Christmas 2011

It's time to talk about Christmas -- yes, I'm behind.  It seems to be a common occurrence these days.  

Part 1

First, we got to spend Christmas Eve with my family sharing time together and opening presents.  I'm not sure how in the world this happened, but I didn't get a single picture from that.  Oh my!

Anyway, things were a little mixed up this year for one reason or another.  We didn't have our usual situation of spending Christmas Eve in Abilene at my grandmother's house and spending Christmas Day there.  So, after we opened presents in Abilene on Christmas Eve, we headed home to Snyder.  This allowed the boys to get to see what Santa brought them Christmas morning.  They were very excited about that!

Here they are after waking up to see what was under the tree -- Mario Kart K'Nex for Jaden and a new scooter for Jaxon.

We opened presents from each other, too.  Here's Jaxon with his new guitar from Jaden.

And Jaden singing with the new karaoke machine we got them.

I guess it was a musical-kind of Christmas.  That's o.k.  We all like that!

And this year, we got to host Christmas lunch with my mom, dad and granny coming over to eat with us.  Here is the table we set before going to church that day.  If you look close, you can see the snow we got on the slide out the window.

Here are the boys ready for church and excited about a WHITE Christmas!

And here they are with our company for Christmas lunch.  It was fun hosting and the boys had a great time!

Here they are later that afternoon putting together their Mario Racetrack.

Part 2

Now, Christmas with the West side.  We rented a house in Arlington and the 11 of the Wests spent almost a week there having fun together.  

First, Memaw and Poppa sent the kids on a scavenger hunt looking for their presents.  They had to pair up with someone so Mallory chose Uncle Jason...

Jaden and Carter went together...

And then Andrew and Jaxon searched together...

They all found their gifts (Wii games for all of them except Mallory who got a cute bag for her dance clothes).

The week was spent playing LOTS of games, eating, playing outside because the weather was beautiful, eating, a little bit of sleeping, and more eating.

One day we went to the Gaylord Texan to have some fun.  Besides looking around the beautiful hotel, we went snow tubing.

If you've never been there, they have a snow tube run inside and it is so fun!

Here are Jaden and Jaxon about to go down...

Then we wrapped up as warm as we could and went to the Ice! exhibit.  It was so incredibly cold!  And the four of us were prepared and came with lots of clothes on -- and it was still cold!  But we really enjoyed seeing what they could do with all that ice!

It was a Shrek theme.  This picture is actually before we went into the exhibit...

This one is taken inside.  As you can see, we had lots of clothes on!

Jaden went down the ice slide.  And, was a little scared of the Ogre.  :-)

None of us stayed in there too long.  Did I mention it was C-O-L-D?!

After we came out, we shed some of the clothes and walked around the hotel just looking at all the sites.  Found a place to take a picture of Memaw and Poppa with all the kids.

Then a family pic of us...

We also spent a day at Holiday in the Park at Six Flags.  It was a fun week!  


Memaw and Poppa had recently gone on a cruise to Hawaii and brought us all back a shirt.  So, we had to show them off...