Christmas Eve

We had a wonderful Christmas Eve. Christmas seems more fun when you have a little one to give to and experience with. This was our year to spend at the Summerhays'. And since we were all here we decided to all spend the night!

We played the "M&M" game. There is a bowl of M&Ms and everyone has a straw. You roll the dice and when you roll doubles it;s your turn to suck the m&ms out of the bowl into your pile. 

It got intense at the end, here are the 2 finalist counting there M&M's. 

Dan won! It was close though. 

We did a flannel board nativity story. 

Grandpa put on a christmas gift exchange game. Which is always fun. 

Then SANTA came! He even had gift for everyone and knew their names!

Declan wasn't so sure about it. 

We also did a service project. AnnMarie had the idea to sew baby blankets and donate them to the local hospital. It was a great idea and we all had a good time. It was fun to see the men get into it too :)

 Amanda and I sang on of Eileen's favorite Christmas songs. 

 And we had a yummy dinner. 

In the Summerhays family, they stay up late and everyone wraps presents and bustles around trying to get last minute things done. Since this was so different from my family, it was fun to spend the night there and be apart of that memory. We were all so excited for the magic of the next morning.

Family Pictures

The day after we saw the christmas lights we had planned on doing family pictures with the whole Summerhays family. We went to the Sand Canyon Church Building. It ended up being a beautiful day. 

 I was bummed because Declan had fallen the night before, while looking at Christmas lights, so his lip was swollen and puffy. But oh well, I guess that is what happens with kids. Here are some of my favorites from the shoot. 

Christmas Lights

Christmas weekend we did ALOT of fun things. AnnMarie and Derek were in town so we packed in al the fun we could  while they were here. To start off the weekend we went to look at Christmas lights. It was fun to have the family together. We stopped by 7-11 on the way for hot chocolate and off we went to look at the lights. 

We had a great night. The only bummer was at the end of the night Declan was walking around and fell on his face and cut his lip open. I felt bad for him and we had family pictures the next day. But it is all apart of the experience. 

Huntington Beach and Santa

Doug and I decided to go to visit his sister Jill who lives down in Huntington Beach. Doug's cousin also lives down there so it fun to visit all of them. We wanted to take Declan to see Santa so we all decided to go down together. 

 Once Doug and I got to jill's house we all drove down to the Fashion Place mall where there was a nice Santa Display. We were very excited  to see no one in line to see Santa. So we went up to the worker and asked how long  the wait was. He told us that they were trying a new system and we had to text santa to get on a waiting list. But we could text him til about 2:00. Since we had 2 hours to spare we decided to kill some time and go get some lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. 

At 2:00 the two dad's ran down to get our name on the list. We found out that we still had another hour and a half to wait. Ugh! Not so fun with 3 little kids. 

Once our time had finally arrived we learned that santa had gone on a break and we still had another half an hour to wait. We weren't thrilled to hear this news, and we told the workers that this new system was not very effective. 

Once we finally got in to see Santa, the santa looked amazing and was so good with the kids. After seeing how cute the pictures were all of our stress and anger somehow didn't matter as much. All, in all we had a great time and always enjoy spending time with Jill and Doug's cousins,,,Stephanie and Eric.