Christmas Break

We had our annual fondue dinner

The cheese is so fun, but next year I'm going to try cheese sauce. With the kids so young, we had to dip their food for them or remind Variah not to put her dipping fork in her mouth.  I think that girl went through like 5 forks!

Opening our Christmas pajamas. 

We gave the kids their bath after dinner and forgot they hadn't opened their pajamas yet. Oops

In our new pajamas

Watching the animated Nativity video

Our fondue dessert

Our Christ tree all completed with the stories of Christ

Santa brought us come movies, a new book, card holders and the Wii

He even filled up the swimming pool with plastic balls down in the basement

He brought Variah a shirt, pants, boots, a bouncy cow, a puppy with food bowls and some books

Everett got a bouncy cow, books, toy cars and a sweatshirt

All the presents wrapped and ready to go

Christmas morning

Our Church was at 9:00 Christmas morning, so we played with Santa Claus presents, then got dressed in our Church clothes and headed to the 1 hour church

I sure love my little family

After church we opened presents. We opened up sibling gifts very first

My hair towel wrap from Daniel

Then we ate breakfast...or traditional french toast bake made with the french bread pieces we don't use up with the Christmas Eve fondue

This year we headed up to Farmington because Ciara and family were in town. The kids took a nice little nap on our way up

Socks from Larlie and Pop

Minion socks...Everett loves minions

Everett got a lawn mower from Larlie and Pop and he was more than excited

Variah got a purse, strawberry shortcake dolls and sequence junior. 

The group

We do a book exchange with cousins. Carsten gave Everett a Bubble Guppies Book

And a construction truck book. He was so happy to get both of them!

Variah got a My Little Ponies book from Trey. She loves my Little Ponies

All of my gifts

Daniel's gifts

All of Variah's gifts

All of Everett's gifts

The day after Christmas we just hung out at home reading books and playing with our new things

We taught Variah how to play go fish with the cards we gave to the family

Testing out her Rapunzel hair I made for her

Daniel took the kids to the park for some sledding

We used our free Zoo Lights tickets from the KSL Studio5 drop box. The kids hadn't been to the zoo before so they were excited to see animals AND Christmas lights

The first animals we saw were fish in an aquarium

We luckily got to see a tiger awake and looking around

The small rodent house was successful as well

We ended the night with a ride on the merry go round. Variah chose to ride on the Zebra cuz it is like a horse

It was a fun night out

We also decided to take the kids to their first movie in a theater! We saw the Disney movie Moana. Such a cute movie and I can't wait for it to come out on Blu Ray

I was so impressed with how well the kids did. I thought for sure we would be spending lots of time in the lobby with Everett, but both kids did a fabulous job and stayed on our row of 4 seats. 

Our Date box for December came in a box that we could color. I've been saving it so we could actually color in it and we finally did!

We had the Jeppsons over for our traditional New Years Eve BBQ dinner and dance party. We've had them over the past 3 years. It makes it nice that we can eat dinner and "party" by 8:00 so the kids aren't up super late but we still get to have fun!

Passing out the poof balls to throw in the air after the countdown. Another nice thing is we can watch the Netflix dance party and countdown multiple times-which the kiddos LOVE!

2016 was a good year for our family with lots of fun adventures. We're excited to welcome our newest family member in February 2017.