December - Part 2

Christmas Eve

On top of making Christmas cookies, we usually go swimming as our main activity on Christmas Eve--it's a tradition we're carrying on from my family--but this year we switched things up a bit and went up to Temple Square to see the lights.  Aunt Georgiana (Darwin's sister) was in town for Christmas and we have never taken our kids up to see the lights.  I feel like a horrible Utah mom for that reason! Haha!  So, we jumped on the opportunity to go see the lights on Christmas Eve this year instead of swimming.

It was a beautiful evening! Check out that sunset!

 It was really warm for being December, and I was grateful.  The lights are beautiful with snow all around, but I was personally glad for a warmer winter evening.

Our kids were excited to be there.  They love temples and being at a temple with lots of Christmas lights we pretty thrilling to them :)

Savannah was having some issues with her hat :)  Cute girl!

Our family!

Aurora loves doing silly pictures

Me and my handsome hubby!  Oh, how I love him!!

After walking around to see the lights with Darwin's family (yes, they were there too, we just didn't get any pictures of them for some reason), we rushed to Olive Garden for dinner before they closed for the night.  We ate a yummy dinner and enjoyed our time together before heading home to get ready for Santa to come.  The girls fell asleep in the car, and I felt bad that they didn't get to put out the milk and cookies for Santa, but we made sure Santa got all the cookies and milk he needed!

Aunt Georgiana slept over on Christmas Eve and Santa didn't even wake her up when he came, even though she was sleeping on the couch right next to the Christmas tree!  What a sneaky guy! ;)

Christmas Day

The girls actually slept in pretty late for being Christmas morning, but it's probably because we had a late night.

We woke up to fresh Christmas snow!  One of my favorite things about Christmas is waking up to a fresh, new, snowfall.  It's one of very few days we got snow this year so we were really blessed to have it!  When Aurora woke up and saw it, she came in to tell us, "Mom! Dad! It snowed!  Santa Claus IS coming to town!"

It was pretty adorable. :)

 

As soon as they got up they were checking out their stockings to see what Santa had filled them with.

Me and Aurora

Yep, now you've seen me without any make-up on ;)

The girls had a blast opening their presents.  Savannah wasn't super interested in the unwrapping part but it worked out well for Aurora because that was her favorite part so she got to help Savy open her presents :)

After a nice, relaxing morning and afternoon, Christmas evening we went to Grandpa and Grandma's house to open more presents and have a yummy Christmas dinner.

Our family on Christmas day

Another silly picture :)

Our cute girls watching a Christmas classic--White Christmas

Happy girls excited to open more presents!

Daddy being silly with some of the stocking stuffers the girls got (a tiara and a dinosaur mask)

Aunt Geo and Rori having a boxing match

Grandma and Grandpa gave the girls an awesome kitchen set

Aunt Georgiana and Aunt Andrea spoiled the girls too!

Setting up the kitchen

The next day, Daddy spent a couple hours setting up the new kitchen set for the girls (he said it took him two movies to do it--we watched The Music Man and The Lorax while he set it up)

 Rori takes over the camera every chance she gets. She took this picture of Daddy.

I think the girls think the kitchen set is more for playing in than playing with.  Whatever works! :)

I thought I got a picture of the finished product, but I guess I didn't.  Either way, it looks great and the girls love it!

Retirement Tribute

Darwin's mom retired at the end of the year.  While Georgiana was still in town, Dar and his siblings put together a little retirement tribute for their parents. It was fun to honor his parents and their many years of hard work!

Darwin reading his tribute

We all laughed and cried together

Georgiana had given everyone silly string in their stockings but was told it wasn't for spraying in the house.  But, after the retirement tribute, Grandpa surprised Geo by covering her with the silly string.  We realized after that why it really is an outside toy :)

Aurora wanted to feed the silly string "spaghetti" to Grandma :)

New Year's Eve

Our New Year's Eve was pretty low key.  We had planned to do some fun activities with the girls and let them stay up later than normal.  Bed time usually isn't until 8pm and we were going to let them stay up until 9:30-10:00ish, but Aurora fell asleep at 6:30pm!!

Daddy put "spicy drink" a.k.a. Sprite, in her sippy.  Savannah was pretty wired for a while after that.

We felt kind of bad carrying on without Aurora, but we had fun with Savannah until it was her bed time.

Daddy and Savy love dancing/spinning together

It was a wonderful Christmas and New Year holiday!  We loved having Daddy home with us for two whole weeks!  It was great to have Aunt Georgiana in town and great to spend so much time with family.

That wraps up 2014 in a nutshell.

Here's to another great year!