Christmas, Anniversary, New Year's!!!

The Saturday before Christmas we drove down to Danville to meet up with Grandma and exchange family presents. It's a small town exactly halfway between us, and just happens to have an awesome Science Center built from an historic train station.

I don't know if it was because of the time of year or because it's a really small town, but we had practically the whole place to ourselves. We all had fun building, playing, learning, and running around. We'll definitely take a trip back someday, hopefully when their butterfly garden is open.

Then we had a wonderful Christmas at home!
We enjoyed decking the halls, lots of Christmas music, movies and books, baking cookies, a trip to the D.C. Temple lights, new ornaments, reading Luke 2, and 2 hopefully new traditions:
-We had the missionaries over for a big ham dinner on Christmas Eve. It was a great way to invite the Spirit and focus on the real meaning of Christmas right when we're usually feeling greedy.
-We got "caught" on only the second day of doing the 12 days of Christmas for our sweet neighbors, but it was fun to try and be sneaky anyway.

ANNIVERSARY

Paul had to work on our anniversary (his assistant left for another job just before Thanksgiving, so Paul's had a busy holiday season - thanks buddy!) so we all went out to dinner the night before. Then the day of, I brought the kids to the women's basketball game and we got to be with daddy in a suite. It was a fun day, and we came up with this fun countdown:

8 years

7 homes

6 moves

5 vacations

4 job promotions

3 beautiful children

2 people so in love

1 eternal family

NEW YEAR'S

We welcomed 2015 three hours early this year. Netflix had an animated kid's countdown so we let Jenna and Liam stay up "late", partied in the fake new year, and put them to bed.

Then Paul and I played a new game we got for Christmas, and rang in the actual new year with sparkling juice and kisses with certain little baby that never sleeps!

I have tons of goals for the year, most of which can be accomplished simply by getting on a schedule. After having nothing resembling a schedule since Gavin was born, I'm super excited to make good use of the command center binder my sister-in-law made us for Christmas!

And we decided our family motto for the year is the primary song "Saturday is a Special Day". We want to make sure to use our Saturdays to prep ourselves and our lessons so that our Sundays can be relaxed and focused on our family and our Savior. Obviously we try to bring the Spirit into our home every day, but we felt like we especially want to focus this year on making our Sunday mornings less hurried and stressful.

Here's to an amazing 2015!