Christmas and Family

This was taken the first day that everyone was home! Talk about a big group- what a great way to start a family visit!

Abram drove home with some of his "Virginia Family" who quickly became our "Virginia Family" too! It was such a pleasure to have them here for just over a week! They were a blessing to us all!

With all of the late nights this is how we found the little ones in the morning... their "waking" time doesn't seem to change no matter how late we stay up!

We are all very happy to have Nathan home from Germany!!

Sylvia LOVED to read stories with Mr. & Mrs. Hannah!

making some puppets with Mrs. Hannah...

We did lots of playing in the snow and went for several hikes!

Goofing off with the big brothers...

On Christmas Eve we did our family Christmas gift exchange.

Grandpa Neal and Grandma Judy came for Christmas Eve also and Mom made the traditional Swedish Meatballs and mashed potatoes. The boys did well too... Aaron, Eli, Joel and Noah each ate something like 23-26 meatballs out of the 175 total!

Christmas Day was a lot of fun like always! LOTs of food, family and fun!

We had our Happy Birthday Jesus party along with Christmas carols, scripture reading and message from Uncle Mike.

and thanks to Dad, Sylvia didn't miss her nap ;)

Abram, Hannah and Eli all practiced up on their violin and played a little for us! :D

We went ice skating, sledding, made snowmen, had snowball fights... and so on.

It was a great day to go Ice Skating...

We went for a hike and these crazy guys decided to test out how tough they were... Behn won... he did a snow angle w/o his shirt.

Sylvia loves her big brothers!!

another hike in the park...

I could post lots more pictures, but since I want to leave some room for imagination... ;)

We had a great family visit! It was hard to say good bye to Abram, Aaron, Jennifer, Mr& Mrs Hannah, but we feel very blessed to have been able to spend a whole week with them all! ...and we still get to have Nathan for a whole week longer!