Christmas Break

Now for the Christmas season, all combined into one post!  It was a great one with a lot of fun times.

We...

...went to the annual Nativity display in Palo Alto.

They had a fun kids room with dress ups and a cute puppet show of the Nativity story.

...made gingerbread houses!

(thankfully that picture was taken just before it fell on the ground and broke)

...went to the Nutcracker! 

(just us girls with Grandma)

I was debating about trying to attempt the SF show but I'm so glad I didn't.  The San Jose production was great and close and cheap.

...sat on Santa's lap!

Those pictures are all thanks to my dad.  I love how Elijah's shirt is completely soaked. I can't remember how that happened.  The older three asked Santa for a pogo stick, a "remote control wand", and Harry Potter legos (in age-order).  Elijah just wanted to get off! :)

Grandma Lorna and Grandpa Tom came along for the fun:

Grandpa spent much of the their visit trying to convince the kids that he is Santa.  There's definitely a resemblance.

Christmas Day finally came.  We were lucky enough to have family come to us this year when Grandpa Tom and Grandma Lorna came into town.  It was so nice getting to spend Christmas with them.

The obligatory Christmas jammies shot before we head down to open presents: 

Nate refused to smile.

Only a few minutes later he was all smiles with his new "Star Wars guy."

We had a great day--relaxing, playing with toys, watching Christmas movies, eating a yummy turkey dinner, and having our own little polar plunge.  Tom, Joe and I jumped in our pool and it was SO much colder than we were anticipating.  We got out immediately.  We later bought a thermometer and found out it was 42 degrees!

The day after Christmas we took advantage of the beautiful 75 degree weather and hit the beach.  It was a great day.  The guys had fun swimming in the ocean.  

Like father, like son:

Grandma and Eli:

The day after that, we had more adventures when we headed into the city to go watch BYU play Washington in the Fight Hunger Bowl.  It was our first time taking the train in.

Passing the time with a HP book--what else?

The game was a disappointment, but at least the kids had fun and did pretty well, despite it being way past their bedtime.

I was too lazy to get out of my seat so this is the best picture I got of Natalie with Cosmo:

We said goodbye to Tom and Lorna on Monday but Joe still had the day off.  So, we decided to finally get over to the Tech museum to see the Star Wars exhibit that Nate had been begging to go to.  It was a lot of fun.  We could have spent hours longer there.

It was fun watching Nate's face light up when he saw different things.

They had this fun area where you could build a little lego hovercar that moved with magnets.

This was Elijah's favorite part:

Joe and the girls did this astronaut simulation game where you tried to maneuver around to get different targets.  Joe got the high score of the day!  One guy asked him if he was a pilot.  The lady running the game knew better--she said that he must have played a lot of video games as a kid. :)

On New Year's Eve, we let the kids try to stay up.  Elizabeth and Natalie made it for the first time ever.  Of course that threw off their sleeping schedule for a few days.  On New Year's Day we went up to a fun park here and played.  We finally got out the mitts and tried to teach our kids how to throw and catch.  We should do that more; it was a lot of fun.  It hasn't felt much like winter with how warm it has been here but it has sure been nice!