December Recap, Part II: Christmas Edition

The rest of the month passed in a flurry of fun, as it should!

I just love this picture of Camille

I hosted the Young Women's Christmas party at my house, since Craig had to work that night.  We decorated ornaments and played games and ate WAY too many cookies...

My girls!  (I tilted the photo so it would be less obvious that that tree is leaning!)

And we visited Daddy at work, which is always a treat!  Ryder loves dressing up in Daddy's Patriot paraphernalia...

I took the kids to the library one day and they discovered the new touch-screen computers for kids!

It always makes me happy when my kids play nicely.  If the house looks relatively clean, that's just an added bonus!

I finally took Camille to get her first haircut.  $14 later, you can't tell any difference at all!  {Sigh.}

That's her "What are you doing???" look...

My cute girls

Kendra is such a good sport about playing with her siblings!

I have a drawer for measuring cups and things and we decided to clean it out.  This is some of what we found...  I guess I have some hoarding tendencies...

Colton helping Craig wrap presents!

I had read that the National Gallery had a wonderful Vermeer exhibit and really wanted to see it.  Craig had the brilliant idea that we should go on the 23rd and then hit the Messiah Sing-Along, too!  It turned out to be the BEST day EVER!!!!

Fine art makes me giddy

The exhibit was really well arranged, with several other Dutch masters all put together so you could see how they drew on each other's works and how they made them their own.  This is a tricky way to organize something, because it can just make everything super boring-- I was impressed because in this case, it really served to show just how amazing Vermeer's technique actually was!

This was one of my absolute favorites

Craig taking a picture of me taking a picture.  So very meta.

I only got about an hour at the museum before Craig had to drag me away to eat.  Seriously-- art museums turn me crazy, I can't stop running around trying to see everything!  We walked to the Shake Shack and had a big mid-meal (lunch? dinner? who knows???), then walked back to the car and drove to the Kennedy Center.  We were very lucky, because even though it was a bit rainy and windy, it wasn't actually cold.  Considering the artic fall we've been having, 60 degrees in December felt quite nice.  I can handle rain just fine when it's not freezing!  Craig dropped me off so I could get in line right away while he parked the car.  The ushers were already warning us that we weren't guaranteed tickets, so that made me nervous.  Somehow I'd gotten us in line right between two different Mennonite groups.  As we stood around waiting, the group in front of us began singing Christmas carols.  I figured we were all there for a sing-along and would be doing this inside the concert hall as well, so I went ahead and joined in with them.  They noticed and began chatting with me and we had a great time in line!

When it was finally time to get our tickets (an hour and a half later), I was kind of sad that we weren't all seated together!  But I couldn't be too sad-- because it was just the two of us, we ended up getting AWESOME seats, row L in the orchestra section AND next to an aisle!  We were stoked.  AND THEN I ran into a friend of mine from BYU that I haven't seen in years, so that was super fun, too.

Not bad for being "not guaranteed seating"!

The concert was so fun. They had a new conductor now, which made me a little sad since I've always loved Barry Hemphill. But this new lady kept things hopping, as she conducted almost the entire thing at what felt like double time. And the soloists were some of the best I've ever heard here, so that was wonderful.

Another nice thing was that they'd changed the concert time.  Where it used to start at 8, this year it began at 6pm.  We were done by 8:30 and since there wasn't any traffic, we buzzed right home and were there before 11pm!  I was afraid we wouldn't be back until one in the morning!

Craig's parents had been babysitting all day and we'd set up the guest room for them so they could just stay the weekend, rather than going back and forth between our house and theirs so many times.  We got home and told them all about our day and heard about what our kids had been up to before heading to bed.

And then it was Christmas Eve!!!  We had short church and then Craig and his Mom got to work in the kitchen while I, um, napped...

Camille is so helpful!

Bentley was bored, so we put him to work chopping potatoes

Once it was dark, we went to see the crazy house-- Charlottesville's very own winner of the National Tacky Light contest!  They're now up to over 300 blow up decorations and countless nutcrackers and other decorations.  I don't know how these people do it, but we sure enjoy seeing it!

Camille with Rudolph (the owner) before we entered the yard

And they had Santa there!

This panorama doesn't even do it justice....

Then we went back home and read the Luke 2 story and sang Christmas songs.  The kids got to open their Christmas Eve jammies from my parents.  I may have picked them out this year and it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to find matching jammies for all my kids' sizes.  So I tried to get them all similarly themed.  In this case, they're all very fuzzy and feature either polar bears or penguins, with an emphasis on black, red, and grey.  I thought it worked well!

The kids settled down really well (no one wanted to climb out of bed and risk scaring away Santa!) and before I knew it, it was Christmas morning and they were rushing down the stairs in gleeful anticipation!

Typical: she's more interested in the packaging than the actual present!

Ryder has desperately wanted a huge stuffed animal pig but those are ridiculously expensive so we found this instead: the idea is that you use it to hold your stuffed animals and then it's like a beanbag chair!  Fun and functional, right?  But we were worried that Ryder wouldn't like it, so I was so happy that he was so excited!

Kendra finally got her own Kindle Fire

It's a big hit!

We let Oreo nibble around her present for a couple minutes before opening it for her

Colton wanted these very fashionable slippers

Bentley finally got Jurassic World

Colton & Camille playing with the cooking set from my Aunt Jan

This present was almost as big as Camille!

This just makes me laugh: I'd asked Ryder to set up this nativity set and it wasn't until way later that I noticed the extra angel lounging on top of a palm tree!  Quite the vacation he seems to be enjoying!

Ryder's bean bag can also be a costume!

That's what was inside the big box!  Happy Camille!

It was such a fun day!  Presents took most of the morning (with a break for cinnamon rolls) and then Craig got to work on the turkey.  I spent a huge portion of the afternoon chatting with each of my sisters and parents, who I was missing a lot.  Dinner was pretty much perfect and it was just a relaxing rest of the day, in the best Christmasy sort of way.

Merry Christmas!