2011 Christmas at the Westerhold's

Saturday night we celebrated Christmas with Scott's family. 

It was different this year because we normally do Scott's family's Christmas on Christmas Eve.  This year, though, we decided to do it a week before.  Although it seemed a little weird to be doing it the week before, I'm so glad we changed it.  Our out-of-town family was able to be there and it made it easier on the ones who have to switch holidays between families every other year.

The whole family together.  The only one missing this year was our nepew, Daryl, who is in the Navy and currently somewere off the coast of Singapore.

Our nephew, Paul, got out of the Marines a couple of weeks ago and actually finished driving back to Missouri from California earlier on Saturday.  It was a long drive but the family was happy that he made it in time to celebrate with us.  It was the first time in 4 years that he has been home for Christmas.

Of course the kids couldn't wait to open presents.

After the kids opened their presents, we played a couple of games.  One of the games involved a box that was wrapped and inside of it another wrapped box and another.  We passed a pan around and had to roll the dice until we hit a 3.  When we hit a 3, we had to put on oven mitts and had a chance to open the box.  Meanwhile, the pan keeps getting passed around so each person might have 30 seconds to open the box or might not even have 1 second depending on how fast the next person rolled a 3.

Kanin was finally able to open the last box and won a little prize.

This year we had the thought of getting all of the kids matching pj's so we could take a cousin picture.  We all ordered them from an online company but once they came in, we realized that most of them had really shrunk after pre-washing.  It was too late to buy new matching ones so we just ran out to Target and bought red shirts and used the iron-on letters that came with the originals.  Either way, it turned out so cute!

I had to get some of my little munchkins.