Christmas Eve 2010

As usual, the craziness of Christmas started with a busy Christmas Eve schedule.  We laid low most of the day and both kids took great naps.  We opened up our traditional one-present-on-Christmas-Eve-that-is-always-new-PJ's-for-everyone gift.  Then, we loaded in the car and headed to Christmas Eve mass with Jason's family. 

Jason dropped Amelia and I off at church and then took Henry to hang out with some relatives since we weren't sure he could handle the nearly 2 hour wait time/service.

Henry hanging out with Mike and Ike

After church, we all met up at Jason's aunt Carol's house for a little fried chicken dinner.  It was around this time that I first noticed that Henry felt a bit warm.

But he has been doing the whole drooling, chewing, crabbing routine for a couple days, so I thought it may be a teething related fever.  So the fun continued....

Amelia LOVES hanging out with these ladies--Candace and Sienna.  Not only do they (still) have a huge Barbie stockpile at their house, they have a PINK room.  With BUNK beds.  It's pretty much all Amelia talks about when she is there.  It is rare for her to be out of the pink room at Carol's house like in the picture below.

And speaking of pink, poor Henry totally got the Christmas Eve pacifier shaft.  We were running late getting ready for church and the pink pacifier is all I could find.  Poor, poor Henry.  (As a side note, this particular binky is not leftover from Amelia's stash.  One night I went to Walgreens to replenish our binky stash and the pink/purple combo pack was all they had!  What was a mom to do?!?).

As you can see, as the night went on, Henry seemed to be feeling worse.  He was acting okay, just tired and a little clingy.  You know he must be feeling bad when he lefts Uncle Dave hold him!  Around 7 pm, we headed to my parent's house for Christmas with my dad's side of the family. Poor Henry basically came in, said, "Hello", played a tiny bit, and then went down to sleep.  The other two babies both younger than him are total night owls and outlasted him by HOURS!

Upon returning home, we set out cookies for Santa and carrots for the reindeer.  And then, we headed to bed--all in our new jams!

Seeing the Big Man in Red

 We decided to head out to see Santa once Amelia firmed up her desired wish list.  We talked about taking the kids to the mall, but upon looking into it, the photo packages were obscene in price!  So, to Bass Pro we went. 

Apparently everyone else in St. Charles decided to venture out the same night as us and we had a 30 minute wait.  Luckily, they have plenty set up for the kids to do.  Amelia took a turn with the pink rifle and as you can see below, she was all business about knocking off the bunnies.

 I had to get a sweet and innocent picture of her shortly after she dropped the rifle.  I gotta say, she scared me a bit.

Henry wasn't so impressed with the shooting range, but he did like all of the little lights around--right as his height no less!  Luckily they were not hot.

We decided to put Amelia on Santa's lap first so she could have a nice conversation without a wriggling Mr. Henry distracting them.  I will say that Bass Pro has the friendliest, most patient Santa I have ever encountered.  You would never know there was 100 people in line behind us based on their pleasant, un-rushed conversation. Just as she told us she would she asked Santa for a rocking horse and a Rapunzel doll.

Then we threw crank-pants-Henry on Santa's lap as well for a picture.  It didn't go too great.  The photographer actually gave us two different ones (the 5x7 is free and then you can order additional pictures if desired) and neither was good.  Amelia looked perfect in both, but Henry wasn't real happy with the set-up.  Good thing Santa had a death grip on Henry because he was doing everything he could to get away from him.

Our Santa visit was followed up with some Wendy Frosties.  Nothing like cold ice cream on a freezing cold night!