Merry Christmas!

If you were to base our holiday spirit off what our blog shows we would be classified as, well... Scrooge! Let me assure you that would be a false judgement!

As we made our countdown to Christmas we had those old fashioned cardboard advent calenders with chocolate in the windows for each of the girls. We would also let them take turns drawing a little piece of paper out of a jar. Each paper had a scripture reference about Christ's life and they would help read the scripture and then eat their chocolate before bed. They really looked forward to it each day and it helped to keep us focused on the celebration of Christ's birth. We also had this cute sticker book that told the story of Mary, Joseph, the Angel, the Innkeeper, Shepherds, Wise Men, and of course Baby Jesus. After putting all the stickers on the book Afton liked to tell us the story and "read" the book to us. On the first page where Mary is visited by the Angel, Afton would say, "Below, you are having a baby Jesus" She must have heard us say "Behold", but when seeing the Angel in the air above Mary who was kneeling she was quite sure the Angel was telling her to 'Be low'. We thought it was hilarious and have yet to correct her!

Today has been a wonderful day home together with our little family. We visited Santa last night and then came home and snuggled up with some homemade white-peppermint hot chocolate (deliciously rich) and watched a movie with the girls. They love to all snuggle together on the couch! Afton awoke about 6:00 to see if Santa had come to our house, Chelsea wasn't ready to open her eye's until 7:00 (and even that took some prodding), so Afton had to be very patient and wait a whole hour before she could go out to the living room. Two and a half hours later we finished with gifts, not because we had a ton, but because they like to stop and play with each thing they open. It is so much fun to watch them both and join in their excitement! Aaron got a great new board game that we've been playing together. New York friends you'll have to add this to your game nights, it's called Ticket to Ride. It's German like Settler's of Catan, but doesn't take as long to play! We've had fun with it just the two of us today!

Game nights are a holiday tradition for us! Well, we really like to have game nights all year long, but they seem to be much more frequent over the holidays! We haven't done a lot of partying this year, but we've had a couple good late nights with friends playing games and have several more planned before the new year! We didn't send out a Christmas card this year, so if you just thought you were crossed off our list, be reassured, no one got one! ;) We hope an announcement this spring will make up for it! We still love you all and hope your Christmas and New Years are full of health and happiness!

(keep scrolling down for lots of cute photos!)