Christmas 2012

Our first Christmas as a family of 3! My maternity leave has really worked out well for the holiday season. It's been wonderful being able to spend extended periods of time with our families. Ben was able to take of 2 weeks over the holidays. We're going to be in for a rude awakening come next year.

Our first meeting with Santa was a success! The Pilot Club in Starkville hosted a pancake breakfast with Santa that we attended. This was also Michael's first restaurant outing.

His gifts from us:

Christmas Eve Service- we've been to Sunday School once in Southaven, but this was his first "big church" experience. He lost it right at the beginning, but I was able to get him asleep and we were able to rejoin the service. By the way, he's wearing the outfit he came home from the hospital in. It's huge on him now, maybe he'll fit into it by 6 months.

We celebrated with the Cayson's for our annual ornament exchange. Ben's aunt Jeanne and cousin Aaron

Took a family photo in front of the tree:

Christmas morning in Starkville. The stocking belonged to Ben when he was an infant. The Cayson's were way too generous! We all are very blessed to have such wonderful families

We went to the cabin for Christmas after we had breakfast with the Cayson's. Nonna was insistent on getting a picture of all the kids and grandchildren. Thank goodness! We are terrible about documenting events. We celebrated Christmas with a 4th of July themed dinner this year. Several years ago, we quit having the traditional turkey dinner. After eating it at Thanksgiving, we were all over it and have been doing a different themed dinner ever since. It was storming terribly, but we had hotdogs and hamburgers, deviled eggs, chips, lemonade, and blueberry cobbler and ice cream. It was quite possibly the easiest dinner we've done!

Ben's Aunt Jeanne made this outfit for Michael out of an old sweater of Mike's (Ben's dad).

And this outfit was Ben's at his first Christmas. Keep in mind Ben was 7 months old...

We had a wonderful, wonderful Christmas. I didn't get any pics to document our NYE, but it was very uneventful. Ben was asleep resting up for a deer hunt the next morning. Michael and I rang in the new year drinking a bottle of milk and eating a big bowl of rice cereal!

I'm not even going to make a statement about how I will try and keep up with this blog better..what's the point?!?! Hope to get back to it soon!