Christmas Day

As fate would have it, Mason woke up at 5:30 on Christmas morning. Sort of luckily for me, Mason was a huge daddy's boy the whole trip and didn't want much to do with me at all.  He was crying for daddy when he woke up so Alan took him out to the living room and tried to get him to sleep until the rest of the family was ready to be awake at 7:00.  Spencer, Mason, Michelle, and Lindsey (?!) rushed out to the living room to see what Santa left for them.  Lindsey was the only one who was disappointed to realize that Santa doesn't visit 24-year-olds!  Haha!   

Mason was happy with his scooter, books, and Mega Blocks.  Spencer got a marble run, books, and a big Lego set.  I don't remember everything Santa left for Michelle, but I know she got a road rug and more Celtic Thunder dvds.  (She is a Celtic Thunder super fan!)

Marc got a flashlight in his stocking.

Baby John's first Christmas!  I think he kept his poor parents up for most of the night.

Mason found Hedwig the owl in his stocking.

Traditional Christmas breakfast: cinnamon rolls and hot chocolate.  I  made sure to have a fried egg before my orange roll so my blood sugar wouldn't go crazy.  It didn't work - I still got a migraine.  At least that orange roll was good!

We tackled the rather large pile of wrapped gifts after breakfast.  Mason loved helping everyone unwrap theirs.

I managed to find an affordable mid-size ping pong table for Alan this year.  I didn't know he had seen it in my Amazon order history, so I had fun keeping such a large item a "surprise."  It's a great size for our garage and super easy to set up and take down.  Alan is excited to get all practiced up to be the Rasmussen family champion at our reunion coming up in July.

Playing Michelle's new Uno game.

I love it when Christmas falls on Sunday! It's so wonderful to be able to worship by partaking of the Sacrament that day.  My migraine started just before we left for Church so I wasn't feeling that great, but I really liked what my parent's ward did for the meeting.  They asked several ward members (Mom and Aunt Susan included!) to share their favorite Christmas song, why it was their favorite, and a little of it's history.  Then we all sang that hymn.  It was interesting and the Spirit was strong.  Thank you to Alan for taking our very tired and grumpy two-year-old out so I could enjoy the meeting!

Mom fixed a very nice turkey dinner after Church.  I was feeling pretty rotten by that point and felt bad that I couldn't help at all.  Mom and Dad invited an older woman without family from the ward to join us.  She was an interesting lady and was positive she could stop my migraine with a two-minute massage.  It didn't work, but it was amusing! ;) 

I was finally able to take my medication with dinner and felt mostly better after that.  We spent the rest of the evening Face Timing with Alan's family and playing games. 

I'm always a little sad when Christmas Day draws to a close, but this was a good one.  Merry Christmas!

Pre-Christmas St. Johns

Arriving early Tuesday afternoon, we were the first visitors to arrive at my parent's house.  The few days just before Christmas are my favorite part of the season so it was nice to have all of my shopping and errands finished and to just get to relax at home.  And I did a lot of relaxing because just a few hours after we arrived, my feet and ankles started swelling.  It was a weird reaction to some medication I had been taking for a stomach issue that was probably made worse by all of the sitting in the car on the way down to AZ.  My ankles got so swollen that it became quite painful to walk or even to stand.  I kept them elevated as much as possible, but it didn't help the swelling and just made everything stiffen up.  Compression socks helped some and allowed me to participate in most activities.  My vacation running plans went out the window though.  It was definitely a bummer, but not as bad as the terrible migraines I had last time we went to SJ for Christmas. 

Spencer and Mason had fun gathering the eggs for Grandpa most days. 

King's Court became the game of the vacation.  Grandpa or Marc taught it to Spencer on one of the first days we were there and he couldn't get enough of it.  When everyone else arrived, Spencer talked Katelyn into making a tournament bracket for both King's Court and horseshoes.  It was awesome that everyone was able to make it this year except for Elise and her family.  We even got to meet Kate and Zac's darling, little John for the first time!  He was just three months old.

We watched a lot of movies.

Marc wins the Uncle of the Year Award for being so awesome with Spencer.  Rather than sleeping on the couch in the crowded house, Marc decided he wanted to sleep on a cot in my parent's half-finished shed/cellar and he didn't seem to mind a bit when Spencer wanted to join him.  They plugged in a space heater and stayed nice and warm every night.  Spencer got to stay up much later than normal because I didn't want to send him out there by himself, but Marc probably went to bed earlier than normal to take him out there.   Spencer adores Marc and I'm glad he has such a good role-model.  (You couldn't have convinced me that I would ever write than sentence when we were kids!)

This is the sad face of a little boy who had to be strapped in his seat to prevent him from getting into all of the gingerbread house decorating candy.  ;)

And this is the face of a bigger boy who is excited for gingerbread houses!

Alan made the gingerbread again this year - 3 pans of it!  Look at all of those serious faces!

We were mostly on teams this year.  Mom and I opted for the usual graham cracker houses because we had team members who weren't patient enough to build a house before decorating it. ;)

It was a real task to get Mason to put any candy on our house - he couldn't stop eating it!

