The Days of December

December, as always, was a very exciting month for our family. Of course it was the Christmas Season that brought most of the excitement and anticipation, but we had a few other fun things going on that made it even better. One night, we had the Lunar eclipse, so Shawn and I stayed up late and watched as much of it as we could out on our back patio. I was FREEZING cold, and there were a couple of times that I thought my shivers were going to put me into labor, but we survived, and got about a million pictures, but I'll only post one.

Now, on to the Christmas joys! We had a family do the 12 days of Christmas for our family, and I cannot tell you how much my kids loved this. Lucy quickly learned that every night around dinner time if she opened the front door, there was a surprise for us on the porch. We all loved it and I only wish I knew who it was so that I could get a recipe or two from them. Thank you so much for everything our secret santa!

We also had our ward Christmas party where Santa made his appearance. I'm really glad they had a Santa because I was a total slacker this year and never even got the kids to the Santa at the mall (we only had one car for most of the month, and we were car shopping the whole time to, it blocked out our schedule really quick). Lucy was so excited she could hardly stand it. Jack was so not excited, and slightly traumatized, as are most 1 year old kids who are introduced to Santa.

This is Lucy preparing to meet Santa with our good friend Sheryl, who Lucy adores and usually asks if she can play with.



This is Jack preparing to meet Santa, from the safety of my lap across the room, and holding a death grip of my sweater in his little fist.

And this is Lucy with Santa. Pretty much couldn't be happier as she asked for a Princess Barbie and promised that she had been an angel all year.

And this is as close as we got to Santa with Jack. No amount of encouragement was going to convince him that this dude in the red suit was a friendly being.

Lucy calmed Jack down, that and the fire truck that showed up outside right about now because some kid pulled the fire alarm. With the alarm, the sirens, and all the flashing lights, Jack quickly forgot his near abduction experience with Santa.

I have to say that I have been extremely disappointed with our "winter" around here this year. December was such an ugly month for us. We did get this ice storm one day in December and it was so pretty. Shawn is always much better about taking pictures of these kinds of things than I am. We didn't get a white Christmas, and we all know that is just a slap in the face for me, but we did get our big storm on New Years Eve, but even that was a disappointing amount of snowfall. It really just made the roads terrible, as I posted below, and caused a bunch of accidents, and then melted 2 days later. Not ok with all this. No wonder my mother in law who has lived here 20+ years hates winter, winters here are pathetically disappointing a frustrating.