We hope you all had a great & Merry Christmas.  Our was nice and low key. Considering we'd been celebrating it on and off since Thanksgiving, it was a nice culmination of all the celebrations (Christmas #4!).

This year Will got into Santa. Last year we didn't really do anything with Santa, just started telling him about this guy in a red suit so when people asked him "What's Santa bringing you?" he'd have an idea of what they were talking about. (He still didn't.) This year I told him Santa fills the stockings for us with presents.  And we leave him cookies & milk and carrots for the reindeer.

So, Monday night, after the Christmas Eve service, Will and I iced the cupcakes we made to celebrate Baby Jesus' birthday. We decided to share one with Santa. (You don't think Jesus minds, do you?) We gave Santa some milk and put carrots out for the reindeer.  Will was very excited!

The next morning I woke up to hearing him say by my side of the bed. "MOMMY! Santa came and ate the cupcake and drank the milk and he filled our stockings! And the raindeer ate the carrots!" He was so excited, I have to admit it was cute and I'm glad we did it.  He and I went and we opened our stockings while James and Alex slept. We played with things he got, ate chocolate and FINALLY, at 8, we woke them up so we could open gifts.   

Both boys got various cars and trucks and airplanes and helicopters. Alex got a big ladder fire truck from Great-Grandpa Harbin that is popular with both boys. He also got his own "race car driver" semi-truck. (Will got a Jimmy Johnson semi-truck earlier and it was causing some problems with sharing. Now they have the semi trucks race. For those who care, Alex ended up with #12, Ryan Newman because it was the only one left at the store). Will got a remote control digger and LOTS of games. He's been playing Sorry, Go Fish!, and dominoes with James and I over the last few days. He is just like his Harbin & Miles family members, a game lover!  Not that we're doing anything to discourage it!

My favorite gift had to be this cool thing I didn't even know existed! It's a device you can hook up to your computer and then it'll play the music on your computer through your radios in the house. So I can listen to the cds I've stored on the computer, or songs I've downloaded, or (mainly) to internet music sites and hear it in the kitchen and the rest of the house (instead of blasting the music from the corner of the living room). It's been great! I loved my Finetune.com Christmas mix I'd made, but was sad I couldn't listen to it far from the computer. Now I can play all the different types of mixes (and have made a few more).  James got boring gifts like a Colts fleece and a book. But seeing as he put the fleece on that day, he seems to have liked it.

With it just being the 4 of us, lunch was pretty simple. (I didn't want to do all the work to do a feast the boys wouldn't eat anyway!)  That afternoon, everyone but Will took naps.  It was warm enough we went for a nice walk after that. We found out it was the warmest Christmas (in the mid-40s) in a number of years, so I'm glad we got to enjoy it.

Wednesday was even warmer so we spent more time outside, walking and throwing rocks in the near-by partly frozen pond.  The last two days have been cold and rainy so we've stayed inside more and had fun with the toys.  Thank you everyone for helping make all our Christmas celebrations so nice!