Christmas 2008

We had an amazing Christmas! We stayed in our pajamas ALL DAY LONG! We took our time as each child opened their gifts. We made sure they knew who the gift was from and we immediately set each toy up and played with it. It took HOURS to get through everything since we let the kids direct it all, but we had so much fun. We miss all our family a lot today, but thank you to all of them for understanding our need to be together as our own little family today!

Christmas Eve

We decided to spend this Christmas entirely at home in Idaho. This is the first time we have ever done this. So, to offset the dissapointment of not getting to see our family on Christmas this year, we invited our other "family" over to dinner for Christmas Eve. Ben always says that the Hamel family is the family that you get to pick. We love these guys! Thanks to Angie, Chad, Riley and Madeline for making our Christmas Eve wonderful and our life in general so happy!

It's a White Christmas!

Since Ben has been gone practically this whole month, the responsibiltiy of shoveling the snow has fallen to me. (Luckily we don't get as much as our friends and family in Salt Lake!) I let Conner and Kate come outside and play while I shovel. So, each morning the kids hope they can wake up to find snow just so I will have to shovel and they can go out and play. Don't tell them that it is actually possible to go out and play even when I don't need to shovel snow. I am not a good play outside in the snow mom...