Christmas Eve

 I love the magic of Christmas!  Christmas Eve is such a special day to me as all preparations for a wonderful day reach their peak.  Anticipation is high, and it is just so much fun.  A new tradition was started with the Gibson family the last few years of having a Christmas Eve breakfast together, so that on Christmas day we don't have quite as many conflicts trying to get everyone together for an extended period of time.  Lance, Kim, Warren, and Xander got to see Ashlyn for their first time, and Warren absolutely loved her.

I can't resist taking extra pictures of Ashlyn.  The last baby still needs plenty of cute pictures, right?  Especially for these special days.

Our traditional Christmas Eve dinner was quite chaotic.  I think it took the boat of things just not working out as planned.  It was really hard to get everything ready on time, and part of the trickiness was the time that a newborn takes up.  In the end, we got things reasonably ready... except for the ham, which finished just as we finished dinner.  We held off dinner as late as we dared, and of course, that made everything else later for the rest of the evening.  We actually even did some of our typical after dinner things before dinner, just because we were worried about time.  The nativity was one of them, and that didn't quite go as planned either.  I think about halfway through Ashlyn got really fussy and needed to be fed.  I left to feed her, and then things really went south.  The kids wouldn't cooperate, and finally Devon just called it quits about halfway through.  Really, the night wasn't quite that magical, enjoyable thing you want Christmas Eve to be.  Oh, well. I doubt we will really remember, except for the fact that I just recorded it so we can remember it forever.