Merry Christmas, Part One

Christmas here was wonderful! Though we missed our families, it was really nice to be in our own house. As always (by this I mean the three Christmases total that I have not been at my Dad's church), the moment that I most missed being home was as we were going to Christmas Eve church. It was sad to sit in church and not be listening to Dad preach and see all of our wonderful Bethesda family, but we looked awfully cute and it was fun to see Liam so interested in seeing members of the congregation dress up to create a living nativity scene during the sermon.

Then it was time for Christmas Eve dinner. Earlier in the week, we decided to make soup--something easy and we picked a soup we had made before. We actually looked to make sure we had all the ingredients, and I even put the soup together before we went to church. It was only after the soup had been cooking for a while that I realized my crucial error. The recipe called for lentils and I added something I thought was lentils (and so did Wade), which turned out to actually be white beans, which turn out to not cook as quickly. By the time we got home, the beans were still a little crunchy, so we fed Liam something else and put him to bed and then had soup. Despite the ingredient issue, it turned out pretty well, but I was disappointed we didn't get to have Christmas Eve dinner together.

I think my favorite thing about this Christmas is that for the one and only time in his life, Liam went to sleep on Christmas Eve expecting Christmas morning to just be another day. No matter how much we talked about what was coming on Christmas morning, Liam had no idea. It made the next morning so much sweeter because he was so surprised. The surprise was magnified because he had quite the pile of presents. Not until we were bringing everything downstairs did we see how much there really was. Here we are getting ready.

Wrapping the Last Present

All ready for Liam!