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| My twinsies! They are so similar! |
The big kids had this day off of school! We ended up celebrating Drew's very belated birthday dinner at a chicken and waffle place, Gold Feather. You may recall that his birthday was the day Brian and I flew out to get Roman and things have been so busy that we just kept putting it off, but we finally had a spare evening! |
| Everyone got matching PJ's and various types of gingerbread houses this year. |
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| Bob was so thankful for a squishy ball he had been wanting. |
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| Nobody noticed the Light Up Corn Hole set until Dad pointed it out. |
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| Although I am still working on sewing Roman's incomplete stocking, he did get two little toys for St. Nicholas Day. |
If you don't get your tree before or on Thanksgiving weekend, then the pickin's around here get pretty slim. We went the second weekend of Advent this year. We tried a new place that brings in trees from Oregon, but it had only trees that were 10 ft tall and bigger. The few regular sized trees that were left were marked "sold" and priced at hundreds of dollars. So we went to Home Depot because it was nearby. It had been totally picked over and only had 5 foot trees left...except the displays. We got the most beautiful display tree and brought it home. Only problem is it had been out of water for days before bringing it home. We like to keep our tree up throughout the whole Christmas season, not just Advent. As I write this post, in early January, it it sagging badly and very much drying out no matter how much water we give it.
The next weekend I got the lights on and we decorated on Laetare Sunday. It was a beautiful tree, but so full that it was hard to fit our ornaments on it. I am hoping to get a fake tree for next year that we can decorate too, so we don't have to cram the ornaments on. All the kids have special ornaments that they have received as gifts from years past, though the younger kids have fewer ornaments by far. I always unpack the ornaments and hand them out or make piles for everyone. Then I put my special ornaments on, but this year I barely had room on the tree to put them on. I used to be guaranteed the top was left for me, but now the three older kids are all my height or close.
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| Bob liked to help me unpack them more than put them on the tree. |
Brian is the picture taker for tree decorating every year. He really enjoys the getting of the tree more than the decorating. He puts on his five or so ornaments and then takes a million pictures.
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| Drew got a Green Ember t-shirt. He is still obsessed with Green Ember book series and continues to reread his favorite books in the series. We are reading aloud the first book at bedtime right now. It is adorable that whenever I read a statement about a character that turns out not to be true later in the book, he can't help but tell us that it's not really true and we'll see later. His excitement is adorable. He has now started reading Kathryn Lasky's Guardians of Ga'Hoole series and is now a little bit obsessed with owls too. |
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| I love consumable gifts! With six kids it can be overwhelming at Christmastime if everyone gets a bunch of gifts you have to find a place for. So I put in as many consumable gifts as I can. One thing, that the kids all love and I typically won't buy because it isn't practical, is individually microwaveable Mac-N-Cheese cups. They are not filling and they are expensive. As it is we have to make three boxes of regular Macaroni and Cheese to feed the six of them. So I gave them each one cup of the Mac-N-Cheese to use for a lunch sometime. They were super excited about it. |
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| Judah was celebrating the Nutella and pretzel pack. He really loves food. |
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| This is Judah's year (when he turned 7 yrs old) to start watching the Star Wars movies and shows with the big kids, so he got a baby Yoda to commemorate the year. |
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| Our Altar with our biggest nativity scene with our O Antiphons gathering in front as we do them. |
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| The stockings were hung on the banister with care. |
