Christmas Morning

This Christmas was a lot of group gifts. As in, all of the kids could play with all of the toys so it was hard deciding who got to open what. Everyone still got an individual gift or two, but most are to be enjoyed by all. Everyone was awake by 5 am.... After presents ate a bit of breakfast and moved the toys down stairs for more playing room, then I crashed on the couch (lets be honest, I don't do well with early mornings) and didn't wake up till after our church had started. :( We still maintained our Sabbath day observance and spent extra time pondering the true meaning of Christmas.

This is the best picture I got of Amelia or Miles. They (especially Miles) had a hard time holding still for a picture. They were much more interested in making their new toys do things.

Brodrick has recently learned the fun that is yelling "Cheese" at the camera when he sees it.

...opening presents...

Lovin' the bed head hair...

Playing with one of the Imaginext toys. Brodrick found this one on Christmas morning and still likes it the best out of all of the choices.

All in all we had a great Christmas. Tim and I didn't give gifts to each other, which was kind of nice. We didn't have to worry about buying/wrapping them for each other. Instead we decided to give the money that we would have spent on each other to families who are trying to raise money for their adoptions. I know many families who are ready and able to open their homes to children in need of families and the only thing that stands in the way, is money. Sadly, we didn't get the idea via fellow blogger at scooping it up to not give gifts till we had already done all of the shopping for our children. I'm not gonna lie, but after reading how calm and bright scooping's family's Christmas was, I'm pretty sure I want to attempt doing something like that for our whole family's Christmas next year.

Our family has been so blessed and are so grateful that we could help directly bless the lives of others. We donated to this family- who is adopting two teens from eastern Europe. They are LDS and already have a large family so we knew they would be blessed by a monetary donation. The second family we donated to is adopting a little girl who has down syndrome from eastern Europe. You can see her button on the right had side bar. This is a military family so the father is gone a lot. They also have three boys almost the exact ages of our children which added all the more to the tugging of my heart strings. Our contributions were not too significant in the large picture, but I know that both families will benefit for our gifts.

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas!