Christmas Parties before Christmas

Testing out the gallery feature of WordPress and it’s pretty cool!! I wanted to do this post before I did the three other ones but those just had to come first 🙂 And I really wanted to do this one because we had so much fun over the weekend!

Saturday we had Mike & Ang come over for our Christmas dinner. We usually go out but finding a babysitter for two kids is a little hard these days… LOL – So they came over which was lotsa fun.  We saved our Gingerbread house to decorate and it came out AWESOME because Angie was directing us.  Look how cool it looks?

Sam was having SO much fun. In fact, she kept saying that over and over. “I’m having SO MUCH FUN, GUYS!!!” You think we bore the poor girl all day long. Well.

I had to add in the picture of me and G sticking our heads in. haha 🙂 After that the boys watched the Laker game and Angie and I gabbed. I like to gab. Gabbing is fun.

Sunday was our annual Williams Family Christmas party.  Love that party. It was awesome as well. Sam attached herself to my youngest cousin Dana and she was SO SWEET (Dana, that is) and played with Sam for HOURS. Tons of little people and let Sam follow her around.  Sam loved it. She sat next to her for dinner and loved life.

After dinner, seeing all the cousins sitting around at the table and chatting, I made a comment about how we should all go get a picture together for the parents.  They all generally agreed and laughed and moved on.  I then made the comment AGAIN to my Mom and two aunts and they were like, awww, let’s do one right now! 🙂 So then we ALL walked outside. And argued about where we should all stand. And went back and forth about it… Then they said we should go up to the balcony. So we did. Sam snuck up with us, she was following Dana. Even though she is not a cousin, and basically.. what? a second cousin to them all? We allowed her in! haha 🙂 So, I think my cousins were about to smack me after that. It took forever!

So then we came back down and they decided that they found a better spot in the backyard and proceeded to try and set us up there.  All the aunts and uncles were out staring at us by this point and taking photos.

We kicked Sam out of that one… but OH MY GOD, I just realized that Dana was not in it! LOL!! Sheesh. Besides which, the sun was IN OUR EYES and all the Mom’s (aunts) kept telling us to close our eyes and then they would count to three and have us open our eyes. It just did not turn out well, did it? This was the best one and Danielle and Stevie were still doing crazy things with their eyes! haha! Well, then they all made us go out to the driveway and take yet ANOTHER photo.

And with 8 different cameras pointing at us, no one was ever looking in the same direction… Except for this one, maybe.. we just were all looking the other way and not towards this exact camera! And I decided that since Sam was in the picture, I would grab little G. 🙂

It is so nice to see all my cousins at these family gatherings.  Katie and I (well, Danny too when he was alive) were always the oldest ones. I guess Danielle was also around but we didn’t see her that often when we were younger for some reason… But we were the oldest ones by about 6 years or 8 years, I think so now that we are all getting to the ‘grown’ up stage, it’s easier to connect with everyone.

And they are all growing up so amazing! I love hearing about the things they are doing. This is my Mom’s family… and there were four kids… married and all had children.  Now, I’m a little hazy on the exact order of the kids… but Danielle and Katie are the oldest – Danielle was telling me she was working to be a birth coach and has some amazing stories! Katie is my wonderful sister, of course, and she is heading out on tour with the PDC in January to help organize them. After me, I think Kyle is the oldest and he is serving in the Navy (I think, jeez…) and is being deployed in a month!!! He is not sure where he is going but the 7th fleet usually gets sent to China or Korea or areas around there, so we will all be thinking about him and hoping he will be ok.  Taylor is after that and he is doing filming and won an exciting award that I posted about a few months ago. I also think he is helping with some of his parents business and doing some new offshoots with it with his brother, Brandon.  But Nicole and Stevie are next, they are about a month apart.  They both have graduated and Nicole went on to work at a non-profit, Project Kindle that works with children effected or affected by AIDS. Stevie came home after graduating from Boulder and is working to be a lawyer, I beleive. I think she is interning and going for her second degree right now! Gina is next, going to college and working, she is a busy girl. Brandon is after that, working with Taylor on a few different businesses. Dana is the baby, she went into middle school this year.

So that is our big family on my Mom’s side.  I used to see my Dad’s side every Christmas Eve but since he moved up to Oregon (along with my Grammy), I don’t see everyone that often. But he is one of four children as well, and I think I have 16 other cousins – another huge family! Hubby’s family is small in comparison, LOL.

Which is why our Christmas’s are always huge! But I love my family, I feel so thankful to have everyone around!

That was our weekend, we actually ended the day with our regular Christmas game where we buy one present and do that steal three times thing.. which is always entertaining!! Justin had an early number and choose something that got stolen, but before it got stolen I had a late number and my present wasn’t opened yet soo… YES, I OPENED my own present. 🙂 It was a Borders gift card, I figured I should open it since no one had yet! haha 🙂 Of course I kept it. 🙂 HEE, no one stole it from me.  But then hubby opened another one after his was stolen which turned out to be GIRL sunglasses! ha! So I kind of got two gifts. I thought that was funny.

G ended up sleeping in the crib after he fell asleep and Sam had some quiet time in the bedroom watching some TV while we played our game. No nap and she was TIRED OUT!

We are looking forward to our regular Christmas! Can’t wait for tomorrow, Christmas Eve!

xoxo

Tagged as: christmas, Photos