Leftovers

I've got to get these pictures cleared off my camera, and, well, it's too late in my mind to blog separately about any of it. Lazy, you say? Whaddareyou gonna do about it?

Some kiddos at the Ward Christmas Party:
Tessa's first visit with Santa. He gave her a mini candy cane. It doesn't take much to win her over.
(One thing I do remember about this night is that there were orange slices on the dessert table. Tessa would walk up and get one at a time, eat it, and then she would put the leftover peel on the closest dessert plate to her so she could go get another orange slice. These plates were often in the hands of the owners. These owners were often grossed out. Should I have taught her not to do this? Yes. But I didn't. I stayed in the shadows and laughed instead.)

We went to the Fort Worth Zoo:

The sibbies:

Listening to her play...

is one of my favorite things. This morning Tessa was playing with her Groovy Girls. I heard one say to the other, "Oh, are these your toes? I thought they were mine!" The other Groovy Girl responded with, "Noooo. These are MY toes!"
Poor Groovy Girl #1. So embarrassing. Can't say I've ever been in any mistaken toe situation, but I can imagine.

If you ever have difficult mommy days...

then you should read this.

I have a dream.

"...when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

-Martin Luther King, Jr.
read full text here

So, she tells me...

"I'm gonna go save him." Sweet.She's clearly got his best interest in mind, right?
Right?

Yum

Christmas 2009

Who takes only two pictures of their kids on Christmas morning? Me. There was a third, but it was fuzzy. Two. That's it. Boo.
But, to give myself a little credit, we did use the video camera for the first time in eons to get Tessa's reaction upon discovering what Santa brought her.

Santa brought both kids some wheels. And the Tiana dress? We'd been hearing about that thing for two solid months, so I'm glad Santa FINALLY brought it. Especially since the list of Tiana accessories was getting longer a few days before Christmas.

We had a laid back Christmas morning. It was really nice. We stretched the morning into 5 hours. Santa, breakfast, our presents to kids, playing with toys, web cam openings with grandparents, me snarfing down peppermint bark Dove dark chocolates, etc. You prepare for Christmas for so long, and I don't like that it seems to be over in 20 minutes on Christmas morning. So, this particular morning was perfect. So fun.
The night before, we had some friends over for Christmas Eve dinner. None of us had family around this year, so I'm grateful that they were okay coming over and playing family with us. One of the things we did was read about Christ's birth and act out the Nativity.
Aren't these two some of the cutest shepherds you've seen in a while? I love that they each brought their own sheep. Two in herd is plenty.

Since Cole was the baby who was awake, he took on the role of baby Jesus. He had a great time watching the kids. The three dads present agreed to be the wise men since we were short staffed.

Here is the angel checking out the manger scene and telling Joseph about how her back aches:

Actually, there were some very sweet moments of reverence in our short reading and reenactment -- another happy memory from this year.