We arrived in Woodbury on the 24th, just in time for a delicious lunch of sloppy joes! Summer was ready for a nap after a big morning, and it was GORGEOUS out (above 32 degrees!!!) so Dad, Paul and I headed out for a nice long run. When Summer woke up, we went to the Christmas Eve Service at New Life Church, and then headed back to the house for the traditional pizza dinner at the coffee table and the reading of the Christmas story by the fire. The next morning, we opened gifts, had our traditional swiss steak dinner, and enjoyed hanging out and getting caught up on each others' lives before we headed out the next morning for Part III of our Christmas in Chicago. Here are a few pictures!
Our Family after the Christmas Eve Service
Airplane with Daddy
More Airplane with Daddy
Eating Pizza at the coffee table
Summer's spot
Tucker enjoying the fire
Summer got an Elmo, her favorite character right now!
We started our Christmas celebration at our home, planning our "Christmas Eve" for the 23rd and our "Christmas morning" for the 24th. We have been trying to think of some traditions we can start that our kids can look back and remember doing when we celebrated as a family. This year we decided to make a graham cracker house on our designated Christmas Eve, and then we watched a Christmas cartoon about a puppy (Olive the other reindeer). We hope to make a new house each year with our kids and take pictures of each one :). Here is Summer next to Graham Cracker House #1.
We took videos to document our designated Christmas morning. If you would like to relive part of it with us feel free to watch these clips.
Waking Up
Walking Downstairs
An excited little girl is done with breakfast
Waiting for Daddy to finish breakfast. (Summer is playing with her Christmas toy from last year... Kind of fun to think back to last year ....)
Spinning with Daddy
Tucker's Stocking
Opening a Mr, Mrs, and Baby Potato Head
(Summer loves to practice saying and pointing to her body parts and this has proved to be a lot of fun for her already!)
Opening a Baby and Animal book
Opening Stocking
We had a fun start to our Christmas! We then got packed up and ready to head to Part II of our Christmas Celebration: Woodbury.
We got home tonight from our last wonderful Christmas celebration. It was such a blessing to see so many family members in such a short amount of time. Paul and I enjoyed relaxing together tonight and watching some videos we took of our Christmas morning---I will post some soon! In the meantime, here is a video I had on the camera from a few weeks ago that I forgot to share....Daddy is reading Summer's "Spider" book (Summer always asks Daddy to read this one) and she has a funny dance she does to this book. Enjoy!
