It's Christmas!

*Update* I wrote this before we left for Cincinnati, and it seems a shame not to post it. I forgot in the flurry of Christmas to actually post it! More pictures and stories from Christmas to come.

It's officially Christmas. We got a foot of snow today, "Santa" came to the house last Friday night, and we've been up to our eyeballs in Christmas cookies. And the best is yet to come! We're leaving tomorrow afternoon for a week in Cincinnati (No, Mommy, I'm not going to Cincinnati, I'm going to Nonnie and Pawpaw's says Frankie). And my final project is done. I am done with my class. Oh, that feels good. Now I can play all day with my children.

Some Christmas happenings:
Daddy and Frankie work on a gingerbread house together:


Frankie tells us all about making her Gingerbread house in this video and I give a short tour of our Christmas decorations (short because there really aren't that many).

Frankie lined up all those red hots. Um, yeah, that's my 2-year-old (Hmm, my 1 year old is noticeably absent from this activity...)

There's my 1 year old! In the house's favorite boy pjs.

We had a house Christmas Saturday morning, so we could give the kids some gifts and exchange gifts with Rachel and Rebecca. We put out cookies and milk for Santa, and he came! And ate most of the cookies, but left 2 for Frankie and Dex.

And stuffed the stockings (one item in Frankie's stockings was a new pack of Tinkerbell underwear. She calls them her jingle bell underwear)

A Merry Christmas Greeting from Frances:

Chris picked out this awesome new Elmo cell phone for Dex. It has a USB2 connection and we downloaded his name to the phone, so Elmo says things like "Oh, Dexter, it's you calling!"


A new Tinkerbell costume! (Oddly enough, she actually calls this her Tinkerbell costume...)


This toy is awesome for Dex - it has lots of buttons that make noise. And one of the songs goes "I am your robot friend, I'm here to help you." It's pretty sweet. And doesn't get stuck in your head at all.

Tinkerbell!

This adorable owl hat was from Rebecca. He kept it on for about 3 minutes for us to take pictures. It was really thoughtful of him.

A set of Disney book with a read-aloud CD from Rachel. Definitely a new favorite

Pancake breakfast!


Um, yeah, I love Christmas. Duh.

So several batches of cookies were made at the house this past week that got this type of sign on them:

Poor Chris. Rachel finally came home with a cookies platter he could eat: