Christmas, Christmas time is...Gone?!?!?

Befor I get to the nitty gritty of Christmas I feel like I need to make a personal reminder and warning to all y'all out there....If you find yourself needing to walk around, it is never a good idea to do an intense strength training workout one day and then run 8 miles the next!!  Please help me remember this as I am sure that by Sunday I will be feeling good enough to have forgotten and try something similar the next week (don't tell Pratt, but I can be kind of hard headed about stuff like that)

Now on to Christmas!!!  Can you believe how fast that came and went????  I mean seriously, we are already approaching the back end of January and I know by the time tomorrow comes around it will be Christmas again!

Anyway, once again we had a super fabulous Christmas season celebrating the birth of our Savior, Jesus!  I just really love this time of year.  The candle light service at our church on Christmas Eve is one of my favorite (tied with the sunrise Easter service on the beach).  The children love that they get to hold a lit candle and do fairly well sitting through the service.

Here we are all ready to go.  I am not quite sure about the forced smiles in this picture, but it was the best one I got.

This year we were super excited to share our Christmas Eve traditions with our dear friends Erik and Rachael.  This was their first Christmas together as a married couple and of all the things they could have done, they chose us to spend their evening with us!  We are so blessed to have such wonderful friends:)

 I can't believe it, but I totally forgot to take a picture of the milk, cookies and diet coke we left out for Santa.  It was a momentous occassion in this house and I totally failed to capture it.  Oh well, sometimes it is better to live in the moment then live behind the camera.  At any rate, Shelby was super excited and tickled to death when she got up the next morning to an empty plate of cookies, an empty diet coke can and half a cup of milk.  It was priceless!!!

We hit the ground running around here on Christmas day.  

A quick shot before things got started... 

I was definitely more excited about Shelby's pink bb gun than she was.  My grandpa had a hobby of building (crafting?) guns and as I got older one of my favorite memories is going to Wyoming with the family, driving a few minutes out of town and shooting up anything and everything we could find with all sorts of guns...ah, those were the days:)

After we were done at our house, we got ready and headed to Meme's, from there we drove down to my family's, and after a quick afternoon nap (which was definitely needed by all, especially a certain "young" lady with brown curly hair who goes by the name mom) we popped on over to Papa and Grammie's to finish out our day.

I can't believe JP's eyes are closed in this shot:(  It had such great potential.



We all crashed into bed that night and slept rock hard.  It was a wonderful day!