We were blessed to celebrate Christmas with Aaron's family this year! We celebrated with them the first year we were married, but we weren't able to make it the past two years since Julia was a newborn for married Christmas #2, and last year I only had two days off for Christmas. It was so wonderful to be able to make the trip this year to spend time with Aaron's family! Many of Aaron's extended family members still hadn't even gotten to meet Julia yet, so it was extra special getting to introduce them all to her. She was quite the star of the weekend and very, very quickly had them all wrapped around her little finger, as the photos will demonstrate... haha! She was very spoiled and very loved!
Stephen flew in to Oklahoma to spend a couple days seeing us and old friends and Augustinian brothers here before he joined Aaron, Julia, and me on the trip up to Kansas on the Wednesday night before Christmas. We had a couple days of time with just the immediate family before the extended family joined us on Saturday. We enjoyed some fun times all together before heading back home on Monday (Christmas Eve). We ate delicious food (thanks to Aaron's mom!), exchanged presents, played lots of games (paper party games, Wii games, board games), worked on a puzzle, celebrated the fourth Sunday of Advent together at mass, ate more delicious food, watched some games on TV, laughed and talked... and ate more delicious food ;-) Basically, we all had a wonderful time! :-)
I had 20 million photos, so I'm breaking them up into two posts. Below are some photos of fun times with Aaron's immediate family, with a post to follow shortly with photos of our time with the extended family!
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| All bundled up for the bit of snow that had fallen overnight! |
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| Unfortunately, the winter had been so mild I forgot to pack coats for
any of us, so we just put tons of layers on Julia, and Aaron and I
borrowed coats from his mom (hence the fitted look on Aaron!). |
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| Snow angels! |
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| Julia, Aunt Jessica, and "Frosty" the tiny snowman! |
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| On a ride at the mall! |
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| Julia with Santa! |
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| Riding the train! |
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| Grandma "Gee" Mary bought Julia a new coat! The saleslady was nice enough to also cut down a balloon from one of the wracks for Julia :-) |
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| There was a lot of dancing to ZZ Top this trip with some fancy new dance moves from Julia! |
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| Stephen was lying down during the gift exchange... haha! Also, he was totally at Louis' disposal this trip... and ended up with ripped shoes and pants as a result! |
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| Classy wrapping from Stephen, as usual. He wrapped his gifts right before giving them, using scraps of wrapping paper from presents that had already been given... haha! It's a tradition. |
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| Papa Mark and Julia ate a lot of lollipops together this trip. This one was so big she literally couldn't open her jaw wide enough to fit it in her mouth! |
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| Julia helped us all open our stockings. |
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