Merry Christmas!

Can you guys believe Christmas is over? It always seems so crazy to me that you have this entire month (or more) or decorating and shopping and planning and celebrating and all of the sudden, in one quick day, it's just over. Most years the weeks following Christmas leave me in a bit of a funk, a Christmas hangover, but this year is a little different. Now that Christmas is over we are officially in baby countdown mode, so while I am still a little sad about my favorite time of year being over, we defiantly have something big to look forward too!

Anyway, our Christmas was wonderful. S got a full week off surrounding the holiday so not only did we get a chance to get things done beforehand, we also had a few days to spend together and recover after. On Christmas Eve we had our friends A and J, and their kiddos as well as her parents over for brunch. It was nice to let the kids play and burn some energy while the adults hung out and ate all the yummy food. (the other, not pregnant, adults also got to drink all the yummy drinks. I missed my eggnog and rum this year!) After a day of playing the kids were worn out enough to go to bed without too much of a fuss, so we did our usual traditions. First the obligatory posed pictures of the boys in front of the Christmas tree.

Don't be fooled by the few cute pictures we managed to get.... most of them looked like this!

Then we put out our milk, cookies, and carrots for Santa and his reindeer and read our Christmas stories in front of the tree. 

(This is a really good angle and the book is helping to hide my enormous baby bump!)

And one of my favorite parts was taking a moment to take in our beautiful tree in our beautiful new house. I"m just so happy here and so happy that we get to call this place ours.

After we got the boys settled S and I (mostly me!) finished wrapping some last gifts and put out our stockings and headed to bed too. We told the boys they were not allowed to go downstairs in the morning until we were all up and could go down as a family, and amazingly they listened and even let us sleep in all the way until 6:30!

The boys opened stocking while S and I got settled and got some coffee going for ourselves, and then came all the gifts. I've gotten much better over the years about being mindful of my spending and not just buying stuff to have stuff, but to buy meaningful things, but I admit love watching them open presents that I have put so much time and thought into. They were all grateful, and S was very grateful over the box full of beer and the new beer fridge that Santa brought him!

And can you see the them we had going with some of our gifts? These were only two of the four coffee making apparatuses we received! They are much appreciated and I am grateful that we are going to be adequately caffeinated when we have a newborn in the house!

Our house looked like a bomb went off in it when all was said and done, but a happy and festive bomb! And if there is one good things about being a million months pregnant at Christmas, it's that nesting is kicking in pretty hard and every trace of Christmas was cleaned up and packed away on the 26th!

Oh, and one last thing before I close out this post..... would you believe we managed to catch Santa on my phone camera again this year!!