Our Christmas Eve!

We had a pretty fun day today. This morning we took some Christmas gifts over to our neighbors, which was a fun way to let Hannah be involved in the gift-giving/service aspect of Christmas. In the afternoon we got together with our best friends, the Nations, to do the traditional Nativity reading, with the kids acting out the different parts. They had fun, even though, with their attention spans, it only lasted for about 3 minutes before they were all distracted by other things. Hannah was very excited to be Mary and kept making some funny "sweet and holy" Mary face. It was pretty funny. Joshua was the innkeeper, which meant he ran around like a monkey until we dragged him over to say "No room!" After that, we got the three older kids (Hannah, Jonathan and Sam) to sing some Christmas carols while Joshua danced, and then they were done. So we put on Hannah's absolute most favorite movie, the Aristocats, and tried to play a game while listening to the kids act like cats (i.e., hissing, meowing, licking each other, licking the carpet...), scream, jump on the couch, etc. Needless to say we didn't actually get to finish the game! Then we headed over to some other friends' house for a special Christmas Ever soup dinner, which was fun until Joshua fell and smacked his face on the brick edge of the fireplace. It immediately swelled like crazy and he has a nice black eye now, which you can't see in the pictures because the flash was too bright. So we went home, let the kids open their Christmas Eve pajamas, and put them to bed. Besides that one little incident, we had a fun day and are so thankful we have such good friends to celebrate special occasions with. Mostly we are thankful for the birth of Jesus Christ, which gives us a wonderful reason to celebrate and to remember the important things in our lives, which can be so crazy, tiring, and frustrating at times. I'm grateful we have this time of year to receive an added measure of the Spirit to draw us closer to our Savior, and to each other, and to give us the boost we need to make it through another year! We have experienced a lot of changes, trials, and decisions to make since graduating from BYU a year-and-a-half ago, but we've learned a lot along the way and managed to come out on top so far. And it's not over yet -- Seth is starting another job and we are moving to San Diego in three weeks! So the new year will be bringing even more changes for us (hopefully good ones!). We are excited to go, but we will certainly miss all of the wonderful people we have come to know and love out here. We are so thankful for the things we've been blessed with, and also for the hard things we've gone through, which have also blessed our lives by teaching us to depend more fully on each other and on our loving Heavenly Father, who truly knows and cares about us and our family. Merry Christmas to all of you and we love you all very much!