Christmas has come and gone once again, and we feel very blessed this year. I particularly have just been very grateful for my family, our home, food on the table, the Gospel in our lives, our children, each other, and all that it entails.
We didn't go all out this year for Christmas, in fact, we planned on having a very small Christmas. We budgeted $100 for each of the boys, and Will and I agreed to do homemade gifts for each other $25 and under.
We were originally hoping to make an offer on a home, and put our current house on the market. Part of that plan was purchasing new bedroom furniture for the boys' room, and our's as well in order to make the rooms look nicer and more staged. However, if you read my other recent blog where I mentioned the home we were interested was bought by someone else, and we also cannot currently get a loan anyway (due to being self employed), the house-hunting thing has been put on hold.
But we decided to still keep our budgets small and continue with the "small Christmas" plan anyway, and it turned out very lovely. I had a lot of fun planning a homemade gift for Will, and the boys also had fun making gifts for everyone in the family...
Here is my gift for Will- it was a "date package", for an all-day date to go hiking together, have a picnic, and more. I wanted to give him something that he would particularly enjoy. I always seem to pick the dates and they usually involve a movie and Italian food. For this though, I wanted it to be all about him.
This little guy woke up around 11:30 on Christmas Eve hungry and so I brought him down into the kitchen to give him a midnight snack...Even though he is still nursing, he wanted actual solid food.
The next morning the boys woke up at 6:30 a.m. and actually were very good and hung out in their bedrooms chatting with each other for like a half hour, until they eventually started to wander downstairs to discover that Santa Claus had come.
Yes, yes....our child is holding Jack the Elf, but only because we allowed the boys to give him a goodbye hug before he went back to the North Pole until next Christmas.
Riley was trying to figure out what the heck was going on, but he was pretty excited about his Sleep Sheep and his stackable rings and balls.
My absolute favorite was opening Will's homemade gift to me. I actually shed some tears on this. He put this together himself...and it involved WORDS...so many wonderful words that have so much meaning to me. I can't even tell you how awesome this gift was. I will treasure it forever. And this is just a small version of it. Apparently he ordered a wall-size mounted canvas, but it wasn't ready by Christmas (still waiting for it to be delivered).
Christmas morning was very relaxing. I made hot cocoa and traditional Pilsbury orange cinnamon rolls (a Southworth tradition).
Someone snuck onto our porch around 12:30 a.m. and delivered real snow. :) How fun. Guess I got my wish for a "white" Christmas afterall.
The boys had fun playing some games together...
My parents gave us a beautiful framed family photo for our wall...
This little guy totally dug his first Christmas!
And Will enjoyed a long winter's nap. :)
Here is a video of Christmas morning, a little of Christmas Eve, as well as a couple shots from our post-Christmas weekend at Long Beach with Will's family. Please note I didn't edit any of this, it's the full clips - mostly because I know years from now it will be fun to see/hear. Oh, and it's terrible quality - but I had to keep minimizing the size in order for Blogger to upload it. I have a better file on our computer (for my own personal reference).
