Christmas!

We had a really wonderful Christmas this year. It wasn't, however, what we had planned! All of the Sewell's and Grosse's were going to gather in Bloomington to celebrate with Mike, Kristina and Ethan, but our girls both came down with colds. Since Kristina is on chemo, we decided we'd better stay home. The trouble was that we had already sent most of our gifts to Springfield with Dan and Marnie! We did have our stocking stuffers, so we just waited for the rest of our gifts. That probably worked out better for the girls...they didn't get so tired of opening gifts! We ran to the store for food for Christmas day and we were all set.

I'm discovering that when you have kids, each Christmas gets more exciting! This was Natalie's first Christmas and Analise's first Christmas to begin understanding what it is all about. Analise can now sing 3 verses of "Away in a Manger", asks me where baby Jesus is and where Mary and Jophus are, and informed me that Santa's sleigh was pulled by goats. I did say "BEGIN understanding"! We celebrated the 30 days of Advent as well as Christmas itself, which is a new tradition we are excited about.

Analise and I made chocolate-chip cookies for Santa.

We had a white Christmas!!
This was the best we could do for a Christmas Eve picture!

Christmas morning!


Not so sure about all of this Christmas stuff.


My first holiday meal!


Natalie got a little tired during the proceedings!
He, he!


On the 27th, Mom and Dad came to Philo and we celebrated again at Dan and Marnie's house.








We are way ready to play!
Analise's first snowman.
Yes, I'm aware that it looks a bit Asian. And mean. It was what we had to work with...
This was after she tried to eat the snowman's face. Hey, it's snow, right?!