Christmas!

Wahoo!

For Christmas, we made our way to Minnesota to impose upon the hospitality of Dallin's brother Seth, SIL Tiffany and their family. It was fantastic.

We still had to decorate our place a little bit before we went.

See the little pieces of paper dangling by strings? Those are christmas lights made by Dorothy. She was very sad that we don't have Christmas lights outside our apartment, so she made some.

And then... Minnesota! Cousins! Good food! Fun!

The drive went really well, better than expected. Mapquest says it's a nine hour drive, but it ended up being closer to seven hours. Woot woot!

The kidlets acted out the Nativity story on Christmas Eve. Dorothy, being the only girl in the bunch of age, got to be Mary. Here, she is really upset at the shepherd for sitting in the manger.

Cookies for Santa, with a note from my nephew.

A close up of the cookie. That, my friends, is the NBA logo. Dallin made it. Can you tell what he was excited about this Christmas?

Dorothy got to open all of our presents as well as hers. Dallin and I got a piece of grown up art. Isn't it pretty? Doesn't Dorothy look thrilled?

Best action shot of the trip. Look closely.

Ruby in the car. This was a hotly fought over toy.

Presents.



Opening the coolest present-- a set of Tegu blocks. They're magnetic wooden blocks so you can do all sorts of gravity defying structures. I might play with them more than Dorothy.

Some other highlights-

Church on Christmas morning: It's funny, because I think that had I been a kid and my parents had told me that we would be going to church before opening presents, I would have thrown an all out, rolling on the ground fit. But, much to their credit, the kids were fine with it. It was a really beautiful start to the day. Church was one hour, and entirely musical. We listened to and sang Christmas songs. Lovely.

Mall of America: We decided to do an anthropological study by going to the Mall of America on December 23. Also, we needed to take our computer in to the Apple store for some repairs. So, while we were sitting back and laughing at the crazed shoppers in the Bastion of Consumerism that is the mall, we felt very much like hypocrites because, well, we were there too. Our computer came out all shiny and new.

"The Hunger Games": I read the entire trilogy in four days. Thankfully, Seth and Tiffany are both avid readers, so they seemed to understand my hysteria. I've waited until now to read them because the premise is a little disturbing, and I'm in a funny place emotionally while I'm pregnant or have little babies. But I felt ready at the time, and I wanted to see what the pop culture phenomenon was all about before the movie came out. I could write a whole post on what I thought of it.

NBA: Dallin and Seth went to a game-- Minnesota vs. Oklahoma City Thunder.

It was a FANTASTIC trip. We're already talking about doing it again next year. Right, S&T?

The day after we got back, all of our kids cam down with a stomach bug. Sad. But it's the only time that the babies are this cuddly, so a lot of this happened. Aw.