Celebrating December

This Christmas season was full of fun parties, family & friends. One of the reasons I think decorating was so great this year was because I knew we'd have lots of people coming over that would see all our fun Christmas stuff. We started out the month with my niece & nephews (Triplets!) getting baptized. They were great! Between wanting to go swimming in the font and being too cold to get out, it was definitely entertaining for the rest of us watching. I still can't believe they're already 8 yrs. old!

Two of our other nieces had birthdays this month and so we celebrated those with a big family party. They were both so excited to get their presents and have a day where we could celebrate them. Birthdays are great.. it's the one day a year when it's all about you, and for kids I think it's just so important to make a big deal out of it. Seeing their little faces light up when everybody sings to them makes it all worth it. Especially when Christmas is so close, they needed a separate party to make them feel special & important too. Mission accomplished, because they really had a great time!

We started out the weekend before Christmas with my Bunco group coming over and we had a really fun time with yummy food & a gift exchange & of course our regular game and prizes. I'm always shocked when we can fit everyone in my house but it seemed to work out pretty well. We're always experimenting with new family room layouts to see what will fit the most people without feeling overly cramped and luckily, I think we found one that will last us a while this time.

A couple of days after Bunco we had our daughter's 11th birthday Wii party with some of her friends and they played games and had a great time. Some of our friends were able to make it to the party with their kids too and we all got sucked into the Nintendo. Easy entertainment and an excuse to act like a kid all rolled into one, what a great party!

The next day, we had an early Christmas dinner with my cousins where we exchanged white elephant gifts and partied like rock stars playing Guitar Hero. It was so much fun! Definitely one of the highlights of the night was seeing the serious rocker faces my cousins had as they jammed to one of the more difficult songs. It was so great to see everyone and hopefully we can do it again soon.

Finally we ended the pre-Christmas festivities with one more birthday party for my daughter where she could celebrate with the family. It's great to have most of her cousins living close by and since they've grown up together, they're all really close and love spending time together. For party favors, I made them all t-shirts with iron-ons of their favorite Nintendo characters and one for my daughter that said "This Wii Party is all about Mii!" They loved it and they had a fun time playing together. So as busy as it was, we had a wonderful time being surrounded with family & friends and really feeling the Christmas spirit all month long.