Finally the weather calmed down...

By Sunday the weather seemed calm enough to attempt a trip down to Owatonna to exchange presents with the Boyces. The boys were thrilled with their new games and toys. Here are the 2009 Christmas Boyce and Hagen family photos.

Merry Christmas!

Our Christmas plans had to change quite a bit since we did manage to get a snowstorm here in Minnesota. Christmas eve with the Waceks/Boyces has been rescheduled for Sat. Jan 2nd and so we went to Mass on Christmas eve afternoon and then had a quiet evening just the four of us after the boys added baby Jesus to the creche.

The boys opened their gifts this morning and have been playing (and fighting) ever since. They each got a Vikings t-shirt and a Chuck E Cheese $10. gift card. Connell also got a Backgammon game and a mini pool table. Liam got a little parking garage for his Matchbox cars and a cash register (those are all the presents from Santa and within our family, too)

Merry Christmas to everyone reading my blog!

Sledding

Christmas eve day was perfect for sledding at the neighborhood sledding hill! Ray and I went with the boys and a few neighbors and their kids. Thank God for the warming house afterwards and the hot chocolate that Marta made them to have with cookies! (Ray didn't make it into any of these photos that Brian Fendrich took).

Christmas Decor

I thought I would share a couple of pieces of our extremely minimal Christmas decor around the Hagen household. We don't decorate a lot as we have very little room and the boys are infamous for destroying things.

We do have our Little People Nativity set adorning the fireplace mantle. It's been up since the first Sunday of Advent and we chose not to put baby Jesus nor the three magi in it until the appropriate time (so the boys will add baby Jesus on Christmas morn and we'll add the kings on the Epiphany). We purposely do that to remind us of Jesus' coming. Well, the reason I thought to put the photo was because when John Henry was here yesterday, he looked at me and pointed to the creche and asked in a serious tone, "What happened to Jesus?" Then I explained it all to him, but given that he is only 3 1/2, I'm not sure if he understood the whole story!
Our Christmas tree went up for the second year now (we didn't start putting one up again until Connell was 4 and Liam was 2 for obvious reasons -- well, obvious if you have spent any time around our curious, energetic boys...) So here is the tree. And I have often talked to many of you about how simple we have tried to be in our Christmas and gift giving for the boys' sake. To put it into perspective... this tree has under it everything among the four of us, presents for all the Boyces, presents for Ray's mom and Tom & presents for 4 of the boys' cousins. We already had some Christmas celebrations and so several presents are gone. Santa will bring one thing for each boy as he always does and that will be it.

Liam entertains

Liam had his friend John Henry over for 3 1/2 hours this morning. They played inside and I took them out back sledding for about 30 minutes. We also got our winter gear back on to walk up the hill to meet Connell off the bus. Connell took one look at John Henry and asked, "Who's that?" It was a fun morning.

Liam's Christmas Concert

Liam had his preschool Christmas "concert" this morning at church. Although he doesn't look very happy in these photos, it's mostly because the lighting is so bad in the sanctuary that the photos never turn out. He did a nice job of pretending to sing (or actually singing) and behaved quite nicely.

Weekend Recap

Luckily the snowy weather took a short break for the weekend to allow us to make the 2 1/4 hour drive to Little Falls for Christmas with Ray's dad and wife. It was a fun afternoon. The boys had fun playing games and playing with their new toys. Liam got a GeoTrax portable track and train and Connell got Othello and Battleship. It was nice to see everyone. Ray's grandma Hagen came with aunt Sheila and her husband and so it was a nice size group.

Yesterday afternoon the three males put up the Christmas tree while I paged through hundreds and hundreds of Connell's paper scraps from the last year trying to decide what was worth keeping and what needed to be recycled or thrown out. Connell is the "king of paper" in developing his own games and somehow there are scraps all over the house. We had been throwing them in a bin when people came over just to get them all out of sight and so it took HOURS to sift through them all. Of course Connell didn't want to part with any of them. There were also about 10 partial decks of cards in the mess from which I was able to create 2 full decks. Argh. Someday I have to go through our real paperwork to figure out what to shred or keep and yet just keeping up with Connell's paperwork is nearly a fulltime job.

This week is quite full with Ladies' Night Out, several church programs and meetings at church, ECFE, last-minute Christmas prep, etc.