Christmas

December was a crazy busy month for us.  We didn't even get Christmas cards sent out!  I was planning the ward Christmas party for the first week of December and then teaching preschool for the next two weeks before Christmas.  I didn't even have time to take any pictures, let alone post those pictures to the blog.  Oh well.  We did have a great Christmas visiting family in Utah, though.  Here's a few pictures to recap the season.

We opened presents together as a family before we left for Utah.  Paige and Lucas were pretty excited!

Lucas's favorite present was probably this Chewbacca angry bird stuffed animal.

He also really liked his Jake Legos.

He was really getting into the present opening and was tearing into the wrapping paper like a crazy man.  It was pretty funny.  Paige got pretty good at opening presents too.

We made the drive out to Utah in one day, 10.5 hours including stops.  It was our best time yet!  Both Lucas and Paige did REALLY well.  Lucas has been having a hard time with electronics and TV lately, so we did the drive with no electronics.  I was really worried about it, but he was totally fine and he was the best behaved he has ever been on a trip.

The first thing Lucas did when we got to Utah was make a snowball.  It was night time so that's all we had time for but first thing the next morning he dragged us all outside to make a snowman.

We went out and played in the snow every chance we got.  Lucas was in heaven.

Here's Paige in all of Lucas's old winter stuff from when he was a baby.

She thought the snow was pretty fun.

We played with Ava, PJ, and Rose.

They had a snowball fight.

And built more snowmen.

All of these kids are not normally from cold places, so none of them had proper snow attire.  It was actually kinda nice because this made it so they couldn't stay out for more than 15 minutes at a time, so the parents didn't have to stay out for that long.  The snow is pretty but it sure is cold!

We had a little get together with my parents, Sarah, Nate, Olivia, Joseph, and Uncle Mark on Christmas Eve morning.  We had omelets, cinnamon rolls, and hot chocolate, and opened Christmas presents.  Lucas and Paige are wearing matching Christmas jammies.

I love Paige's face in this picture.  She is super excited about her new quilt.

And here's Paige practicing on my sister's fitness pole.  She looked like she knew what she was doing.

On Christmas Eve evening we got together with all of Ryan's family for dinner.  We had these awesome crackers to pull and get goodies out of.

Our kids were the first up on Christmas morning, and every other morning.  Here's Lucas playing with his Angry Birds Star Wars Death Star game.  He was SO excited to finally get it.

One of the days we were in Utah we went to the Natural History Museum up by the University of Utah.  It was really a cool museum and we had a fun time while we were there.  The favorite part for the kids was this Earthquake exhibit with a seismometer in the ground to record the magnitude of the kids jumping on it.

Here's an action shot of Lucas.

He got pretty good at it.  Paige liked jumping on it too, even though her feet never really left the ground.

And of course no museum would be complete without a water table for kids to play in sand and water and get super messy.

We also went to see the lights at Temple Square and out to dinner after at Crown Burger, the George family tradition.  We came right after the museum and forgot to bring all our hats and gloves and stuff with us, so we were a little chilly, but it was still beautiful.

The drive back home to California went almost as smoothly as the drive out to Utah.  The kids were a little more restless since it had only been a week since they'd been cooped up in the car, but we made it back in one piece.

Since we were so busy earlier in the month of December we hadn't had time to make our gingerbread house, so we made it the day after we got back.  Lucas loved eating all the candy while we were decorating it.

We had a pretty great Christmas week spending time with so many of our family and friends.  We hope you had a great Christmas too!