, but I thought he was nuts. While we were finishing up the cooking of food, Laurel took the kids downstairs to do some crafts that she had brought, with them. After we ate, everyone just kind of hung out.

Chloe seems to like attacking Alex lately. At least he’s a good sport about it.

Granny brought a Pluto stuffed animal for Adam, and she also brought some candy for the kids. Lydia decided to share some candy with Pluto.

Granny also brought some pajamas that she made for the kids.

Since she was taking pictures, Liesl wanted to get a current picture of Kyle and myself.

Ethan and Alex spent a lot of time together this evening, I don’t know why they are both making goofy faces though.

Here they look a little more normal.

This picture of Ethan reminds me of one of those teen heart throb posters that some of my friends in junior high/high school had…but he’s not even TWELVE YET!

Kyle’s back has been bothering him, so he laid down on the floor to stretch it out, and he asked Jeremy to push on it. Jeremy didn’t do such a good job of pushing on Kyle’s back, so he walked on it instead.

Before everyone left, Liesl got pictures of Alex & Sylvia holding Seth, since they weren’t here the other day when Lars & Daniel got to hold him.

Christmas started way earlier than it should have this morning. The older kids were wide awake first thing, and woke up the little ones because they knew they weren’t allowed out in the living room until everyone was awake. Adam was QUITE grumpy at being awakened. I just laid in bed pretending to be asleep for awhile to annoy the older kids. 😛

When I finally got up, I went out to the living room to preheat the oven and open the blinds and I found a blanket of white outside that was not there last night! Snow has been pretty sparse this winter.

Since Adam was not happy about being awakened, I took him out to the living room by himself first. I had to show him which stocking was his.

Then he went to show everybody else and we let them all come out to the living room.

The kids lined up in order like that by themselves, and Jeremy is holding Seth. 🙂

We let them play around with what they got in their stockings for awhile then we had breakfast. After breakfast, we moved on to unwrapping presents. We cut way back on presents this year. Partly because we didn’t start shopping until way late, partly because we couldn’t afford much this year, and mostly because we have a TON of stuff already. Grandpa had asked for some ideas for Christmas shopping, and I told him that we have so much stuff that we don’t need any more stuff. I gave him a few ideas that could be for the whole family. He decided to go with getting the family a telescope, a very nice telescope. It’s a computerized telescope, and we can’t wait until it’s warmer so we can play around with it.

Jeremy had asked for the Disney infinity game, and Ethan wanted the Skylanders video game. I’m not excited about either of these games because you are required to buy each character that you want to play as, separately. So not a cheap, buy it once and play it to unlock characters kind of game. But Jeremy almost never asks for anything specific, so Kyle got the game for him. Jeremy was very excited about it too.

Lydia, since she is three and going into Sunbeams at the beginning of the year, she got a set of scriptures.

E

Each kid had a present to open, and we let Adam open the one for Seth. There were also a few presents from Santa for everyone.

Kyle and I didn’t even get anything for each other, just because we have so much stuff that we didn’t feel like just buying something random for each other.

The rest of the day, we just relaxed and let the kids play with the new stuff. And since Debby and Jeff no longer live in Utah, they didn’t stop by and it was just our family all day. To avoid cooking we made sure we had fixings for sandwiches. Over the years we have found that we prefer keeping the food simple on Christmas day, and we do the fancy stuff whenever we are getting together with family. Which this year, will be tomorrow. 🙂

Liesl offered to watch the kids at Granny’s house today, so that Kyle and I could finish up the Christmas shopping without them. So we took the kids and dropped them off at Granny’s to spend the day with Liesl & Granny. We decided to keep Seth with us though, since he can’t tell anyone what we were getting.

The kids had lots of fun during the day. Liesl even helped them make some cookies.

We went shopping and I was really slow, this being the first time I’ve been away from the house since Seth was born. And of course because I was slow and we didn’t have much shopping done to begin with, we were shopping most of the day.

We got home rather late. Later than I had wanted to be out on Christmas eve. Kyle took the christmas pjs downstairs so I could wrap them while he fed the kids. After dinner we let Adam pass out the presents and let the kids open them.

After the kids changed into their new pjs, we let them pick out stockings and sent them to bed. 🙂