Christmas Day and beyond....

Christmas 2011 was a blast! We had some good down time the week leading up to Christmas and that was much needed. We did some crafts, baking and just hanging out. Our pre-Christmas crafts: Christmas Eve was our traditional Children's Christmas Eve Service at church at 5pm. Tyler and Scott had a little debut at the beginning of the service and got to wear their PJ's! They were children who walked around with Dr. Carney talking about what Christmas is all about before the Christmas story was actually acted out by other children in our church! After the service, we came home to get ready for Santa to arrive! The boys were so cute on the way home looking up in the sky to see if they could see Rudolph's red nose glowing. Once we got home they were so excited to get Santa's cookies out and the reindeer food in the driveway. Once they finally settled down to go to bed, Tyler had a hard time going to sleep. Then, when he finally did go to sleep, he came to our bed around 3am and NEVER went back to sleep!!! He was just so excited and I think a little nervous about the idea of Santa being in our house! :) Santa came!! Wow, a basketball goal!!!! From Robbie and I they got these things: His very own big boy bookbag since he will be starting school this fall and he loves to feel big like his brothers! A Cam Newton signed jersey!!!! A cool art desk! At the service on Christmas Day, Tyler was asked to be apart of a song sung by various children and an adult soloist. It was absolutely beautiful!! That afternoon we headed to Robbie's mom's house for Christmas with his family. Yummy food and more presents were had by all! :) The day after Christmas is when Andy(my brother), Tiffany, Anna and Caroline arrived from Texas! So, we had Christmas with my family then plus an entire week of nonstop fun!! Passing out and opening presents!! On the 27th, we had Christmas with my mom's side of the family. We started a tradition a few years ago of going out to eat and then to someone's house for a fun gift exchange. It's always a lot of fun!! While Andy and his family were here, endless amounts of fun were spent at the State Museum, fishing in the pond in Mimi and Pop's backyard, going to the zoo, bowling, eating oysters that Pop cooked (well some people anyway), taking a trip to Yumilicious, riding the carosel at the mall and many, many other fun activities! My 2 sweet nieces....Anna (5) and Caroline (almost 2) Robbie got a fire pit from my parents for Christmas. Here are some pictures from our first time using it! We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows. I had some other good pictures on my phone that I was going to put on here, but Greyson got ahold of it the other day and learned out to delete pictures! So, I lost some favorites!! Oh well....I'm sad but what can you do?!?? The first part of January brought about some crazy challenges with Greyson going to bed at night and taking naps. We battled and battled and battled this but we are finally back to a normal bed time with him. We thought he was ready to maybe give up his naps but thankfully not yet! We have started calling it rest time instead of nap time and he falls asleep when he is ready. For the past 2 weeks, his naps have taken place on the landing of the stairs. It is so cute! I initially start him out in his room, but he slowly makes his way down and ends up falling asleep on the landing. Here is one of him just today. He was wearing a golfers hat. :) Some more random pictures and a video: Greyson learned to sing Jesus Loves Me along with me months ago, but this was the first time I actually got it on video! It is so precious and warms my heart when we sing it together while rocking before bed.



My awesome running girls and their kiddos came over the other night for dinner and play time! All of our husbands had something going on so, we decided to have some girl time (with the kids!)! It was fun!