Christmas Day continued 2013....

Our crazy Christmas afternoon at Mimi's with Dad & Melissa.

 I think I've spent every Christmas afternoon of my life at my cute Grandma's house. She is such the hostess and goes above and beyond in making holidays special. It's obviously hereditary because my Dad takes on the same role. Between the two of them, my kiddos are spoiled beyond measure....

Did I mention that they are professional shoppers? 
That mountain of presents? All for my kiddos...!

Ca-Razy. But so fun for the munchkins. 

Later that day we headed to our next stop, the Hansens where we had a yummy Christmas dinner and more gifts. I obviously was done with taking pictures by then since all I have are these four....but since I took a ton on Christmas Eve over there it all evens out! The movie Frozen came out in November (we went to it the day after Thanksgiving), so the girls were super excited to get Ana and Elsa (in different forms from both my Dad and the Hansens) as gifts this year. That movie and it's soundtrack have become staples in our home and the girls are slightly obsessed! SUCH a great movie!! Cute Cousin Isaac is obsessed with knights and got this darling knight's tent and dragon from Santa, and Chris' Dad surprised him by refurbishing an old bike Chris had used on his mission in Louisiana that had been sitting in their garage. Now he and Parker & Emmie can go on bike rides together! 

And that was our Christmas! It really was a great month and I was so, SO thankful that my kiddos stayed healthy all of December! I quarantined them a bit from friends (besides school) and religiously used On Guard Doterra oil on them and it worked! Although I was finally just coming out of my inner ear problem and my other medical issues I had experienced earlier in the year, I had some big time issues with kidney and UTI infections from Nov-end of Dec and random bleeding (TMI but really I think maybe two people read this and I want to document) that kept me in a lot of pain and running to the Dr and even over the hospital for testing... but by Christmas Day thankfully I was feeling much better. 

Honestly, I think my favorite thing that we did leading up to Christmas was an advent Christmas tree calendar that I printed off, that had scriptures from the New Testament of the story of the birth of the Savior. Each night the kids were so excited to read one and color in another ornament on their advent tree. It was a really great way to keep the focus on what Christmas is truly about - all throughout the month! We will definitely make that a tradition!