We had a beautiful Christmas Eve and Christmas Day morning together as a family!
Christmas Eve was spent baking all day - special treats for baby Jesus' birthday and for snacks for Santa since we knew he would be hungry delivering all those gifts!
Joseph had a blast baking with me and was so cute with it all. We made Neiman Marcus cookies, candy coated pecans, and a new recipe I tried this year - mint brownie bites! Mmm! I was going to make a fruit cake too (a Zajicek recipe and tradition from Michael's grandma!) but ran out of time unfortunately before we needed to leave for mass.
We went to the 4pm mass at church. The church had a 4pm Mass in the church and a 4:10 overflow mass in the parish center. We got there at 3:35 and it was already standing room only in both places! A wonderful problem to have, but a bit of a bummer that we had to stand in the back of a little corner cubby hole in the church for the whole mass. But it was a nice Mass regardless! :)
After church we attempted to go out to dinner for Christmas Eve, but it didn't quite work out. The place we wanted to go was closed. So, we decided we would just do mexican food at On the Border. As I'm walking into the restaurant holding Andrew, he had a blow out yucky diaper and it was all over his pants and now my own arm. (poor little buddy ended up having many of them as part of a little cold/virus he got) So we picked up Taco Cabana (ha!) and headed home. We were sure to put out cookies for Santa before bed time and the boys were all set! I worked hard to hype up the Santa thing for Joseph that night.
The next morning I was so excited when Andrew woke up and it was time to start Christmas morning. Wouldn't you know Joseph decided to randomly sleep until 8am?? So when he finally got up we walked downstairs and enjoyed opening presents and sharing sweet memories with our boys. Joseph was a little concerned that Santa left a few bites of cookies on the plate! ;) For gifts, Joseph got some little music players, a hammer and peg bench, a book, bubble toy, jet thing, animal hospital and his big gift was a new sandbox for the backyard. He was so cute and insisted on opening every present of his while sitting inside the sandbox. Andrew did quite well too - he got a little puzzle, an elephant ball popper, star stacker and a penguin boppy toy! He stayed entertained by just chewing on the bows though.
After presents and stockings we enjoyed Michael's breakfast of homemade donuts. He used the canned biscuits for the dough this year and decided that sure saves a lot of time and mess than making his own dough like he did in previous years. It was so yum and a wonderful way to wrap up our morning.
Then it was on to Grandma's house! Stay tuned!
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| Eagerly waiting for the cookies to cool |
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| My sweet boys after church (unfortunately this was after we had eaten so everyone's shoes were off and we didn't look quite as spiffy as we did earlier for Mass) |
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| Our family of 4! |
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| Putting cookies on the plate for Santa |
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| All ready to go! |
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| Sweet boys |
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| Let the fun begin |
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| A boy on a mission |
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| Andrew loved the bows! |
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| New bubble toy! |
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| Andrew's new bath bongos |
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| Daddy's turn |
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| Time for stockings (Andrew is shaking his new container of Gerber Puffs!) |
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| Time for yummy donuts |
