christmas eve!!!

christmas eve was a full, busy day for our little family!

one of our favorite traditions is going to get donuts the morning of christmas eve. 

we always take a picture in front of the tree with our sleepy bedhead and then go get donuts at our favorite donut place. this year, because christmas eve was on sunday (which i totally love!), we decided to make donuts at home before church. it was delicious and greasy and sweet and such a great memory... but it was a lot of work making the dough the night before, waking up early to roll out dough and cut out donuts, then frying and glazing them. not to mention that we smelled strongly of fried dough for sacrament meeting and the house still hasn't fully recovered. but it was fun!

i love this picture because it sums up owen pretty well. he always has to be helping in the kitchen even if it interrupts lego time :)

it took some trial and error to get the oil temp just right, but chris figured it out! turns out the pioneer woman (who's recipe we used) cooks hers at a temp much higher than we preferred it. we had chocolate, maple, and regular glazes... plus a few with sprinkles for the two little boys.

donuts + bacon + scrambled eggs = happy, full kiddos!

and our traditional picture... done up for church instead of in jammies this year.

we only had sacrament meeting on christmas eve. 

it was a beautiful meeting and i felt the spirit several times touch my heart and testify of the truths surrounding our savior's birth. i felt a deeper love and appreciation for mary and what she must have gone through emotionally and spiritually after the angel gabriel visited her. and joseph too. it was a special meeting to me and filled my heart with peace. 

anyways, due to our shortened meeting time, i asked the kids to put together a little christmas concert for the family. the big kids got flustered and upset if they messed up and kept asking to redo their songs. they better learn how to handle their mistakes because they have a real recital coming up in january!

and because i know grandparents will enjoy it, here is their concert on video, minus all the major mess ups :)

Christmas Eve recital from Lisa Brower on Vimeo.

after the recital, we put together some flowers and headed to the closest nursing home called Ashton Place. we walked in and asked if there was a resident that doesn't have many visitors this time of year.  chris spotted a resident slowly making her way down the hall with tears in her eyes. we introduced ourselves and asked if she would enjoy some flowers. she was very confused and rambled quite a bit as we walked with her back to her room to drop off the flowers. not sue if she had any idea what was going on, but she definitely stopped to point out her flowers to the other residents as we walked by :) even though it was short, we enjoyed our visit with jamie at ashton place.

that evening we had the missionaries over for our traditional spaghetti dinner complete with spicy sausages! i wish i had thought to take a picture because our table was quite pretty and it was fun to share our evening with the elders. after, we read from luke with them while the kids acted it out with our little toy nativity set. we watched the nativity video after that and then played a game and had dessert. i made a white chocolate raspberry truffle cheesecake that was extremely good!

we gave the elders some gifts to open christmas morning and chris also brought out all of his ties and let them each pick out a new tie. they seemed to think that was pretty cool!

 after they left, we brushed teeth, then snuggled up by the fireplace while we tried to recite the night before christmas while chris read it. then we opened a gift all together, got the kids in bed, wrapped a couple gifts and waited for Santa!

because opening a gift on christmas eve is so special, we decided to have the kids open our big family gift that will take place in march.

thanks to grandpa and grandma brower's christmas money, we are going to take the kids to sea world to celebrate getting our student loans paid off!!! we have tried to be very open with the kids about our whole loan process. we dont want them growing up thinking that we have a bunch of stuff just because thats how it is. we hope that through this they have learned that we have had to work hard, make sacrifices, budget, and plan in order to get to where we are and where we will be. they are just as excited as we are to make our last payment in january!

usually we save all of our gift wrapping for the night of christmas eve, even though we hate doing that. we turn on james bond movies and watch while we wrap, which means chris wraps one or two during each movie and i wrap the rest and miss most of the movies. BUT this year was different!!! we only had a couple gifts left to wrap. so we decided to rent the movie logan lucky on vidangel and then went to bed. it was so nice to enjoy the evening instead of the usual rush rush rush of wrapping.