Alan's and Spencer's didn't collapse this year - success!

Zac was so patient with Mason, who climbed in his lap every time Zac was trying to work on his computer.  Our boys are so lucky to have such great aunts and uncles on both sides!

Mason loved playing the sandbox and playhouse while the guys played horse shoes.  My feet kept me from embarrassing myself at that game this year. ;)  I think Alan came out champion in the tournament, but Marc was a close second.

We had a really nice ham dinner with the missionaries from my parent's ward and Uncle Bob and Aunt Susan on Christmas Eve.  We had our normal family program afterward with every family presenting a part.  Marc did a power point quiz with some New Testament facts about the Savior, Spencer played a piano solo, Mom and I played a duet, Michelle sang Away in the Manger, Mom played a solo, Lindsey and Katelyn did their traditional (?) sock puppet song and dance, and Dad read the Christmas story from the Bible.  After that, we drove around to look at a few Christmas lights then headed home for bed.  The whole evening was dampened by a migraine for me, but it was still such a lovely evening.

Lindsey helped Mason make a name sign to put by the tree so Santa would know where to leave his gifts.  

Christmas Trip - Getting There

I'm a little amazed that we've been able to continue our tradition of going to Arizona for Christmas every other year for this long.  Spending Christmas at home really means a lot to me and I'm so grateful that Alan is able and willing to make that happen.  His school schedule gives him lots of time off at Christmas and it's really helpful when we're trying to drive so far.  We were also really grateful that Alan's parents let us borrow their SUV so we didn't have to squeeze in our little sedan, and that a friend let us borrow her seat-back dvd players.  Our little portable dvd player doesn't cut it very well for two kiddos when one is a toddler and can't stop himself from pushing buttons. ;)

We had planned to drive down through Utah so we could visit Elise's family and Alicia, but snow storms made it too dangerous to travel that way.  So at the last minute, we called our friends in California and Phoenix and arranged to stay with them.  We drove all the way to Bakersfield the first day. We left at 7 am and got there around 10 pm.  It was a LONG day, but both boys did better than I expected.  It's just too bad that Mason won't sleep for more than 20 minutes at a time in the car.

Fast food dinner somewhere in CA.  I didn't think Mason's first corn on the cob experience would be at KFC, but I'm glad he liked it!

Katie and Ben were SO, SO nice to open their home to us late at night, especially since it was Katie's birthday!  They even gave us their own room!  What amazing hosts!  This was the only picture we took.  It was late and we were both tired, but I'm glad Katie made us take it.  We stayed up too late catching up, but it was so fun!  Then we got up nice and early for church the next morning before heading on our way.  Spencer and Jonas had fun playing kitchen hockey and I wish we lived closer so they could be better friends.  Thank you Katie and Ben!

We spent the rest of Sunday driving to Peoria, AZ where we stayed with Glen and Rachel.  They were our first married college friends and are awesome!  I still miss living close to them!  They fed us a delicious dinner and Spencer had such a great time playing with their kids.  Again, more friends I wish we lived close too!  I also wish I had a taken a picture there!  They had school and work the next morning so we couldn't stay up too late, but still had a really good visit.

We decided to take a break from traveling on Monday so we could enjoy the warm Phoenix weather.  It felt great!  We had been saving up to go to Legoland CA on this trip, but Spencer goes to go to the Legoland Discovery Center at the Arizona Mills Mall instead.  None of us care for amusement park rides much so this much smaller version fit our family well.  There were lots of hands-on building activities, a couple of small rides, and several 15-minute 4D movies.  Both boys had fun, but Spencer was in heaven!  He especially loved the "build and test" area where you could build cars and then race them down tracks.  There was also a cool earth quake simulator where you could test your towers.

"I Lego man!"

Mason got pretty worn out after a couple of hours so I took him outside for a snack while Alan and Spencer played a little longer.

Selfie in the sun!  I have missed the sunshine!

Spencer probably could have stayed at the Discovery Center all day, but we made him come out for lunch and so we could go to the small aquarium just across the hall in the mall.  It wasn't the most impressive aquarium, but it had some cool things and it was almost deserted since school was still in session there.

We let the boys play on the small, indoor playground at the end of the aquarium while Alan and I searched for a hotel room.  We wanted a hotel with a pool, but discovered that most hotels in The Valley only have outdoor pools.  We settled for one fairly close to the Mesa Temple because we knew we wanted to go to the Christmas light display that evening.

The Temple lights were definitely the highlight of the day for me.  There was just a special feeling on the Temple grounds and it made me so happy to be there with my little family.  We got there just after sunset, before it got too crowded.  It was dark, but still light-jacket weather and it felt so nice.  We took our time just enjoying the lights and the Spirit.

After the lights, we had dinner at Sweet Tomatoes and then went to our hotel room.  We later found out that our hotel was only two blocks away from Marc's house!  It wasn't a super fancy motel, but the room was divided into two sections (great for putting the boys to bed at a normal time), and they served a nice hot breakfast.  We drove the last four hours to St. Johns right after breakfast that morning.