Christmas festivities.

Sugar Cookie Decorating

Christmas Eve Talent Show (new tradition) including Ninja moves video & Lil' Bunny Foo Foo Dramatization 

Christmas Morning

Graham Cracker Houses

My favorite Christmas shot

and due to a distinct lack of shots of our girl in this post, one of Rocky

 

The above shot is my favorite from Christmas this year. It reminds me so much of my busy little boy. Within 5 minutes of the tree being up he had found all of the pom poms on the garlands he could reach and bunched them together in these little clusters. It makes me laugh finding these and  watching him busily and very seriously "woking" on the tree.

Christmas 2011 was a success and already feels like ages ago, not just a week. We had a wonderful family gathering on the Eve. We did some caroling and hopefully Rich got some fun shots to share from that. Every time we went to house, Lars wanted to take off his jacket and boots. It was fun to see the kids sing and the people at the doors light up. That is definitely a fun new tradition and then we gathered for our traditional hamburger and rootbeer floats. Mike special ordered some gingerbeer which is a fun new kiwi addition to the tradition. Then we had a little talent show which brought us some bollywood dancing, some tap, some ninja moves, a dramatization of "Little Bunny Foo Foo" and a slideshow from 2011. There were several other random talents in there and Rich was asked to narrate LBFF about 3 more times for the kids. 

Christmas morning was short and sweet. I tried to make the room feel fun with balloons and streamers and candles. Lars was genuinely thrilled by it all. There were lots of excited "oohs" and "ahhs" as he ripped through the gifts thanks to his adoring grandparents in New Zealand and New Mexico and the free chain saw Grammy Lyall found for free at the local dump. Our little girl slept through the whole thing and I wasn't about to wake her up to take a family picture of us looking exhausted.  Next year, we have decided to not put the candy out because we couldn't keep Lars out of it. He had handfuls before I had cut of his supply.. He was jazzed. Hey, it's Christmas. We are still enjoying our NZ supply of goodies that was sent over by liz and in the post-Christmas letdown where you can't quite get the energy to get back to work after gearing up for the holiday. I am giving myself through New Year's and then it is back to it! And because there was a distinct lack of pictures of Rocky in this post...

Here's to a positive, less stressful, exciting (but the good kind of exciting- not the broken pipe, broken bone, broken car kind of exciting) 2012.