Oh There's No Place Like Home For The Holidays

This year we were actually home for the holidays! Well, most of it anyways. We got back from Europe on December 15th leaving us only a week and a half to get all Christmas shopping, decorating, etc. done. After a few days of recovering from jet lag, I was back to my less zombie self and did what I could to get it all done. First up, a Christmas tree!

We were planning on getting a nice, big real tree this year since we have space to put it but seeing as we would have only had it for 10 days, it didn't seem like it would be worth the money. So through a series of events, I was able to recover our old rinky dink BYU apartment Christmas tree that I had donated to a friends garage sell. This beauty didn't sell so I was more than happy to at least have something up for Ethan to have fun decorating and redecorating, and that he did!

Somehow this smarty pants knew that there was suppose to be a star at the top of the tree and reminded me of it about every 5 min that day, so we had to make a quick run to Wal-mart to get him his star. It was cute that it was so important to him..

We also had fun decorating Christmas cookies! Ethan somehow just couldn't manage to get very much icing on the cookies at first.. hmm...I wonder why...
And for those of you who know me and how healthy I like my kid to eat, it took great will power on my part to allow him to eat pure frosting! He was in heaven and talked about it for at least 2 days after! I guess it was the holidays, right???

This was the first time in 4 years that all 8 of the Smith kids were together at the same time. I'm pretty sure they loved every minute of being all together again!
Christmas Eve- We read from Luke 2, had a mini family talent show, opened up one gift each and ate way too many sweets!
Caryn & Nate singing a hymn for their talent

The boys singing and playing the guitar. Even Ethan had to show off his amazing ukulele skills

Chanda singing "Peace, Peace, Peace." What a beautiful soprano voice this girl has!

Christmas Day!

We all woke up late from a late night before. We had set up this train set from Ethan's great Grandma & Grandpa Sims the night before so it was the first thing Ethan saw when he went to see that Santa brought him. He LOVED it and had pretty much no interest in opening up any other presents. It took a lot of bribing by us to get him to :)

This toy was a hit and he still continues to play with it constantly!

Christmas morning at the Smith home- we were all spoiled by Grandma & Grandpa Smith and the kids! Thanks you guys for making our Christmas so great!

Justin and I weren't going to get each other anything expensive due to a lack of funds from all our traveling. I held up my end of the bargain, but Justin, not so much. He bought me a beautiful leather bench for our entryway and some yummy smelling perfume! I loved them! I fixed his old watch by putting a new battery in it. Lame. I know. But I surprised him by digitizing all his mission pictures (since he served before digital cameras came out) and will eventually make an imovie out of them. He loved it :)

Playing on the new trampoline that the kids got for Christmas

On the 28th, we attended Barrett's homecoming talk ,(Justin brother who served in Budapest, Hungary), and then the next day we left for a mini family reunion in Indio, California. You didn't actually think we would stay in one place for more than a week did you?! Of course not!
We had fun playing together at the Worlmark Resort there...
We played basketball...

Ethan found the video arcade... and thank goodness he is content to play with it without having to put money in!

We played at the park...



Played some tennis....

Justin and I were quite the dynamite duo :) Undefeated!

And played a fun, what must be a AZ middle school game, called "Poison"

After a few days in Cali, we headed back to AZ. Once Chanda & Davin left back up to BYU and the guys went back to work, the holiday hustle and bustle settled down. We are home, well Ethan and I, until the end of January and are enjoying the time we have to just relax at home together. What do we do with all the free time we now have you ask??

Well, we ride Ethan's cool, new bike to the park that Santa brought him for Christmas..... (Note- this bike is really only cool because I bought it for $5 brand new at a garage sell!)

And we have fun jumping off things we probably shouldn't at the parks.....
But it makes for fun pictures right?!

We play with Daddy as much as we can....


And we love to be goofy and have fun while eating lunch together!

We are SOOOOO happy to be home but had a wonderful Christmas being with family. We look forward to next year with a new little girl to spoil and my mom and dad joining us out here!