Christmas

We had an exceptional Christmas this year, despite the fact there was no snow and Alex was throwing up.  

The Annual Brady Family Christmas Eve Brunch was kicked off at 10am with lots of great food and wonderful company.  Although Sam and Natalie, Nicholas and Christian were in Tennessee we were able to Skype with them and watch them open their presents!  The siblings and spouses have a rotation each year so we don't have to buy everyone a gift.  We had Sam and Natalie and they had us, and boy they did a great job!  

Alex and Heidi got princess dress up costumes!  Alex wore her Rapunzel costume all day, and Heidi was a twirling tinker-bell until nap time. 

 
Tyler got a gift card for his Nook, which he was ecstatic about and spent the rest of the day downloading things and playing on it.  Kate's Mom Renee was able to come visit for Christmas and we were excited to get to see her again!

I think Sam and Natalie officially have the title of best gift givers.  I was super happy to receive a cupcake tower!!!!  I've been wanting one of these forever and secretly hoping I would get one for Christmas (although I never told anyone that).  So when I opened my gift up, it was a dream come true.  Everything we ate for the next 3 days was first presented on the tower.

Alex also got a my little pony hair styling set and spent the rest of the day doing the ponies, and everyone else's hair.

The kids played, we ate and talked, did puzzles and laid around all afternoon.  It was a wonderful Christmas Eve! 

 That evening we had a nice turkey dinner and the kids put on a performance of the Nativity.

 We were short a few people but fortunately had some willing volunteers to fill in the gaps..

 Uncle Michael spent the rest of Christmas Eve playing hair salon with Alex and it was simply adorable.  He is going to make a great Dad here in a few weeks.

 Finally it was bed time and so we set out the milk and cookies and hustled the kids off to bed so we could finish the rocking horse at the 11th hour!!!!  Tyler and I were hurrying and gluing horse hair in as Alex walked into the kitchen complaining about something.  Then mid-sentence she goes "Huh?!" as she noticed what we were doing.  We told her not to tell Heidi and sent her back to bed. 30 seconds later we heard Alex trying to explain to Heidi what she saw.

Alex was so excited about buying everyone a gift and spent her own money getting everyone plastic popcorn movie cups and Heidi a toy elephant.  She wrapped and labeled each gift by herself (with a little help).

After a solid week of late nights working, gluing, nailing and staining, the horse was done!    

Alex woke up at 3 AM complaining of a tummy ache and took me back to her bed with her.  After 2.5 hours of me not sleeping, Alex woke up and threw up.  Heidi started to cry for food and at that point we decided we might as well open presents while Alex felt well enough.

Here is our early morning picture before the kids ripped into it all!

 Heidi was only interested in the banana that Santa had left in her stocking.  After that she wouldn't open any gifts (which was fine with Alex who opened them ALL), and was content playing with everything Alex had just opened.

 Alex loved the act of ripping all the pretty wrapping paper off.

 The kids loved their set of kitties

 And Alex still lugs her giant dog around everywhere she goes.

 Heidi is adorable at pretend eating and drinking from the "coco" set.

 We went to church (which Alex slept through), the girls in their matching Christmas dresses from Grandma Brady.

 Heidi finally started to enjoy her rocking horse and has since become quite a daredevil on it.

We drove up to Highland and played with Michael and Danielle for a few hours.  They got the girls one of those cool play-dough icecream shop sets, and we all  played with it for the next hour.  It was really cool, I think I'm just as excited about it as the kids, although I'm going to have to get past trying to insist that the kids NOT mix the colors.
     We had a great holiday, plenty of family, good food and remembering the Savior.  We got to play plenty of dressup, hairdresser, playdough, connect 4, read books, and pretend kitty.
One of the best gifts I received was hearing Tyler admit "Man, compared to this, school is easy!" after spending a morning dealing with diapers, tantrums, begging for snacks and mini meltdowns.
Now we just have to ward off the post holiday blues as we look forward to birthday season!