Holiday Celebrations

Christmas time was a lot of fun this year with Kelsey. She really started catching on to a lot of our favorite traditions. I can see how fun it would be to have lots of kids at Christmas time.

Her favorite part was probably the amount of Christmas dresses that she could choose from. I loved this one most only because it is the dress that Whitley wore at our wedding so it was kind of fun to see Kelsey wearing it.

Every year we have a list of movies that are must sees for our family including: Muppets, Elf, White Christmas, Rudolph, Home Alone, Santa Clause, Its a Wonderful Life. My favorite is White Christmas, Ethan busts up at Home Alone every year like he's never seen it, and Kelsey really took to Elf. She was locked on and actually laughed without prompting. It was actually a lot of fun.

She laughed so hard when Buddy gets hit by the taxi and then when he gets stuck on the escalator. It really made it so much more fun for Ethan and I.

This year wrapping took twice as long because I let Kelsey help. She was in charge of the bows and the name stickers and she was so proud. She wanted to give Ethan his presents every single day to show him her work.

I managed a Christmas craft for Kelsey's nursery leaders. This year for neighbor gifts I just gave wrapping paper so I didn't have a need to make many things which was actually totally cool by me. This little diddy took like 10 minutes and I don't think it would have turned out any better if I tired. Note to self: sometimes the more time you spend on crafts the worse they are and ALWAYS give store bought gifts to neighbors. Lets be honest, the cookies end up in the trash anyway.

We played "Don't Eat Pete!" a lot with Kelsey but would use her "special stables" people to hide the marshmallows under. She was a terrible peeker, but she loved the game.

Setting up Grandma Wing's tree and our tree.

Instead of driving to Salt Lake to look at the lights we went to the Riverwoods. It was just as gorgeous in our opinion. While we were there we got to meet Santa and although Kelsey got a little shy she didn't scream like last year. He sang her Jingle Bells and she wouldn't stop talking about it.

Kelsey kept pulling her hat over her eyes and running around. She laughed so hard every time she did it.

Some nice person let Kelsey pet their dog and she would have stayed all night, but he kept drooling on her and I was getting so grossed out that I made her stop

Another nice man saw our camera die before we got a family picture, ran up took this one with his phone and emailed it to Ethan right away. Technology really is super awesome.

Ethan and I have never really done a live nativity, but this year the Palmers invited us over to join theirs. The Morris's, Smiths, and Apkers all came to. This is something that I would actually love to do with other families through out the years. It was really fun. Kelsey was a wise man and actually wore the costume. She didn't make it to baby Jesus though because she thought baby Peter was much cuter.