"And so this is Christmas"

We spent Christmas in California with The Engineer's mom and stepdad. We enjoyed the beauty of far-northern California. We even got to choose our own Christmas tree from the forest!

Honestly, in a lot of ways it was a tough trip. I can't go into detail in this public forum, but The Engineer's mom is in her 80s, and, well, sometimes age makes things complicated. It was an important trip to take, but I am very glad to be home.

Thankfully it wasn't all stressful! Christmas was really lovely. The night before, we put out reindeer food, plus cookies and milk for Santa (with letters from the kids.)

The next morning, the kids got up, and we confirmed that the cookies and reindeer food had been eaten!

We all got gifts we were excited about...

...and we had a really nice, relaxing day together...ending it by eating an "engineered turkey"! I wish I'd gotten a picture--The Engineer made a fantastic turkey. He did his research (like a true engineer) and we ended up with a delicious bird with crispy skin and moist meat.

We stayed in California until the 29th, and then headed back home. The 30th was The Engineer's birthday, and we also had our belated family Christmas that night.

For some reason this Spiderman car/boat/plane toy has been a big hit with Zoodle!

The big toy was Chickie's new Barbie Dream House. (This is a combo birthday-Christmas gift since it's a larger gift than we'd planned to purchase this year.) It was another hit (of course.)

I'm finding Christmas is so much fun as the kids get older. Everything is just so exciting to them. I'm looking forward to next year (or I guess that's really this year--Happy New Year, all!!)