Lil' Dean Fam

On Christmas Day, 2011 around noon, we packed up and headed over to Grandma's house.  The highlight of my visit was talking with my little brother, the Missionary, on Skype.  Hanging up this time was definitely more difficult than last year when we had only seen him about a month earlier.  He seems to be doing really well and is quite enjoying his current home-share arrangement.  We spoke with the family briefly as well and they do seem like very nice people.  After we visited with Justin for a while, we headed downstairs to exchange gifts.    We got lots of clothes!  I love getting new clothes for Christmas, so does Colin.  The boys ate lots of sweets. And the highlight of their day was this Jeep cruiser from Grandpa Ed and Grandma Veva.  They were really excited about giving this fun toy to my kids.  We haven't had lots of time to play in it yet because it's been... Winter. But I'm sure that thi...

We had an amazing Christmas this year.  The kids are so fun on Christmas. They try so hard to be well behaved.  Most days they did pretty well.  Our house didn't have an elf on the shelf but we did have an elf named George who came to put a piece of candy in the shoes of any boys who had been well behaved the night before.  It was pretty motivating for the boys to remember that the elf was coming to visit.    On Christmas Eve we took the boys to see the Adventures of Tin Tin which was a pretty good movie.  Then we came home and got to see Stuart, Brooke, Ocean, and Maple do their Christmas morning for a little while.  They live in Singapore so they're a day ahead of us.  Then we called Nana and Grandpa Bruce and chatted with them for a little while.  Afterward we read the Christmas Story out of our family Bible.  Then I had the boys search for a present marked with a star under the tree.  They were allowed to open those gifts ...

Ryan, Evan and I met up with our friends Amy, Jackson, and Kara at Gardner Village to search for all of the Christmas elves.  We had a fun time looking at all of the cute elves and the different things they were doing throughout the village.  Ryan did a really good job reading the clues and writing down the locations on the Elf hunt page.  The boys got a free candy stick at the sweet shop so they were, of course, excited about that!   All of our cute kids: Ryan, Evan, Kara and Jackson

Mom, Jess and I decided to make candy without the kids this year.  Tee Hee.  We know we should include them in our family traditions but they're still so young and will have many years of candy making to come.  This year we made caramels, peanut butter cups, peppermint bark (shaped like beautiful little snowflakes), and butterscotch haystacks.  

 When Santa and Mrs. Claus arrived at the ward Christmas party, Ryan and Evan were the first to jump on their laps.  Sorry if they cut in front of anyone! Ryan wasn't too convinced as to the authenticity of this Santa but Evan was pretty excited.  I thought they were a cute couple!