Christmas 2011

This Christmas was hard. Harder than I expected, and I think harder than we were really prepared for, but we still managed to make some good memories as a family, and my Mom ensure that we were busy.

Christmas eve was at our place since we now have room for everyone, and we had planned to see Arthur Christmas, come home and decorate gingerbread houses, talk to Stephen for his call home, have some appetizers and finger food and go to bed. Mom added a few things to that list.

As a family (minus the kids) we went to visit Dad's grave, this was only my second time going out to the grave since we had to say good by 3 months earlier and I cried, It all felt so wrong and unfair. Dad is supposed to be here to share in fun family traditions, and instead we were adding a new tradition of visiting the place where he is burried knowing that he isn't there, but feeling the need to go all the same.

Now this is where Mom kicked things up a notch. She insisted that she needed a pedicure and was taking all 5 girls (that includes Ryley) out to get pedicures and the boys were all going bowling. Ryley loved having someone rub her little feet and paint her tiny nails, and she sat very well for it.

Then we had to have some lunch and she treated us all to Chinese food (I might have had some say in where we went to eat, I was really craving some good Chinese). Then we only had about an hour in a half until it was time to go to the movie.

It made the day a lot busier, but it was fun all the same.

The kids all got new pj's to open, and it was really fun to see how excited Ethan was with his pj's, he more or less ran all over the house screaming "I love them, I love my new skeleton jammies"

After quickly getting kids to bed Jordan and I cleaned up from the evenings festivities, and set out the gift for Christmas morning.

This year Chirstmas was on a Sunday and it was nice to kind of drag out the day. We had breakfast and opened presents with Melanie's family before church, then went to 1pm Sacrament and spent the remainder of the day with Jordan's family where we had a wonderful Turkey dinner with some great company.

I just wanted to include some pictures of Ryley from a photo shoot Jordan did with her before Church.