The Call Family

She had to be bribed with a trip to Maggie Moo’s for this.

Warning: This is a really long post, but contains really cute pictures!

Christmas Eve was spent at my Grandma and Grandpa Christiansen’s house. We enjoyed an assortment of wonderful food and a great Christmas program full of talent, Santa Claus, and of course a Nativity reenactment.

The program began with my dad reading the story of Percival Piggy. “Percival Piggy did something quite shocking, on Christmas he hung up a stretchable stocking…”.

The program continued with a talent show and the much anticipated visit from Santa!

Santa comes to our Christmas Eve party every year and brings gifts for each member of the family. When he pulled out Avery’s gift and called her name she got really nervous and started to cry. I ran to her rescue and helped her get her gift from Santa.

Avery’s favorite part of the program was the Nativity. She was chosen to be Mary this year and was so excited! Last year after watching the nativity portion of the program Avery pretended to be Mary for about 6 months, so this was her dream! My cousin Devin was the donkey and Avery got to ride on him.

I love this picture of Avery and my cousin Jason. They are sitting so quietly and watching everything that was happening.

After everything ended we drove to my parent’s house and unwrapped our Christmas pajamas. We quickly changed into them and hurried home to get everything ready for Santa to come!

I purchased stockings for our family this year with our names embroidered on them. This is Avery’s stocking full of treats and presents from Santa.

Avery asked Santa for a princess castle this year.

On Christmas morning Skyler and I had to wake Avery up to go see what Santa had brought her. She was not really sure what was going on. Skyler hurried down the stairs to capture Avery’s expression when she saw her castle. As you can see she was so excited!

Avery loved her castle so much that she didn’t even care about any of the other presents laid out for her under the tree. I was finally able to get her away from the castle for a few moments just to see what else she got.

The rest of the day was spent visiting relatives and opening presents. Avery got WAY too much stuff, but she loves it all!

We were invited to spend New Years at a friends cabin. This was actually the cabin that Skyler and I stayed at during our honeymoon so it was a lot of fun to go back there after 3 1/2 years. We had tons of fun relaxing and playing games with everyone.

Avery fell asleep in my arms and I was about to go lay her down when Kurt Ostler, the owner of the cabin, asked me if he could just snuggle with her. He loved it and she stayed asleep the whole time he held her.

Upstairs in the cabin there is a game area filled with a pool table, ping-pong table, basketball arcade game, electronic dart board, foosball table, and a few video game systems. Skyler’s favorite thing to do was play pool.

Skyler and I spent a long time making an Ariel doll for Avery out of little plastic circles that are ironed together.

When it was finally done Avery was so excited to play with it.

They had lots of fun art projects for Avery to do. She really enjoyed coloring and making pictures using foam stickers.

Avery and daddy loved playing ping-pong together. Avery was so excited to be involved in the big kid games.

We had a great Christmas and New Years. Thanks everyone for making it so much fun!