Presents!!

So Santa is a smart guy! He brought presents to Michigan and to Atlanta. The boys did a great job opening their gifts, and they actually took some time this year to look at each thing before moving onto the next gift. We did have a couple snafus with sharing the new things, but that seems to be the daily battle. The jury is still out on whether they should get the same thing or not!

Brian seems to like this a bit more than Andrew, but it's a great project for them to work on together. It is a model of a car that you rebuild the engine, lots of new names and pieces, but I'm sure we'll have it figured out in no time!

Surprise, Santa brought gifts to our house too. Telling the boys that story seemed to be our saving grace. If they seemed disappointed or too tired to leave the airport, we let them know that Santa probably stopped at our house too. Thank goodness he did!

All in all, it's been a wonderful Christmas season. We tried to put a little more meaning into the actual Christmas story and the birth of baby Jesus, and less emphasis on the gifts. I'm sure it will be a lesson that we work on every year.

We are excited to finish out 2011, and move on to another happy year!

Christmas in Michigan

We got to spend 6 days in Michigan celebrating Christmas. We got to do lots of cold weather activities, and we had lots of family time. It was great to see everyone all together, the kids have more fun each time we get together.

Grandma Cindy got all the kids matching pj's, super cute!

We went to the pottery place uptown to make cookie plates for Santa. The kids all participated surprisingly well!

helping to make the cookies

The first snow fall on Christmas Eve, it was all melted by that afternoon

The second snowfall on the day we left, but enough to make a Frosty!

A Christmas Story

Andrew's Preschool Christmas show. All the kids end up on the church altar, quite a feat that some of them make it the whole time. It was no surprise that the first group up was the 4 year old girls (the most patient and well-behaved). Andrew's class was part of the stable animals.

Our little donkey!

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

Took the kids to the center for puppetry arts to see Rudolph. It was a great show, and the boys did really well. Matthew was scared of the abominable snow monster, and Andrew needed a bathroom (stretching) break, but we made it all the way through.

After the show you could go upstairs and make your own shadow puppet.

Matty just liked the markers

Andrew is on the end! Not bad!

Puppeteers at work!

A Stone Mountain Christmas

We took my family to the Stone Mountain Christmas as a belated birthday gift for my Dad. It was a little chilly, but lots of fun things to do.

The joke of our tickets was the "unlimited hot chocolate", but between the 10 of us, we easily had 2 each trying to stay warm!

On the train around the mountain, they play Christmas music and have lights every now and then

The best part of the night, Polar Express 4D. They break the movie down to about 20 minutes, but there is falling snow, shaking seats, and two kids that loved it! As we were leaving the theater the fireworks had started. It definitely put us in the Christmas spirit!