Christmas #2

Christmas Break was absolutely fabulous. First of all, Chuck was with us 100% of the time for three whole weeks. Awesome. While law school isn't fun all the time, still having "school breaks" is fabulous. John, Lucy, Laura, Tom and little Spencer all arrived on December 18th and the fun began!

For some reason my pictures uploaded out of order. I tried to organize them by day, but the days aren't quite in order :) 

Christmas morning! Jackson woke up early but we just played until all the others were up around 9am. We all met in Glen's room for the Krebs Christmas tradition: Drink a cup of orange juice and then go down the stairs to see your gifts from youngest to oldest!

Spencer and Jackson hanging out with Grandpa on Christmas morning!

Jackson's Santa gifts

It was SO fun watching Jackson discover his new gifts. He was a pretty happy little guy :)

This kid melts my heart.

He LOVES his laptop :)

Spencer and Jackson took naps right after the fun began, so they got to open more presents in the afternoon!

Such a pro at unwrapping presents.

Grandpa Krebs with the three littles.

Love these shirts.

Elsie bell!

This group of pictures is from random days over the break.

In case you were wondering what we did the whole time. At least we were all playing Ticket to Ride against each other on those devices. 

Cute little Spencer.

I love this guy.

We completed seven puzzles. We're awesome.

We played a lot of games! One of our favorites: Perudo

Look at that smile!

Grandma Krebs pulled out this swing for little Spencer, which he loved. However, all the bigger kids decided the swing was pretty cool to and they all wanted turns in it too.

The weekend before Christmas we all gathered at the Marcums home and had a fabulous dinner and then headed over to the Southern lights! Unfortunately, Jackson was a pretty grumpy fella (it was an hour past his bedtime) so after waiting in line for 30 minutes, we turned around and put the little man to bed.

December 23rd is Joseph Smith's (the first prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) birthday. So to celebrate, the Krebs do a candlelit dinner and eat KFC! To be honest, the KFC is usually a Christmas Eve tradition, but because Christmas Eve was on a Sunday and we don't buy things on Sunday, we decided to eat KFC on the 23rd instead :)

December 24th! Christmas Eve! We had a wonderful Christmas program at church and then we headed over to Dad and Kathy's. When we came back to the Krebs we had the traditional Christmas Eve Nativity by all the grandkids. It was awfully cute :) Both in my family and in Chuck's family we grew up opening one gift on Christmas Eve. We wanted to carry this tradition on with Jackson and let him open his Christmas book that evening.

Love this photo.

Cute Sarah was Mary.

Aliya the angel.

Jacob was a wise man.

Spencer was baby Jesus.

The cutest little shepherd.

Another adorable shepherd.

Baby Joseph the sheep. So sweet!

The whole crowd!

The Krebs kiddos!

Acting out the nativity!

Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus :)

We love the Bays!

Brothers.

Her smile is so contagious. 

Josh was Joseph!

We had such an awesome Christmas break with family. I'm so grateful to have such a wonderful family.

2012: A year of three Christmases.

As a kid, Christmas morning was the most magical few hours of every year. We would count down the days, speculate on where the presents were hidden, sneak peaks at name tags on the wrapped gifts and almost pee our pants in excitement as we ran down the stairs to see what Santa brought us. If you had asked me then, I would have said there was NO way Christmas could get any better. And I would have been utterly wrong. 

Christmas as a parent easily tops any Christmas I've had before (and that's saying a lot). While I will never trade any of those magical and perfect childhood Christmas mornings, nothing could be more perfect than watching joy light up the face of a child because Santa (who's me! We get to be Santa now. So cool.) came to visit them. And of course, Christmas only gets better from here. Moral of the story = Christmas as a parent is pretty much my most favorite thing in the world.

This year we got to have THREE Christmases! Crazy, we know. It was official Krebs Family Christmas year and everyone came to us! (Oh, the perks of going to UK Law) We got to spend three solid weeks with most of the Krebs crew (The Adams family and the Krebs family from Oregon couldn't make it. Tears were shed.). Thrown in between all that fabulous Krebs family time, we got the chance to have Christmas with my Dad and Kathy AND head to South Carolina for Christmas with my Mom and Sarah and Perryn. 

Christmas #1: 

We spent the Saturday and Sunday before Christmas with my Dad and Kathy.

We have ourselves a climber :)

Jackson's favorite gift: tissue paper.

He played in this gift bag from Aunt Karen for 20 minutes straight. Don't worry, he LOVES the tractor too, Aunt K!

Power tools! So happy.

The little man found the presents corner.

Apparently, all the present opening wore us out because Dad, Chuck and I passed out while Jackson ran around. Good thing Leah stayed awake!

This video is Jackson opening his gift from Aunt Karen and loving the tissue paper :)

To be continued... :)