Live Oak Canyon

 

We sure love Christmas time at our family. I never realized how stressful Christmas time was as a mom! 

Everything that moms do so kids can have a special and magical time goes unnoticed and it makes me grateful for everything my mom did to make it special. 

I remember our thing was that Santa would hide our presents and we had to go find them in the morning. 

Now we get to do our own traditions with our kids. We used to do all of the presents Christmas eve and only Santa's presents Christmas morning. But now we do only a couple of presents Christmas even.

We let the kids open one present at a time so that everything doesn't just get opened in one minute and they get to enjoy every toy. 

Here we are making cookies for Santa. 

This year, since Marcia and Doug are home, we go to hang out with them. They had some presents for the kids from them and also from Matt and Taylor. Each year, since there are so many siblings, we give gifts to one other sibling and this year Matt got the to gift to our family. 

The kids all loved their presents and Annie enjoyed playing with the wrapping paper and trash, haha! 

Then Doug did a devotional and we had a scavenger hunt around their house where the kids looked for different nativities around the house. 

I love when Lilah draws! 

These two play so well together. 

Lilah fell asleep in the bathtub, haha! She is her father's daughter! 

David loves to go to the "tricks" park. 

He is getting really good at going up and down the ramps as a 4 year old. 

David helping Annie put on her shoes. 

I love going on adventures as a family. 

The Live Oak Canyon always puts on a cute carnival with lots of photo ops. 

We were barely able to go on the train because it was going to start raining and we got to see Santa Claus. 

On the train ride

Most of the workers were pretty strict about not letting my kids on the rides since they were not tall enough, but the guy running a little roller coaster actually let them in and they had the time of their lives going on the coaster over and over again. They had such a great time and they thought they were the coolest because they got to get on with the big kids. I can still see their big smiles as they went around in circles putting their hands up in the air. It was a fun memory!