Christmas

We spent Christmas in a state limbo.  Most of our belongings were on a truck somewhere in transit to our new home.  We left Indiana on the 23rd after church.  That was Katy's bday and as she was the youngest of all her friends in the ward, she had really been looking forward to entering YWs with them.  So, we were all packed and headed out right after church that day.  Actually we stayed for little Angie Mathew's baptism.  She had been in  my primary class and was such a sweetie.   We left the church parking lot and headed straight for Cleveland.
Christmas was quite and relaxing it was just my parents, Alex, and us.  We did manage to see Aunt Faye, Gary, Maria, and Uncle Bob, and Colleen Theusch.  

 Santa decided to bring one nice small gift for the older girls to make it easier in the move.  They were thrilled with their Ipod touches

 Jacob got Star War lego from Mima and PopPop

 Bella and Jacob got a tablet to share.  The elves did not do a good job making them. Cheap quality ones are not worth it! On a side note I just love this boy!  How many 20+ year old men do you know who would wear Christmas footie PJs??

 I wrote the story of my parents conversion in a fairy tale form and had it made into a book. The grandchildren (except the two babies) each illustrated a few pages.  My parents had no idea that we were doing this even though Nicholas and I sat on their couch over Thanksgiving with a laptop so he could format for me.  It turned out so much better with his mad formatting skills!

 Bella and her doll got matching outfits

Jared and I left the day after Christmas to go back to Indiana to finish up. We loaded a U-Haul with stuff we couldn't load on the truck and finished cleaning the house.

Side note:
 The kids and I could not handle not having a tree during the Christmas season.  We still didn't know when or where we were moving two days after Thanksgiving break.  Jacob and I decided we were going to enjoy the Holidays so we decorated the house the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.  We did exercise some restraint and didn't use even half of our decorations just in case we ended up moving before Christmas.  Jared came home the night we decorated and informed us he would be starting his new job after Christmas. His "orders" had come in that day.  (We don't really get orders like in the military but we move so often and our new location often continues to change right up until the last minute.  It feels like we are in the military sometimes) Good thing we hadn't used all the decorations.  We did however leave the little tree up until the very last minute before the truck showed up.