Christmas 2011!

We had a wonderful Christmas full of fun, food, family, snow and sledding! Valeriane, Sean and their kids came up from Santa Fe to spend Christmas with us, we had a blast! The night before they arrived we headed over to the Wildlife Experience Museum for their Winter Wonderland of Lights. IT WAS COLD. COLD. COLD! We bundled everyone up and slowly made our way across the sheet of ice covering the parking lot. They had a little "Elf" village set up with Santa at the end....the line was WAY too long and it was WAY to cold for us to put forth the effort to stand in line...so we skipped it. The kids really enjoyed seeing the reindeer's. They have TONS of lights set up along the perimeter of the museum, they were beautiful. I would have liked to take some nice pictures but it was too cold (did I mention it was cold that night?) to get my hands out of my gloves to use my camera. A few weeks before we went I drove by with the boys on the way home from their gym class. Tyler was so touched by the beauty of the lights he got very teary eyed, it was a nice teaching moment about what its like to feel the spirit.

 After we got home we had some hot chocolate and what I like to call "Kid-Sized" smores. You improvise when you can right?

Later that night Val and Sean arrived, the next day was Christmas Eve. We had a lot of fun just hanging out and playing games. Katy was very smitten by Sean. Often she would go to him instead of me....and that's saying a LOT. Every time we see them she is the same way with him, its pretty cute.

For Christmas Eve we made some Fondue and supplied MANY options to dip....yummo. We also read a nice Christmas poem and let the kids play a game where they had to pick up marshmallows that we threw all over the floor (snow man pieces...I think that's what we called them) with spoons. They had a blast, its the simple things in life right?

(I know, its really blurry....but you get the point!)

Christmas Day was Sunday this year, so we let the kids check out the loot in their stockings but waited on opening all the presents. We headed to church and uh, "let" Val and Sean watch our kids while Jack and I were part of the program. Once again Katy hung on to Sean pretty much the whole meeting.

 This isn't the best family picture of us, but its pretty funny. Thanks Sean for always bringing a little laughter to the fam!

Once we got home the kids were eager to get to the presents! In the Wilson household Santa arranges a fun scavenger hunt for the kids with some of their larger gifts, so he did it for all the kids at our house. I'm putting in a good word to our new Elf on the Shelf, Buddy, to arrange for the same thing at our house next year!

Eli and Denali showing off their new snowboards!

 I LOVE Tyler's expressions in these pictures! He had been BEGGING for a NintendoDS for MONTHS. YeYe bought one for him for his birthday/Christmas this year. He had also been begging for some Pokemon toys, so he was pretty excited to get some. Jacob had been pretty obsessed with Star Wars and so we got him a Darth Maul Lego ship. Jack sure had fun putting it together!

 Our family's Christmas loot...Yes, there are TONS of games!

 Christmas aftermath

It was a wonderful Christmas, we really enjoyed being able to spend it with family! It is so nice that we live so close to a lot of our family so we have more opportunities to see them!