Holiday re-cap

Happy New Year, everyone!!

I guess it's time for me to catch up on my blog.  I took zero pictures during our holiday, but Kami just informed me that she has a few that she took on her camera, so I'm going to borrow.

Some people in our ward invited us to breakfast, at their house, on Christmas Eve.  They invite everyone they know and it's a huge event that they hold in one of their big shops on their place.  It was great and we really enjoyed it, but weren't too thrilled when we got home and realized that we had locked ourselves out of our house!  We have one of those screwy locks on our garage door that will let you out of the house whether it's locked or unlocked.  This normally wouldn't have been a big deal, but our spare key was apparently carried away by one of our little darlings.  We spent a couple of hours trying to figure out a way to get into the house without calling a locksmith and without taking off the doorknob, but finally Shawn just took off the door knob.  He replaced it with a normal one, and it's been really nice!

We then did all of our usual Christmas Eve traditions, except that instead of going sledding on Christmas eve, we settled for bowling, as there was no snow.  Everything was even more fun than usual because Shawn took the entire week off of work!  Some of the things we enjoyed this holiday season were: going to school Christmas programs, (band, orchestra and grade school) going Christmas caroling with the extended Gee family on Christmas Eve:


This is a favorite tradition with the kids - everyone piles onto several trailers and we drive around Sugar City stopping at numerous houses along the way to carol.) I have to admit that I skipped out on it this year and stayed at Shawn's parents with Abram and Jodi's new baby Eden.

Shawn's sister, Suzette, starred as the mother in the "Greatest Christmas Pageant Ever" and it was fun to go witness that she was the BEST ACTRESS THERE!!  It was a very cute production, and we were proud of her.

We hosted the annual Gee family Christmas Party at our house:

Abram and Hannah - cheesy BFF's

Grandma Shirley; and Jim sporting his new green wig- I'm telling you, everyone would be jealous of the up-town gifts that we give out at our Gee Christmas party!

Christmas day was delightful, although in a way I had a hard time feeling like it was REALLY Christmas.  Where is the snow??

Caden figuring out his rubix cube

On Christmas morning, our kids aren't allowed to get up until 5:30, at which time they are allowed to go into the bonus room and rifle through their stockings which Santa leaves under the kid's tree.  Once the excitement has built to a certain level - mine, not the kids - Shawn and I head upstairs, to see what the kids are so excited about.  This year  I felt like Santa could have stopped at the stockings and everyone would have been happy. Caden was working away on his rubix cube, which he has since learned to solve in about three minutes - who knew that he would be so excited about something like that?!  Nolan was thrilled to find a "motor toothbrush" in his stocking! Evidently Santa received his letter:

Yes, I told him how to spell a lot of the words (at least the ones that are spelled correctly!)

 After checking out the stockings we head downstairs to look at all the loot underneath the Christmas tree, but we don't open presents until we have had a super duper Christmas breakfast.  We eat things at that breakfast that we don't generally eat the rest of the year. Then we opened our presents, and went to church, where Shawn was the speaker for the meeting.  He did a great job. 

Christmas evening at Jim and Marilyn's. Everyone who plays an instrument performed - lots of piano, violin, and even Terry on the trombone!  Then we all sang - it was a very nice evening.

Some other things that we did during the holidays were:
We attended the neighborhood Christmas party, had friends over to party,  played a lot of "Apples to Apples as a family, read aloud the books, "Up From Chicago and A Year Down Yonder" out-loud as a family (Suzette suggested the books, and they are humorous- kind-of McManus style-and were very enjoyable read-alouds.  Sharing a book as a family is one of our favorite things to do, but we haven't done it as much this year because we like Shawn to be there for the whole story, not bits and pieces!!  Plus, he's the best story reader.  We don't want to read on without him when he's out of town, and so often when WE can read, he's working away and can't.  It was so nice to be able to fit in some good books while he was home and we were all on the same schedule!)

Shawn and the kids went skeet shooting with Evan and Jodi. It was so great to see Evan and Jodi and their kids!

Nolan, Shawn, David, Caden and Evan.  Shawn, Caden, and Maddie were the enthusiastic skeet shooters from our family.

We also watched our favorite Christmas movies, and during the week I came down with a nasty cold and we had a movie marathon for one whole day!  It was relaxing for Shawn and I and exciting for the kids because T.V. isn't something that we do a lot of around here. 
It's been great - it was hard to take the Christmas decorations down and send the kids back to school, but we had some wonderful holidays.