Christmas, Christmas, and Christmas.

We arrived back at home Thursday afternoon from a wonderful week in TX with Andrew's family.   Getting back into the swing of bedtime routines has not been fun and Ellie seems to have caught yet another cold, but we are happy to be home.  Andrew is off from school for the next 2 weeks and although he hoping to finalize his job plans, he is, for the most part, home.  With the extra help around the house this week, I have a long list of to-dos and Pinterest projects that I'm going to try my hardest to complete.  Like pretty much everything does these days, Christmas came and went SO fast.

Christmas Eve was again spent with my parents, but this year, my brother brought his girlfriend along.  She is a nice addition to our family and seemed to enjoy our traditional Chinese food dinner.

We then headed back to my parent's house to open up pajamas from Rufus.  It's so crazy to see the comparison of these images from last year. 

Adalyn could not wait for the morning at Mimi and Grandpa's.

We were lucky enough to be treated to another snowy Christmas Eve, so Andrew and I prepped for Santa's arrival and enjoyed our tree by the fire. 

The first moments of Christmas morning went like this:

I read them Santa's letter...

And showed them how he ate some of our cookies.

We set my camera up with a timer for a quick family picture.

Andrew was pretty happy that Santa brought him the Xbox One.  I let Santa know how much Andrew wanted it, and after seeing that we could stream our Amazon Prime and Netflix down to the basement TV, I was pretty excited too. 

I had lost my 2-tone watch about a month before Christmas so was excited to see that Santa remembered me too!

Adalyn and I got new matching running shoes. :)

The girl's got new backpacks.

And other things...

And then it was off to my parent's for even MORE!

People should no longer be surprised to get framed portraits from me.  ;)

There was a tea party.

And since my studio was right upstairs, I attempted some photos of the girls.  Best I got::

I'm going to leave you without an explanation for what that is.  But it really did taste great!

Despite a delayed flight which didn't end up leaving JFK until 10pm EST and put us at Andrew's mom's house at 3:30am Central Time (ahhh!!) the ride down to Texas wasn't too uneventful.

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There was lots of time spent with family.  And lots more presents.  ;)

Andrew's dad and stepmom have floor season tickets to the Spurs, and gave us tickets one night!  It was SO much fun and we were spoiled by the free food and drinks.  

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All 6 of the grandkids.

We ended our trip with a dip in their heated swimming pool on New Year's Day.  Adalyn was all about jumping in, and it's safe to say that some real swim lessons are in order!!

The flight back was much more difficult, as the girls had been up since 3:30am.  Usually after a flight, people compliment us on how wonderful they were…well, not this one.  We got stares and eyes rolling, and sighs of relief once the plane was on the ground.  haha

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