We are back from vacation and ready for an awesome 2012!  We hope all of you enjoyed your holidays.  We had so much fun celebrating with our families!  Christmas Eve Mass was beautiful and we came home to open one present and then put out milk and cookies for Santa.  I love everything about Christmas but one of my favorite parts is seeing how excited the kids are on Christmas morning! It was our youngest daughter’s first Christmas and she was most excited about having lots of people around.  Some of the favorite presents for our other kids were a doll house, a Lego Harry Potter Castle, and a remote control robot that dances and shoots things.  But when all the presents were unwrapped and toys were all around instead of playing with their own things they all gathered around Jason’s new nook to watch a show!

We left on Christmas to drive to the mountains of Tennessee.  Jason and I had the bright idea of driving through the night so the kids would all be sleeping.  That was a terrible idea!  We used to be awesome at road trips because we lived across the country from our families.  The drive there reminded us that we are older than we used to be!  It was gruesome and took us twice as long as we had planned, but we got there safely and that is all that matters.

For our vacation we rented a cabin in the mountains.  The view was absolutely gorgeous!  We had a three story cabin with a deck on every level and even the bottom level looked down onto tree tops.  There was a hot tub, a foosball table, a pool table, and a fireplace.  My favorite part of vacation was sitting by the fire place playing our son’s new chess game which he got for Christmas or reading our books.  We also visited the Great Smoky Mountains National Park but there was crazy traffic in the park so we didn’t explore too much.

Our cabin:

The view from our middle deck:

Playing games:

Two year old attitude (we told her she couldn’t have any more candy):

Our baby is 3 months old already!

Out to dinner:

The kids loved being in the hot tub in the cold mountain nights:

The jetted tub:

Waking up our son with a snowball (he wasn’t happy about it):

Some sleet/snow/rain mix:

Our drive to the National Park:

We got home from vacation in time to celebrate New Year’s Eve at home!  I thought all of the kids were going to make it to midnight but both of the girls fell asleep with less than an hour to go.  Jason and I rang in the new year with our two boys.  Our “Cheers” was with yummy sparkling grape juice and we had noisemakers and midnight kisses too!

Many blessings to all of you for the new year!