Christmas Eve 2012

We were very lucky to have Grandma Redford back from Europe to come and spend Christmas with us before heading home to Canada.  We hosted a turkey dinner for Christmas eve, and invited a few friends from our ward to join us.  LaRon Gneiting took all of these pictures and gave them to us as a thank you for dinner. 

 Paige was very excited, even though she had no idea what was going on.  Zoey was thrilled to have an audience for her dance show with daddy. 

After dinner, we did a few fun activities.  We decorated Christmas sugar cookies.  Some of the adults there had never done this before and really go into it.  I wish I had pictures of some of what they come up with.  We had some very creative decorating.  And it is one of Zoey's favorite things to do because, of course, she likes to eat the cookies with the frosting. 

 Grandma did our Family Home Evening lesson on the nativity.  She'd brought a great magnate board version of the story and told it with those tools.   She even left it for us, so it will become a family tradition every year.  We didn't act out the nativity because we'd done that the night before with Zoey's joy school classmates. 

Grandma Redford gave the girls their Christmas PJs this year, which they opened just before bedtime.  Zoey couldn't have been more thrilled to have so much pink, and so many frills.  Paige gave us a great laugh Christmas day that will be part of the next post. 

I am pretty sure that the dinner tasted good, but it got a little weird for me.  I felt awful and like I might pass out at any minute.  When all the guests left, I took my temperature and discovered I had a fever of almost 102!  Thankfully, Grandma Julia and Kevin did the clean up, and I didn't have that much more to do to prepare for Christmas morning.  I thought I'd just overdone it, trying to get ready for Christmas, but as I found out two days later, I actually had a really bad sinus infection.  Antibiotics cleared it right up.