I hope you all are ready for an onslaught of pictures, because I took a ton in the last week! We’re going to start today with pictures from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and then I’ll catch you up on the other fun things we did in the last week.

Christmas Eve

Let me tell you a fun little tale… 10 days before Christmas Eve our kitchen sink backed up. While the sink would drain, it would take a solid 20-30 minutes, which was frustrating to say the least. But wait, it gets better!

After trying baking soda and vinegar and some draino type stuff, we turned to plunging the kitchen sink. You and your spouse haven’t truly lived until you’ve plunged a sink together. Picture it – Nick kneeling on a chair plunging one side of the double side sink, while I had my arm in the other sink, holding the drain stop in. Good times!

So long story short – we plunged and saw an old, dirty, falling apart leaf. Huh. That can’t be good. We dumped more chemicals down the drain and it now at least didn’t fill up immediately. More plunging, more drain cleaner, more plunging and more drain cleaner. Then the sink started taking closer to 2 hours to drain.

Fast forward to Christmas Eve day when my dad and Nick decided to really get to the bottom of things. What then ensued was a river of black, smelly sludge rushing from a pipe in the basement and racing towards the floor drain 12 feet away. Now we’re all envisioning back hoes in the back yard and jack hammering the basement floor. AHH!

I’m not gonna lie. I stood in the basement and cried, while simultaneously trying to not throw up from the stench.

Amazingly enough the plumber did not have a holiday weekend surcharge AND was just finishing up a job blocks away from our house. Hallelujah! He came over, snaked the drain more thoroughly than my dad and Nick could, put in a better fitting plug in the pipe in the basement and was on his way.

Crisis over! Time to decorate (and eat) mass quantities of gingerbread cookies!

Death by pink sugar!

Jackson wasn’t decorating candy canes – he informed us he was decorating J’s.

I was very impressed with how long the boys stuck with the decorating! Last time we tried (2 years ago) they just wanted to eat frosting by the spoonful.

After the boys were dressed for bed, we remembered to put out the reindeer food (bird seed and glitter)! Don’t you love my boys’ stylish bedtime apparel? 😉

Then Nick raced home from church, where he’d been working in the nursery for a couple of Christmas Eve services, and my parents, sister, brother-in-law and I raced back to attend the 9pm service. There is nothing like being a candlelight service with 3,000+ other people! Amazing! (This was a cell phone shot, by the way.)

Christmas Day

(ETA @ 9:30am – Ty woke up at 2:15 and again at 4:30am to ask if it was time to go into the living room. Both times, Nick sent him back to bed. Crazy kid! Then, when his brothers woke up at 7am, Ty didn’t budge and had to be woken up at 7:20 finally.)

 

You should have seen the looks on the boys’ faces when they saw Santa had taken bites of the cookies they left out!

I just loved watching the excitement over the simple little things in their stockings!

Even Cuties (clementines) are exciting!

Learning how to use a pencil sharpener (that’s my dad sitting there – he and my mom came from Maine, for Christmas!).

Listening to the Christmas story and a new Christmas book in a high-tech way.

Doesn’t she look excited? She looked pretty much shell shocked all day – it was rather funny!

Laura and Mason were pet-sitting a dog and brought Lucy with them. Lily was awfully curious about this little thing running around the house!

Opening the first gift of the morning!

The magician outfit Nick and I came up with for Ty!

I like this gift!

Boy, oh boy, did we get lucky with this one! Jackson was very specific all month that he wanted the Hot Wheels track that sticks to the wall. Problem was, I didn’t realize it would be a “hot” gift and hard to find! When Nick and I shopped the week before Christmas, the stores were out and we settled for regular Hot Wheels tracks. On the night of the 22nd, I was in a different store and they had one of the wall track sets left! Score! I snagged it and we’ll return the other one later this week.

My parents gave the boys’ Mario Kart and wheels for each of them. HUGE hit, and not just with the boys!

Christmas isn’t complete without some toy assembly, right?

It’s also not complete without Egg Nog! Right, Chase?

And while the boys flat out refused to do a picture in front of the tree, this pretty little thing let me shoot away!