Christmas Eve

We started celebrating our Christmas as a family on Christmas Eve when Alexa was a baby. We wanted to have a time that we are able to start and continue special traditions with the kids. The last 5 years we have had a yummy dinner of crab legs. We've decided to stay with the seafood dinner theme for our Christmas Eve dinner but didn't do crab legs this year. Eric made a yummy seafood pasta with shrimp and scallops. As you can see Shane isn't enjoying it one bit! We also like to do the little devotional activity "What God wants for Christmas" during the season and end it on Christmas Eve. We also typically like to do a Happy Birthday Jesus Cake. That didn't get baked this year. It seemed like we had so many sweets around and the evening flew by. The kids also had 2 Happy Birthday Jesus parties in church and preschool already this year.

After we ate we headed off to church for our Christmas Eve service. The kids were mesmerized by all the candles and loved being part of the candle lighting. We usually ride around and look at Christmas lights but since we went to a little later service we headed home to open presents instead.

The girls loved their bathrobes and the talking babies have been a hit. You can also see by their reaction (the two of them hugging) that they loved their beauty salon! Shane got into opening presents this year too. Last year he was much more into the paper and boxes. His big surprise and the highlight of his Christmas was his choo, choo!! This is a picture of him waiting for the unveiling. He could hardly contain himself while daddy put it together! Eric surprised me with a new camera lens. Stay tuned for snow pictures. I was able to take pictures of the kids in the snow from the house. You have to love being able to take close up snow pictures from the warmth of the house. I have some camera studying to do now!