December re-cap! A very merry christmas!

Josh's mom made the kids all matching PJ's

I dropped off the face of the earth for the last month. I will go into all the whys about that in another post. Let's just say I am only a day away from posting my Christmas a month late. I am over a month late! Do you still care about my Christmas? Probably not, but since I don't scrapbook, I wanted to post this. We had a terrific Christmas. 

My mother-in-law made matching PJs for all of my kids. I loved that they were monsters, cuz we kinda had a monster theme going.

Christmas eve we were honored to be invited to my Aunt Deanie's for dinner and a program. I hadn't participated in the Mangum family tradition before so it was really neat for me. I love my wonderful family! Christmas morning was kinda crazy--my in-laws came over Christmas morning, and brought over a huge surprise. How huge? I would say about 6'2-6'3 . . . my brother-in-law, Justin came down for Christmas and surprised everyone. Cooper adopted him Christmas morning and somehow I didn't get a singe picture of both of them. Well, I didn't take many pictures, but I feel bad about not getting one of Cooper. So go ahead and judge me, I am not the mother of the year.

Turner was so excited that Santa knew exactly what he wanted!

Amelia with her new "baebee!"

After opening presents, we headed over to church. I loved that Christmas was on Sunday--it helped us remember what Christmas is really all about.

We tried to have a very homemade Christmas this year. I was so happy when we got a chance to make a gingerbread house with our friends--the Hills. We also made quite a few of the kids presents. My very favorite was probably the present I made for my sister, but somehow I lost the picture I took of it. Oh well!

Here is the jist of what I made for my sister though. I put all of these letters on individual blocks. I loved how it turned out. I really want to make one for me!

We also made the stuffed monsters to go with it.

I wrote the kids a book about monsters and Josh illustrated it. Watch out Jan and Stan Bernstein . . . here come the Thomsons!

I knew the kids wouldn't be as excited as I was to go to church right after opening presents so I made these art kits for them. I think they turned out cute!

We also made them activity books. We put the pages in sheet protectors and invested in washable-dry-erase crayons. That way I didn't have to worry about dry-erase markers staining church clothes.

 

My sister came for New Years! Her family had been visiting her husband's family in Idaho for his sister's wedding and the holiday's. I loved having them here all the way from Michigan. We don't get to see them near enough! When she has her little boy in March, we will have 7 boys between the two of us (and one little girl!) It is a crazy good time when we are all together. The boys slept in a fort and had a great time (even if they didn't get to sleep early either night.) We rang in the New Year with my Nephews' friends in MI. It was a great time!