Merry Christmas!

Christmas festivities started on the eve of Christmas Eve this year!  Thanks to all the grandparents for watching babies this night so the big kids could enjoy a dinner out together.  

We had a very nice Christmas Eve at Grandma Cherie and Grandpa Wayne's house.  As is tradition, we had an early dinner, then went to church for the Christmas Eve service, before returning back to the house for presents!  

Arjen and Gus have been attending Sunday School this fall/winter.  The Christmas Eve service at church is a children's service, with all of the Sunday School kids singing songs and reciting parts of the story of Jesus.  I wish I could have video taped the whole thing, but this picture will have to do.  They did great, and each time they were up there I was wiping back tears of pride in my boys.  Then Gus started to give me tears of laughter as he turned into that kid.  The one, the only one, who was making faces, sitting down when everyone is supposed to be standing, turning around, walking up to the microphone, you name it.  It was too funny.  I felt bad for the Sunday School teacher who was trying to keep them all in line!  

Family photo op - Christmas Eve 2015

Somehow this is the only pic I have of kids opening gifts…trust me, it was a lot more exciting than this picture seems to depict! 

Grandma Cherie gave "Elf on the Shelf" jammies to all the grandkids this year.  We missed Alex for this pic since the poor guy was sick on Christmas.  :(

You can see the elves a little better in this one...

Christmas morning, as always, came very quickly with Arjen being the first to wake us up and announce that there were presents under the tree!  He was extremely patient, waiting at least a half hour before Gus - and ultimately everyone else - was awake.  We had to work on patience a bit this year, and taking turns with gift opening, but all three boys seemed to have quite the Christmas spirit.

Gus was working on reading who his gifts were from!

Aotis had no trouble figuring out what to do with the goodies he found in a box of musical toys he got

 The rest of Christmas Day was spent mostly in our jammies, playing with all the fun new toys and games, napping, then heading over to Grandma and Grandpa's for dinner…still in our jammies!  This guy decided he'd had enough, before he even finished his dinner!

Wrapping up our Christmas adventures, was the Treptow family gathering the Sunday after.  We finally had all six grandkids together, so we snapped a few more Elf jammie photos.  Oh the spectacle we were in the back of the restaurant trying to get six kids smiling and looking at the camera together!