Our Christmas in Pictures

Since my parents live just an hour north of us, we are fortunate enough to see them fairly often. For Christmas, all the siblings were able to be there this year, so it was especially nice to have everyone together. Below were some of our favorite holiday activities:

Baking peanut butter blossom cookies with Grandma; Senya helped with rolling the dough into balls, and Ivan was great at unwrapping the Hershey's kisses to stick in the middle of the warm cookies. And we only had some minor inventory control issues with both the dough and chocolate.

Senya holding her 8-week-old cousin Brian (his birthday is the day after hers).

All the kids loved to play with him and try to make him smile.

My brother Jared was patient enough to let Ivan take endless pictures with his camera.

Aren't uncles the best? Ivan loved moving the tripod around for different shots.

After indulging in sweets and treats for days on end, we are always ready for some physical labor on Christmas Day. Usually, the weather is nice enough to do something outside, and one year, we even washed our cars. It was a bit colder this year, so we raked leaves in shifts. Senya's raking, and Grace (2 yrs) and Ivan (almost 2) were on pick-up duty. (No adults are pictured, but I swear they were helping too--it's just that none of us were as cute holding the rake.)

Since it was pretty cold this year, we had to find ways to keep the kids entertained and from fighting over each other's Christmas toys. A long cardboard box as a slide worked for a long while. Grace and Ivan are learning to take turns.

Playing parachute was also quite successful--we have a nice play parachute at home, but we improvised here with a sheet. Grace and Senya don't seem to mind.

The adults preferred board games to parachutes; after the kids were in bed, we played until the wee hours of the morning, and then always regretted it the next morning when the kids woke up at the normal early time. For Christmas, Trent got the game 'Dominion' for my brother Thad, so we had a new one to play. Trent's grinning because he's about to make a killer play.

(From left: Thad, Trent, my mom Vicki, and Thad's fiancee Melissa.)

This dice-throwing game is also a favorite--it goes by many names, but we call it Greedy.

Ivan is practicing with two at a time. Check out the dice in mid-air!

All in all, we had a fabulous time! I would be experiencing the post-Christmas letdown by now, but we are fortunate enough to have some exciting things coming up in the spring including a visit from Trent's parents and my brother Thad's wedding.

Lucky us for having such wonderful family!