Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas!

Wishing you and your loved ones the most joyful and peaceful  Christmas!

I used two of these pics for our Christmas card this year. Its great to look back at our card last year (with my prego belly) and see how much our life has changed in just 1 year. This Christmas, my heart is overflowing with love and thanksgiving for all that we have, most especially my faith and my little family.    

I have been mourning these past few days for those families who have lost their child, brother, sister, mother, and friend in the happenings of Newtown. I pray for them everyday and have been holding my dear ones a little closer this Christmas. Let us continue to pray for them and for this world. 

*A special thank you to our talented photographer Kristin Eldridge for taking our pictures for us.  

oh advent tree...oh advent tree...

how i love thee...

check out that happy dance! You know your going to have the best day when your morning starts off with treats inside Advent calendars and you start busting out contagious moves like this. :) 

Since the first day of Christmas we have been opening up one of these number pockets each morning and inside I placed a scriptural verse, an picture to go with it and a small treat or note.  

This advent calendar was inspired by oh happy day's blog.

never again...unless they begged

will my children take another photo with Santa. 

{confessions from a very guilty mom}: 

Sophia has been really curious about Santa this year and I constantly battled with the idea of whether I needed to tell her the truth of his non-existence or to lead her to believe in something just for the sake of wonderful childhood. Well... truth is, we lied  deceived and have been playing on this whole "Santa" thing around here. So, when we were at the mall this past weekend..Sophia had her eyes glued on Santa and kept telling us she wanted to see him, but once we got close..she wanted to leave. We basically bribed the poor child to sit on his lap and dragged her baby sister to do the same. Sophia sat on his lap eventually knowing she was going to get a candy cane lollipop at the end of it..and our little bird (Zaylee).. got nothing but some breast milk to console her. True story.