Yearly Photos

During our Christmas break I took the opportunity to have our yearly photo shoot.  We had a lot of squinty eyes this year.

I love Henry coaching Lydia in this picture.

They were really struggling!

Here are some of my favorites...

William:

James:

Alexander:

Henry:

(and this classic Henry face)

Lydia:

(someone was behind me trying to get Lydia to smile... so she decided to imitate them.  Not exactly the look I was going for)

It's hard to get a good group shot with 5 kids but Rich got them to smile!  He did something really funny...

And then we got the shot!

Afterwards we played a little football at the park...

New Year's Eve

We resurrected our New Year's Eve fondue tradition.  For dinner we had pizza fondue and chocolate fondue for dessert.  It was delicious!

The boys were adventurous in their eating too...

We played games throughout the night.

We did some fireworks before we sent the younger three to bed.

William and James stayed up til midnight playing Dominion and watching Napoleon Dynamite.

Christmas Break Fun

Christmas break is one of my favorite times of year.  I love all the extra time I get to spend with my kids. We had a great time playing with new games.

We used some Christmas money to take the family to Gravady one morning.  We had a blast!

James is always fearless and loves to do awesome flips.

All the boys loved the obstacle courses.

Even Lydia had a great time!  I wish we could have a room like this at home!

We used some other Christmas money toward a pass to the new aquarium.  So we spent another day checking it out.  There were so many cool animals to see and it was very hands-on.

Our favorite part was the birds!  It was so much fun for them to land all over us.

Christmas!!

The night of Christmas Eve we had our traditional dinner.

We then read the nativity story from the Bible and re-enacted it.  (James: wiseman, Alex: shepherd, William: angel, Henry: Joseph, Lydia: Mary)

Afterwards, the boys played a game while we put Lydia to bed.

Santa came!

Everyone was so excited on Christmas morning!

We opened all our gifts and then got ready for church.

What a super good looking bunch of kids!

After church we enjoyed time together as a family and had fun with our gifts.