The End of 2012

This is a little late but with all of the holidays, projects, and a computer that likes to drive me crazy I've totally been procrastinating!

Our Christmas holiday season started with our annual Johnson/Culley Christmas party. My family has known the Culley family for over 40 years, they originally met when my mom and my Aunt Betty (Godmother) worked at Ford together. After years there my dad and Uncle Culley started in the printing business together. My Aunt Betty and Uncle Culley have a son, Mark, who is now my brothers business partner. They are family to us without the blood relation. We celebrated at Mark and Jenni's this year to be sure that my Uncle Culley will make it (he doesn't like long drives or driving in the dark). It was a fabulous night! The kids did a secret santa gift exchange, we had a delicious dinner and reminisced about old days while watching slides & videos, it was perfect!!

Brian presented Adrienne (Mark & Jenni's oldest daughter) with her very own bucket with cleaning supplies, apparently she needs help with being a little more tidy.

The chaos of all the kids! 12 total!

My goofy boy!

Looking at some old pictures

This was the best I could do. You can barely see Hai Ping, Sofia is crying, Nolan & Zachary were goofy in every picture and A didn't want to stop playing with the choo-choo train long enough to smile at the camera, oh well!

Our next big party was dinner with all the Plunkett's! Everyone came our way to celebrate in our new home. We had roast and yorkshire pudding, Jenn made delicious mini cheesecakes and the kids enjoyed opening all of their gifts!

The boys playing with their new toy, a cow that shoots a ball, as seen on Ellen

A little hand finding his way up to the yorkshire puddings, silly guy!!

Doing Christmas crackers with the kids

Late night for these 2, snuggling in to watch Wall-E

Christmas was eve was quiet and calm! I think we were all in bed by 10:30 which was good since I felt terrible and A had a fever. He spiked a fever every night for 3 nights straight, we finally took him to the Dr. and found out he had a sinus infection, poor guy!

After bath he got to open his first gift, pj's, super exciting, right?!

Then we set up the cookies and milk and of course carrots for the reindeer!

Finally, it was bedtime!

Sound asleep right by the door to listen for Santa & the reindeer to deliver lots of goodies!!

Santa came!!!!!

Christmas is finally here! And it was a white Christmas!! We were so excited to celebrate this year with A since he is finally understanding Santa and opening presents but it was also very bittersweet. Brian didn't have the kids Christmas eve & morning so it was very quiet here until about 1:30 Christmas day. This was the first time (not only for me, of course) in 14 years that I hadn't been with the kids on Christmas morning. But, Santa and all our family really spoiled A this year. It took him about 24 hours to open all his gifts since he had to play with each and every gift before moving on to the next.

Learning to write his letters & numbers with his new stylus. It's really amazing watching him and how fast he picks things up!

Birds Nests! They were delicious!! Find recipe here.

Snuggling with Mimi since he wasn't feeling too good

After breakfast and we were done opeing gifts with A my brother headed out to pick up his kids. While he was gone we cleaned everything up and got all the kids stuff organized so when they walked in it was like Christmas morning!

Christmas ended quickly in our house though since the tree was knocked down on the 26th! Although a ton of ornaments (important ornaments) were broken the tree was undecorated, taken outside and needles cleaned up within 30 minutes! Sorry no pictures, it was too upsetting at the time to even think about getting a pic :(

Our first major snowfall of the winter season showed up a couple days after Christmas. We had a blast playing in the snow, eating snow (not the yellow stuff), making snow angels and sledding down the driveway.

Time to ring in the new year now!!