Christmas Artinghelli Style

Merry Christmas from the Artinghelli's!

All I have to say is the boys are spoiled!  Spoiled with love, clothes and toys! It's crazy, I don't know what I'm going to do with everything.  I feel as if the walls are closing in on us.  Good thing I have the next 4 days off and I can try to get somewhat organized.  Good thing, I removed some of the "old" toys prior to Christmas and good thing I can take the tree and Christmas decorations down this weekend.  That should make more room. Ha, ya, make more room for our "double dare competitions"  This is what I see in the near future.  Up the slide, down the slide, through the tunnels and shoot the basketball in the hoop, who can do it the fastest wins!  Yes, we have all of those toys!  We even have tons of balls to throw and them during the competition.  

We truly have been blessed.  Christmas Eve we spent at home.  We pretended Christmas Eve morning was Mom Artinghelli's traditional Christmas morning. John and Morgan came over in pj's, the boys, Kevin and I came upstairs in our pj's and we opened presents and had Mom's famous pancakes and sausage, yum! Toys were played with, boys napped and then we had a great Lemon Chicken Dinner. After dinner, we went to Kevin's aunts house and had dessert!  Fun times.  

Boys looking out the window for Santa!

We put the boys to bed and finally got the play Santa!  How fun is that!  I feel like I'm part of a new club!  The Santa club.  I don't think it's "real" (being in the club) until the kids somewhat understand Santa or can at least recognize Santa!  We  had the boys sprinkle the reindeer dust so the reindeers knew where to bring Santa and we set up the boys obstacle course, tunnels outside their doors and laid the presents out.  No cookies and milk this year, but definitely next year!  Kevin has already volunteered me to be the milk drinker, too bad I don't like milk.  We'll see what happens next year.

Boys slept til 7!  WOOT WOOT!  I got them all ready to come out of their room.  We had the video recorder all ready to tape the excitement!  I'll have to come back and post that!

Santa set it up so they'd have to go through the tunnel first.

They were very excited!  Didn't want to open all of the presents because they wanted to open and play with the actual toy they unwrapped.  We had to keep telling them, you still have a couple more presents.  So cute!  They were very excited!  And I was equally as excited for them. Nothing like having kids to bring out the excitement in you!  We had breakfast, played with the toys, all had naps and then went to Aunt Karen's house for more fun and excitement. 

Just a little messy!

And then on Tuesday, we went over to my dad's (grandpa's) house to celebrate one last time!  Santa came there too!  All I can say is it as been a hectic and wonderful Christmas!  We are truly lucky to have so much love in our lives.

So I am looking forward to the next 4 days, 4 days off, 4 days to organize and relax (well relax as much as you can with 2 toddlers, wait, 2 boy toddlers ;-))

Thanks everyone for making our 2011 Christmas wonderful!

Christmas Fun

We are in the Christmas spirit at the Artinghelli household. The tree is up, decorations are out and the boys saw Santa.  We had our annual Christmas party at Brookfield Zoo this year for their Breakfast with Santa event.  Breakfast was good and seeing Santa was a blast.  I predicted that John David was going to freak, as he is having a lot of stranger anxiety.  I thought Austin was going to love seeing Santa!    Kevin was in agreement with my prediction.

Here is a picture of us waiting in line for Santa. As you can see John David was holding the stick that light up.  He was having a blast.

All is good at this point.  They did pretty well in line, only getting out a couple of times but staying within 5 feet of us.  We go into to see Santa.  As predicted, Austin was super excited and very curious.  He went on Santas lap and was happy as a clam.  John David was unsure, but did not freak.  We sat him on Mrs. Claus lap and he was still unsure, but no tears.  We quickly snapped as many pictures as we could and I tried to get them to smile or laugh.  This is what I came up with.

As you can see, John David isn't happy but he's not crying, so that's a win.  Austin is in the middle of talking.  So, I didn't get my cute smiling picture with Santa, but at least I did get a picture.  The one the zoo took, turned out to be the best and we have that one framed at the house.

We did Christmas Crafts over the weekend with Morgan.  We took foot prints and created a tree and we took hand prints and created a reindeer.  Boys loved doing the crafts, we had lots of smiles and giggles.  And I loved it because I have momento's of the boys hand and foot prints.





Austin's feet



John David's feet

Austin's hand

John David's hand

We also took Austin to see his first movie over the weekend, we saw Arthur Christmas.  Austin did great!  He sat in his chair, stood and even sat on my lap.  He enjoyed the popcorn!  I don't think he understood the movie, but that's okay.  I'm sure there will be more movies in our future.

We are just over a week to Christmas!  We are definitely looking forward to seeing the boys open their presents from Santa, afterall for the most part they have been very well behaved and on Santa's nice list!