Christmas Eve

I woke up on Christmas Eve completely giddy. Partly because,

for the first night in a l-o-n-g time the babies 1) didn't wake up at all before we went to bed 2) slept completely through the night 3) slept in until 7 am!!! It was a true Christmas Miracle (special thanks go out to Night time Orajel & super absorbent night time diapers). But another part of it is that I was so aware the whole day that this was the babies' FIRST Christmas. Even though they wouldn't remember this one, I knew every year from here on out Christmas Eve would be so exciting for them!We had no big plans during the day (except skyping with my parents), but late afternoon the festivities began with us dressing in our holiday clothes and heading out to meet Lucas. We had decided to drive around and look at Christmas Lights before our church's Christmas Eve service - mostly because we were going to be keeping the babies up later than their normal bedtime, and we figured they would probably fall asleep while we were driving around (which they did). The only problem was that there were no Christmas Lights. We would find a random house here or there, but we drove around for about an hour and definitely saw fewer than 20 houses with lights (and I want to say the number might not have even been in the teens). It was sad.

Then we went to the Christmas Eve service. The twins sat in the sanctuary for the first part of the service (favorite moments were Allie peeking over the pew and jumping for joy when she

saw the people behind us & Ryan sitting on Miss Karen's lap, holding a canister of puffs, eating them by the handful - which I NEVER allow him to do. He looked like he was at a movie eating a giant tub of pop corn!). They started to get fidgety though, so we moved into the cry room where there were tons of other babies (ok...4) and big kids (2). Allie, new to crawling, got a little overwhelmed, and crawled into a portable pulpit on which she hit her head. Ryan, not crawling, LOVED watching all the commotion around him!

Of, course, they were near meltdown when the service

was over so we rushed them home and into bed. Then Lucas and I worked on creating some Christmas magic (a.k.a. wrapping presents and putting them under the tree) while watching It's A Wonderful Life (we usually have an IAWL party every year, but this year it had to be cancelled because I was sick....). I love that movie more every time I see it.

Before

After

Around midnight we settled into our bed and drifted off to sweet dreams of what our babies' first Christmas!