Christmas

Christmas Eve

Pancakes for breakfast.  I love how Lily just opens her mouth and waits.

 Loving the down time

Helping in the kitchen

 Christmas would not be Christmas without orange rolls.  I thought about inviting friends over for dinner, but Rachel made the request for it to be just be our family, which was hard to refuse.

 Making an advent wreath.  I tried to carry on a tradition my Grandma does, which is to celebrate Christmas from a different place or country.  We would arrive at her house and fill out a questionnaire and learn all kinds of interesting facts.  Then we would eat dinner with foods from that particular place.  So I tried (on a much smaller scale) to teach my kids about Austrian/German Christmas traditions, then we had snitzel and spaetzle for dinner (because I don't like Cod, which is their traditional meal)

 We do a lot of this...Google Chat, Skype, FaceTime...it's a lot of fun to "see" and talk to everyone.

 My attempt at getting a picture of these kids in front of the tree...failed.  I really like these anyway.  Oh, and I did make their pajama bottoms.  I found this cute flannel at the fabric store and thought it would be a quick simple project...until I made them too small.  But the ruffle turned out really cute.

Christmas morning!!!

 Rachel got a paint set, lava lamp and nutcracker

 He got to the bottom of it.  Tommy got a remote control monster truck, dart gun, and nutcracker

 Kate and Lily got a new kitchen

 I'm going to let the rest of the pictures speak for themselves :)

 Lily was good at finding candy

A successful day, with appreciative and well entertained children!

Jake and the kids fit in a couple of adventures during the break before Lily and I fell sick with the flu.  Lily was sick for a good 6 days and it climaxed with a burst ear drum.  Tommy woke up a few nights later with a burst ear drum as well.  My kids rarely even get ear infections, it was crazy!

Skiing in the Poconos (hard to imagine we didn't have much snow back in December.  It was all man made)

And this was a big step in our lives.  A fun story too!  For the first time in our 10 years of marriage we are a 2 car family.  It hurt our pride a little bit since we have gone so long with just one car, but when we were offered the very car we had when we were first married, it was hard to turn down.  We sold this car to our friends who live in Boston when we moved to New York.  Our friends recently upgraded one of their cars and wanted to sell this one.  So we took it back.  We have reunited.

What a deja vu I had when I saw these kids get in.  I used to drive these two kids everywhere in this car.  Rachel even remembers how she thought her window was magic.  She would tell it to go down and it would automatically go down ;)

Hands in your socks race (or something???)