Christmas Weekend

I love the holidays.  I love Christmas and having kids has made it that much better.  It's also made it that much more stressful.  The amount of pressure I put on myself to have the most magical season is silly.  Every year I say I'm not going to do it and every year about the 14th of the month I'm ready to hurt people because of the stress.  Which in turn creates the least magical last 10 days of the season.  I try to do an advent activity calendar every year and by the 5th I've all but given it up.  Barrett doesn't even seem to care about it.  I spend so much time planning when we're going to do everything and then it all goes out the window and I feel bad for giving it up and beat myself up for the rest of the season.  I think next year I'm going to pick a few things I want to do and just do them as we can.  I think I felt so tied down to doing them on the exact day that when it didn't happen I'd just give up and then I was sad we didn't get to do them.  Ok, enough about that.  We had a pretty good Christmas despite it feeling like the universe didn't want us to have one lick of fun.  We kicked off the weekend with our 4th Annual Birthday Brunch Playdate.  This is one of my favorite traditions.  I feel like Barrett might get the shaft when it comes to having a Christmas birthday.  But I just couldn't handle having a birthday party every year in the midst of the holidays. Everyone is busy and it's just too much.  So we have a fun little playdate with all of Barrett's buddies (we celebrate Jackson too since his birthday is the 22nd) and it's worked perfectly for us.

In the past we've had a fun activity planned but this year we did not.  We let them run wild and get out every single toy we own and just have the best time.  Barrett told me it was the best birthday party ever.

We took this picture before the everyone left.  We laughed because the last Friday we had our fancy couples party and then a week later we looked homeless.

That night we headed to my cousins house in Pelham for the Slovensky family Christmas party.  It's a highlight of the season every year.  I was so upset because the Birmingham bowl game was on Saturday so Patrick had to work late and didn't get to go.  Then he had to work during the game and missed going to my grandmother's house, which also upset me but at least he has a job.  We are thankful for that.

This is the only picture I took.  These outfits from last year still fit and I hope they will match forever.  We had a really fun night but we missed Daddy.

Our first day of Christmas weekend was a blast, we were ready for the rest of the celebrating!