We started last weekend with a celebration of Samuel’s 4th birthday! We had a party for him on Saturday, followed by Christmas with grandparents on Sunday, and followed by more birthday celebrations on Monday the 19th which was his actual birthday. Samuel has been playing with David’s hot wheel cars more and more, and so I decided on a hot wheel theme for his party. It was a fun theme! However, I didn’t go all out in terms of having a bunch of guests, or by planning a bunch of activities and games. We had a few neighborhood friends come over, and Grand-mama and G-pa. The kids had fun playing together, and Samuel loved his party. I can’t believe my sweet little guy is four!! Samuel has been pushing boundaries lately to see how much he can get away with. He also does things, like stomping on the floor or making loid noises to get attention. I believe this is still a result of him wanting to be the baby and trying to make sure we still pay attention to him. It tries my patience at times, but I try to remind myself it’s a phase that he will grow out of. Hopefully soon!🥴 Samuel plays with David and Emma so much that he doesn’t have a lot of his own interests yet. He wants to play with whatever toys they are playing with, so this makes it difficult in terms of buying him gifts. Maybe it’s a third child thing, or because they are so close in age? Or maybe it’s just him? I’m not sure. He does love games and music though.

Jim and Alesia stayed over the weekend with us, and we celebrated Christmas with them. The kids were so excited about celebrating Christmas early. A funny moment was when Emma wanted to teach Grandmama piano. It was so cute!! She was trying to show Alesia how to play one of her songs. Unfortunately (or fortunately for Alesia. HA! 🙂 ), we had to leave for Emma’s Christmas gymnastics program. We opened gifts Sunday after church, and the kids loved their presents from Grandmama and G-pa!

On Samuel’s birthday day. We went to the donut shop for breakfast. It has become a bit of a tradition that we take the kids to the donut shop on their birthday. They like to go and proclaim that it is their birthday, and the donut shop here gives them a free birthday donut. We then asked Samuel where he wanted to go eat for his special birthday lunch. He finally decided upon Steak and Shake. He wanted the milkshake of course! 🙂 Later that day he went to the birthday party of a neighborhood friend. Ha! It’s kind of funny because that little boy’s birthday was on Saturday. I don’t believe neither his mom or myself was aware of this when planning our parties.

The rest of the week was filled with Christmas preparations and activities. I had planned that each day we would do some activity in preparation of Christmas. It helped in keeping the kids occupied. On Tuesday we went to pick out our Christmas tree. We were going to go to a Christmas tree farm, but the highway was like a parking lot due to a traffic accident. So we turned around and went to the local Lowes store. It wasn’t quite the same experience, but we still had a fun time. We spent about fifteen minutes picking out the “perfect” tree. They had some photo spots set up, and so I took pictures of the kids while Andrew was paying for the tree. It went home with us to be decorated on Christmas eve. 💗

Wednesday we made sugar cookies. The kids love to cut out the cookies and decorate them. They are getting better with the decorating each year. We used red, green and white frosting, and sprinkles. There is always an abundance of sprinkles! 🙂

On Thursday we decorated gingerbread houses. This has also become a fun tradition of ours. I generally buy the kits because it’s easier, but one could do it a number of ways. You could use graham crackers, or frosted pastries. If I had it my way, I would make sugar cookie houses! HA! I don’t like ginger bread, but we don’t eat the houses anyway. The kids do eat their fair share of the frosting and candy decorations though. 🙂

On Friday we baked cinnamon rolls! This is my favorite. I love how it makes the house smell, and I look forward to eating them Christmas morning after we open gifts. The kids like to help me bake. I let them help by putting the ingredients in the bowl, sometimes stirring or sprinkling. Once I got the dough rolled out, David put the butter on, Emma sprinkled the sugar, and Samuel the cinnamon. Then they helped place them in the pans to bake after I rolled and cut the dough. Making cinnamon rolls is almost an all day affair. It was so cold out Friday that it took quite a while longer than usual to get the dough to rise. Even with the oven on.

We did have a Christmas miracle here in the south! It snowed and we had a white Christmas!! This hasn’t happened in about ten years. It was beautiful. 🥰 The kids played in the snow mostly with Andrew, while Audrey and I watched from the window. I did play in the snow yesterday for a little while with them. It was fun! One of my favorite Christmas movies is White Christmas. I almost always watch it while wrapping presents, which I did. 🙂

On Christmas eve we decorated our Christmas tree! We don’t have a theme or design to our tree. It is simply filled with ornaments that people have given us over the years, that the kids have made, and those we have bought traditionally for one another over the years. I love unwrapping each ornament and remembering who gave it to us, or seeing which kid made it, or remembering which ornament was bought when. This year David got to assist in putting the star on top. 🙂

I also baked baby Jesus a birthday cake! This is another thing that has become a tradition over the last few years. I love making a white coconut cake because it looks angel like, and tastes heavenly! We also attended Christmas eve service at church! I love taking that time to stop everything, and go to sing Christmas carols, and hear about the reason we celebrate this season.

Christmas Day!!! Kids were up early, actin’ like they had already eaten a ton of sugar!😂 Around 7:30 am we opened presents. After opening presents came the great Christmas mess…😵😄💕. Wrapping paper, boxes and bags, and toys that need to be opened and figured out. Andrew did really well at keeping the paper cleaned as we were going this year. Helping the kids learn how to use their toys, or play their games always takes most of the day. It is fun watching the kids figure out their new toys, and helping them learn to play new games.

With Christmas being on Sunday this year, we paused play time, and went to church. This is no easy task with four kids, but important for them to see that Jesus is the reason we celebrate anyway. Andrew was helping to lead the music at the service we attended on post. After worship we had Chinese takeout for lunch. We have done this off and on in our several years of marriage. I enjoy it because I don’t have to cook! 🙂 We then returned home to our Christmas mess, ate lunch, and resumed playing with toys.

I love all the pictures of Audrey’s first Christmas! I can’t believe how big she is getting. She loves pulling up on furniture and getting into things. She tries to follow older siblings around, loves the cat, and tries to get into the cat food a lot. UGH! I have never figured out why babies want to get into the cat food. To my relief though, neither Audrey nor the cat has bothered the Christmas tree too much. Audrey had fun opening presents and chewing on paper and boxes. She likes a couple of her toys and plays with them in passing. HAHA!😉🥰

The weather has delayed our trip to Missouri to celebrate Christmas with other family, but we are looking forward to that this weekend. After all, there are twelve days of Christmas!

Love,

PK