Christmas 2012 in WA

 Well Christmas is over.  We've opened all the presents and had way to much food.  We had a wonderful Christmas, and hope that you all did too.  For Christmas eve we spent the evening with G and G Corier.  After dinner I told the kids a story about a little boy in the hospital on Christmas.  His nurse asked him if he would like a special treat for Christmas and he asked for a balloon. It was Christmas and the nurse had a very hard time finding a store that was open and selling balloons, but after several hours she finally found the balloon.  After she gave the balloon to the boy, he asked to go outside, so she wheeled him outside and as soon as they got outside he let go of the balloon, now the nurse was really upset and was about to give this little boy a lecture when he looked up into the sky and said "Happy Birthday Jesus".
This story was told in Young Women's on Sunday and I loved the idea of letting loose balloons to celebrate Jesus' birth.  So on Christmas eve we got two red balloons, tied with twine and the girls went outside and let go of their balloons and wished Jesus a Merry Christmas and a Happy Birthday.  With all the fun of parties and presents around Christmas, this was just a really fun and simple way to remind the girls why we celebrate Christmas and what Christmas means to us.

 watching the balloons float away.

 After we released Jesus' balloons we went inside and blew up a bunch for the girls.  They talked a lot about how these were their balloons and they already gave some to Jesus so it was ok to keep these ones.

 Claire helping Grandpa with his Ipad

 Grandma ended up with all the balloons.

 Santa came!  Zelda is guarding the tree!

 Surprise!  We had snow for Christmas!  I got up at 6 to put breakfast in the oven and then there was no snow, when I got up again at 7:45 we had almost an inch!  It was so fun to see fresh snow on christmas morning and the girls were more excited about the snow than anything else.  Vi didn't even notice the tree for a few minutes she was so into the snow!

 Claire is ready to open presents!

 Vi inspecting Santa's work.

 The girls were so cute and so sweet about the presents.  After every present they would want to set it up to play with it.  It took nearly 2 hours to get everything open, it was a very fun morning.

 Claire trying out the penguin game.  Peter says it is like topple but with a pirate ship and penguins instead.

They love the karaoke machine. I think we have a lot of music in our future.  I don't have a picture of it, but they also got a great dollhouse from Mary and Dave.  I think there is a picture on facebook.  Anyways, they LOVE the dollhouse.  We had to convince them to leave it in the living room and go to bed, they wanted to take it to bed with them.

 Just some shots of my parent's back yard.  So pretty in the snow.

 Miss Tiff on the only dry spot of the deck.

 Beautiful foggy, snowy christmas.

and Diana.

ok so we forgot to do a little talent show on Christmas Eve, but here is video of the girls christmas Morning singing a song, so this is our virtual Corier family talent show submission.

Merry Christmas!!