Twas the night before Christmas Eve....
....and we were in Evansville with Fonner family!
The kiddos had a grand old time playing in Grams' basement (oh, how I wish I had a basement!!).
Lily is absolutely in love with this baby. She talks so sweet to her and gives her lots of kisses. Until she cries and then Lily's positive that the baby wants her Mommy.
Grams bought them Big Wheels to ride around which they all thought was great fun! Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of that and will have to steal them from Jenny at another time.
Christmas Eve morn, all the kiddos were dressed up in their matching Christmas PJs.
Getting a photo of them all together at the same time is like catching a unicorn and riding it over a rainbow to collect a pot of gold.
My beautiful girl.
Tyler loves to push buttons (not just my virtual ones, but real one too). He turned the TV off and on no less than 47 times while we were at Grams house.
A pic with both my kiddos.....Tyler wasn't in to it.
Poor Tyler.... he's got pink eye. Yep. It's cause we're on vacation.
Jason opening presents. He's like having a 6 year old around every Christmas!
Lily was Grams' helper, passing out the presents.
Doc McStuffins gift #1 of 13
Poor Tyler's eyes..... he looks so pitiful. But he was in a happy mood despite what these pictures say!
Kisses for Grams!
This might be the only picture of all the grandbabies in one shot.
The kiddos were having a grand old time with this dry erase board of Ayden's.
We took a family picture but I guess that was on Jenny's camera too. Blogger fail.
When it was time to pack up and head back home on Christmas Eve night, Lily went in to full on tantrum mode. She pulled out all the stops. Hitting, screaming, kicking, spitting. You name it. The spawn of the devil (can I say that given that it was Christmas Eve???).
It took both Joel and I to hold her down to get her PJs on her before we left. 45 minutes later, we were finally heading out the door. Lily's still crying. I'm crying. Tyler's crying. It's awesome.
The moral of this story: near 3 year olds need naps.
Tyler was passed out before we got out of Mom's neighborhood and Lily was cashed out before we got to the interstate. Whew. Peace and quiet for 3 hours.
Then we got home and put the kiddos to bed. Tyler went right down. No fight. Poor baby was so tired and not feeling too great. Lily put up a few feeble protests but she did finally cave in.
Joel and I set to work on Mission Santa Claus.
The doll house (temporarily repurposed as a book shelf) was built by my Daddy for me and my sisters. Before any of us had kids, I proposed that whoever had the first girl would get the doll house. What a good proposal I had!
The kiddos slept in pretty late on Christmas day. Finally around 8:00 we heard Tyler stirring around and fussing so we got the babes up.
Lily (upon seeing the doll house): There's a house in our house!!
Lily found a present with an "L" on it and she wanted to open it.
But we told her that she needed to find one with a "T" for Tyler first.
So then she went ahead and passed out all the presents from under the tree before she started opening.
Meanwhile, Tyler's checking out that house that's in our house!
And finally everything was passed out and the opening could commence!
Doc McStuffin's present #7 of 13
Lily tore through all of hers pretty fast. Especially once she heard enough times that she couldn't open any of the packages until after all the presents were open and the trash was thrown away so we didn't lose any pieces to anything.
But Tyler was on like present #3 of 12 and not moving fast enough for Lily. We had to keep telling her not to open Tyler's stuff but eventually gave up and let her open some after a while. Tyler was losing interest and playing with paper. Pretty typical!
Joel was up first that morning and built a really nice fire. It was really going and putting a lot of nice warmth in to the room.
After we opened presents, we ate breakfast. Bacon, sausage, eggs, biscuits. Yum. After that, we took baths. And then after that, we realized we hadn't gotten around to opening the stockings yet.
I take one step toward the fire place and said,
OH. NO. BABE! The stockings! The fireplace!! The heat!!! The CHOCOLATE!!!
All of our stockings were full of candy. Now, full of melted chocolate. Luckily, nothing leaked out of it's wrapper so the stockings weren't ruined, but I was SO P*SSED. Uhhgg.
After all that drama, the kiddos took naps (no repeat of Christmas Eve if I can help it!).
Then we headed to Josh and Marie's for Basham family Christmas.
The kiddos played and played and played.
Tyler even warmed up to his Uncle Josh's beard!
