1st Christmas in England

Our first Christmas in England was a smashing success! The girls had a great time and we started fostering our own traditions along the way. We have only spent one Christmas away from my family and that was when I had just given birth to LaLa. She was born a grand total of 3 days before Christmas. This year we started using an Advent calendar for LaLa to count down the days until Christmas. It was a lot of fun for her to see 1)Christmas getting closer and B) her birthday getting closer. "Hey mom, my birthday is two-two!"

Doing a Hulk-a-maniac pose on her birthday!

We also made the girls take about a million pictures in front of the Christmas tree. The biggest challenge in this is getting LaLa and KiKi to actually look at the camera at the same time.

Christmas Eve before Church

We went to church on Christmas Eve at the base chapel. It was an ok service, kinda generic. The girls enjoyed the gospel choir and the more contemporary songs. I totally missed the entire sermon because KiKi by that point had lost patience and was flipping through hymnals and crawling under my legs to find more books to look at. At one point we got the girls to remain still for a whole 10 min by slipping them each a candycane, but those suckers don't last long.

After the service we came home and got the girls into their pjs. Then we got them to help me set out cookies and milk for Santa. LaLa was insistant that she must help me pour the milk.

Cookies and Milk safely on the hearth!
(but Elizabeast got them before Santa got here...thankfully the girls were already asleep)

Christmas morning, KiKi went and woke LaLa up and they found that Santa had left half his sleigh at our address! This was the first Christmas that KiKi actually understood the whole Santa left me presents thing. She was so excited and ripped the presents open like a seasoned pro.

Look Mom a Dancing June Little Einstein!!

LaLa being the more cautious of the two took a more slow, calculated and measured approach to her present upwrapping.

She actually really liked it when she got clothes. These are two sweaters that my mom got her. Aren't they cute!

My Little Pony!!!

Really cool baby doll that names all it's body parts!

Look Mom, I'm a princess!!!

After presents we sat around the house for a couple of hours and let the kids play with some of their toys (and they harassed us to take the rest of them out of the packaging). I then made a green bean casserole and we headed over to Domino's house to exchange presents and have Christmas dinner. Everything was wonderful. By the time we got back to the house we were all Christmased out. Everyone was in bed by 9:30 and we woke up the next morning and got to work uppacking the rest of our household goods.

Even Elizabeast was all Christmased out!