Christmas and New Years

Christmas

Max just loved learning lots of Christmas songs this year buthis favorite one by far was "Angels we have Heard on High" He learned all the words for the first 2 verses and he is still singing it ll day long every day. Sammy also sings the Gloria part and it is so cute to hear them singing it together! Oh so sweet! Here Javier was playing it on the piano and Max was playing a duet :) for a long long time and every body singing. It was so much fun!

One Chistmas Eve we went to the house of our good friends with another family of good friends and had a delicious feast prepared by all and then enjoyed watching all our three year olds and Sammy perform the nativity for us. Sammy got to be Joseph and he was entirely uninterested in Mary. Then we came home and sang more songs and Talked to Javier's family for a long time on the webcam which was so fun! The boys laid out cookies for Santa. I thought it was funny that my boys left the cookies alone but they couldn't resist the carrots for the reindeer.

Here they are basking in their Christmas loot. Okay I learned a valuable lesson this Christmas. Fun toys=well behaved boys. Yes it also rhymes. But seriously, my little monkeys have been so engrossed in the fun toys they got (most of the really fun things came from Grandma and Dadu and Mimi and Grandpa because apparently they are waaaay better at picking toys than me :)) The first couple of days after Christmas it was seriously difficult to pull Max away from playing even for meals! He just played all day straight from the minute he woke up to the minute he went to sleep and he still totally loves his new toys. I have never bought my kids toys except for their birthday and Christmas and since we got them the trampoline for their birthdays this year I think that Max had just really grown out of all our toys. SO its been fun since Christmas. My Mom also pointed out that it would be cheaper to buy a new toy every once in a while than replace all our walls and ceilings from disasters like the kitchen rain.

New Years!

Javier and I both agreed that this year was the best new years Eve we have ever had. In Ecuador New Years Eve is the biggest holiday of the year and there are major parties where everyone stays up dancing until 5 in the morning in every family and you all know that in the US new years is pretty much usually...lame. So this year since we ended up doing Christmas pretty much American (no dance parties till 5:00 am? No opening gifts at midnight Christmas eve?) I decided I was going to do my darndest to make news years feel authentic for Javier. We started the night off awesome because my dear friend invited the whole ward over to watch the most incredible fireworks imaginable at their house. They were awesome! And the whole party was just so fun too, we loved it! But we had some Ecuadorian traditions to do, so we left a little early so we could make Ceviche to eat at midnight and get to work on our Año viejo.

In Ecuador there is a tradition to make a figure of a person or character that represents the old year and to burn it at midnight. We made ours really small because we were afraid of a)burning down our house and b) having the police show up, but in Ecuador many of the Año viejos are 2 stories high and they are made with incredible detail and then burned right out in the middle of the street.  Its incredible if you are friends with Javier on facebook he put  bunch of pictures and you should totally check then out. Max and Sammy were adamant that we should make spider-man even though that isn't necessarily a 2011 thing. Max did it all from the planning to the paper mache and painting. He was so cute because he missed a spot on the head with the paper mache so he kept saying spider-man had a hole in his head and he drew a sad face on him because he thought a hole in his head would make him sad. Poor little Sammy had to go to bed though because you know, he would have been as sad as Spider-man if we would have kept him up till 12 so he didn't actually really get to join the festivities. That really was too bad, but I keep reminding myself, there will be other new years eves.

Nest we had a dance party and rocked out to all of Javier's favorite songs.

Max took this picture of us. As a side note, for years Javier couldn't dance with me without just laughing at what a horrible dancer I am. I think I have either actually learned how to salsa or he has learned more tact...I'm not really sure which.

Then he took a few silly ones of himself :)

Burning the año viejo at midnight. We laid out a bunch of tin foil to keep it a little safer hopefully.

This was such a great year for us! I feel really humbled to think about all the ways the Lord has blessed us! Good bye 2011.

The following night Javier and I played a truly epic game of risk which he won fair and square but I declared it more like a tie because that's the kind of wife I am, and Javier in his sweet (and smartness) smiled and agreed with me. You see he always has a hard time talking me into playing risk with him so whenever we do he either lets me win, or tells me profusely afterward that I should have won. He's a sweetie!