a post christmas post

"Good King Wenceslas looked out, on the Feast of Stephen."

...

We call it Boxing Day, but it is also the feast day of the first martyr of the Church and we have decided this should now be the theme song for this day.  I guess we should all learn the words.  Anyway, the day after Christmas is usually a little bitter sweet, but we manage to keep it awesome because that is just how we are.  The kids love taking some time to slow down and enjoy some of their presents.  They usually start the morning off my setting up all their loot and taking a good picture with it all.  This tradition might possibly have been initiated by Mom, but now they are all well trained...

 Then we spent the day hanging out and getting some food ready for our Boxing Day dinner.

Our cousins and friends started coming over in the evening and we started off by playing some games.  

Baabee started a game of pretending to be animals and then Disney characters with all the kids.

It was pretty intense...

 Then after lots of eating at some point in the evening we break our poppers...

 And everyone gets a crown..

And that is Boxing Day!

 With the Kerstings in town, Angela managed to get a bunch of friends together for a park day.

 I wish these kids could be together to play more often.  They all have so much fun together... 

We moms like each other, too...

 While we were at the park, Zach and John went off to golf.

I took the kids at the end of their round to play on the putting greens...

On the Kersting's last night we went to see the lights at the Glendale Train Park.  

It isn't quite as cool as the Scottsdale one, but it was way less crowded.  

However, we did get rained on which made things more interesting.

 Aunt Angie got to be in town for that part and stay around through New Year's which meant plenty of time for Nerf Gun battles in the backyard...

 And enjoying our new games...

 And enjoying our baby...

 On New Year's Eve we kept it pretty low key.  

We went out for Mexican food and then came back to send off our floating lantern...

 And a few sparklers...

 Baabee joined us for our little celebration...

 We forgot to demolish our Gingerbread house the night before so we did it on New Year's Day..

 Then we just tried to keep up the Christmas spirit ...

 On the Epiphany we did our Chalking and Blessing of our front door.
It is a nice tradition we have started to end the season.

 And Mom might have put the kids up to this one as well...

Another great Christmas Season for the record books!