How I Spent My Christmas Break

The kids were out of school for 2 weeks at Christmas time. We had so much fun those two weeks, despite all the illness we had going on. My brother Sam and his wife Teresa came down from BYU Idaho and Teresa's parents came up from Dallas. We had our 2nd Annual Family Gingerbread House Contest. You can click on that to see the pictures of the completed houses.

Emily had a party with some friends one night and they played Dance Central and had a gift exchange.

Teresa's Parents, Antonio and Angeles, taught us how to make tamales. We made chicken, pork and bean and cheese tamales. In total we had over 200. They were SO DANG GOOD! We divvied up the spoils and my family had our tamales gone in about two days. We did save some for Steve who was out of town at the time.

We had fun making the tamales but we found out that making them is no small task. It took us all day long and we had 7 adults and 4 children helping.

On Christmas Eve everyone came to our house for dinner and a Christmas program.

After our program, we had a special visitor stop by.

This was Antonio and Angeles' last day in Utah. They left for Dallas early the next morning.

Santa with me mum

We all opened our Christmas PJ's and got all warm and snuggly

On Christmas morning everyone from my mom's house came back over to our house (at 6:45am) to open presents. After the presents were opened we all got ready and went to church.

Addy was so excited about this gift, she would not release her grip on it. This is the thing I sat on the floor at Walmart in Missouri on Thanksgiving Day for. I am pretty certain that my sitting on that Walmart floor in Troy Missouri, in the pharmacy department no less, is what led to our subsequent month long disease-ridden cough laced bronchitis pneumonia fest. It is a mistake I will never make again. But hey, we did get a Kinect out of the whole deal.

The aftermath. This is what our house looked like for the next two days.

We moved our old xbox up to the game room to make way for the new xbox/kinect in the kitchen/family room. Steve and Zac and Sam spent a great majority of the day playing Zac's new game. Poor Z, we didn't know it at the time but he was suffering from pneumonia at the time this picture was taken. His lungs could have collapsed at any moment. I still feel like a horrible mom.

The girls spent the majority of the day playing the kinect downstairs while the boys were upstairs. I am so glad we have 2 xboxes now. It makes things so less argumentative that way.

The kids got these hats for Christmas. They wore them all day on Christmas and pretty much every day since. I love them. Everyone comments on them whenever we go somewhere. Look at those cutie McBooty kids! I love them!

On the 28th, it was Sam and Teresa's first anniversary. They were going to share their anniversary with us and we were all (the adults) going to go see the new Mission Impossible movie. Well, this was the day Zac went to the doctor and Steve and Zac and I ended up spending most of the night in the ER and my mom and Lauren were taking care of our girls. So Sam and Teresa went out to dinner that night and then the next night we went to the movie. The next day, December 30th was Lauren's Birthday and we all went to her favorite place, The Olive Garden, for lunch. Then we went to my mom's house to play games.

The next day was New Years Eve. You can click on that to see our NYE photos. Then the kids went back to school on the 3rd of January. Despite being sick, we had a fabulous Christmas break. I love my family so much and am so thankful for these fun memories we made.