More Than Enough: Christmas 2008 & Happy 2009!

What a whirlwind the last 2 weeks have been! First, J's 4th birthday, followed by five Christmas celebrations, L's very 1st Christmas, and finally New Year's! I finally downloaded my pictures from Christmas, and only am posting a small, small sample, but still, this is a going to be a long post... (and yes, my three boys all have matching plaid shirts on in the above picture - isn't it cute?)

The most important thing is that we had a lovely Christmas week. We began with my family in that big city down south. We had our big family tree at my Grandma's house on the 23rd, followed by an early visit from Santa at Ghee and Papa's house on the morning of the 24th.

Here are the boys at Grandma M's house before dinner -

One of the "smash" hits of the night - he actually rode all the way to Dallas the day after Christmas wearing these!

Christmas morning at Grammy & Papa's house. Cousin S is getting to be quite good with Baby L. If only she lived down the street. :)

I had to put one picture of L opening a gift in here. I have dozens, but this one is special. This is a "vintage" toy. I was given one of these toy apples - which I lovingly called my "Bapple" - for my 1st Christmas. My mom realized it was a timeless toy after seeing both her granddaughters play with my bapple anytime they visited. So she made it a mission to get one for each of her grandchildren (which she did thanks to the invention of Ebay) and L was given his bapple for Christmas this year. It makes the softest, sweetest chiming sound when you move it around and he LOVES it!

We were on the road back to our house early on the 24th. After eating the traditional McD Christmas Eve spaghetti cooked by the hubby, it was off to bed with the boys. This year, it took a bit longer for J to unwind and fall asleep as he kept "hearing" the reindeer outside. After watching Santa on the NORAD radar online and showing J that Santa was just making it into the Eastern part of the U.S., he finally declared he needed to go to bed or else Santa wouldn't bring him any presents. Apparently, all of that wore him out as he was still asleep at 8:30 a.m. on Christmas morning. In fact, Mommy & L were still asleep then too. Daddy woke us all up. So much for the kids being more excited than parents about Santa's visit!

Once we were all awake, both boys had fun opening gifts from Santa. Before tearing in, we actually got a really good picture of us using our tripod. We think the boys thought it was funny that the light on the camera was flashing (the timer) and Mommy & Daddy were counting down with the flash in silly voices. Regardless, we couldn't have asked for a better Christmas morning picture.

And here is L in his Santa Baby outfit. It was too warm on Christmas Day for him to wear it for long, but dang he looked cute in it!

That evening, we continued a Christmas tradition with our best buddies, the Bird's. We had "Christmas in Germany" which CB blogged here. It was SO much fun - good fun, good friends and good drinks. What more can you ask for? We are super excited about Christmas 2009 - our theme is more local in flavor and will be a blast to plan for! (Ummm, and for some reason, we have no pictures from that evening...CB, we must have been tired of the camera at this point huh?)

Finally, for our fifth Christmas celebration, we headed to Big D to Nana & Papa D's house. Despite a long trip up the day after Christmas due to traffic, both J & L did fantastic in the car and were real troopers. It was such a treat because JMcD's sister, her hubby and their 10 month old twins were all able to be there. And quite a difference as we went from one boy to FOUR boys on the McD side of the family since last Christmas. Aren't they all just too cute for words?