Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve! 

Not sure why this picture of Beau making a screenshot for one of his videos is at the beginning of our Christmas even, but I guess this is how things started. He's got quite the persona going. 

It was pretty warm on Christmas Eve. We had a great walk at Tyler State Park - one of our family's favorite spots! 

It looks like I didn't get any pictures of us going out Christmas caroling. That is a favorite family tradition of ours. This year it felt especially wonderful to have some type of connection and love with neighbors when we're all quite isolated. We loved delivering molasses cookie bags and some sugar cookies too and shaking our bells and singing up and down the street! 

Here was our traditional Marzipan Cake for our Christmas Eve dinner. It was beautiful! And delicious as ever. 

It felt like a casual dinner since it was just us. But, we made AMAZING food! 

Our family nativity reading was all out hysteria! It was so funny! 

Mmm...dessert and milk and cookies for Santa! 

Here are our secret elves - the Couillens family! They were so amazing! Renaud did the most fabulous elf dance in that costume, totally confusing neighbors who happened to be walking their dog! We were so grateful to them! 

The most unexpected thing happened on Christmas Eve. We had a wind storm, and a power failure. The power went out just after the boys went to bed. Miraculously, the boys really wanted to go to sleep quickly so that Christmas morning would come sooner. So, they were already asleep when the power went out and stayed asleep...at least for the early part of the night! (foreshadowing!) Mike and I enjoyed the candles and the quiet for a bit, but then needed to get set up for Christmas. Quite a challenge to do it in the dark! Thankfully, the power came back on for about 45 minutes allowing Santa to set up the drum set. Then it was back out. 

The biggest drat was that around 1:30am, Santa was trying to drop off the stockings. But, the power kept flashing on and off, making some beeping sounds in the boys' rooms. Beau woke up! And, that was it! He didn't really go back to sleep again!!! We tried to make him chill out and let us sleep. But, it basically didn't happen. By about 5am, we gave up and let everyone get up and start Christmas morning. It was SO painful!!! Thankfully everyone was so excited and happy that we made it through. But, man...Mike and I never even had such a sleepy Christmas day when we had babies!!!