I can’t believe its Christmas Day.  I’ve been thinking lately (like the last few years) how fast time has flown by. This morning, I woke up, and realized that my babies aren’t babies anymore….but that hasn’t diminished the joy and excitement we share during the holidays.  After spending Halloween with the grandparents in Colorado, we decided to speed on down to Texas to escape the cold weather.  We have been spending the majority of our time in the Houston area and settled in for the holidays at our “home” in Livingston, Tx.  The only downside to staying at Rainbows End park is that we don’t have internet unless we go into town and have dinner at the diner.  While I normally don’t mind that at all, it gets expensive so we try to keep it to about once a week or so.  Anyway, here are some photos of what we’ve been doing during the month of December!

We spent some more good time with our friends the Pinegars 🙂  We stayed overnight and got up early to have breakfast with Santa, see the Christmas Parade, take a cookie walk, see some lovely lit historic homes, and generally share some good Christmas fun.

It was wonderful to share old friends, and allow our families to mix and mingle and become friends as well….and it was equally amazing to enjoy the holiday festivities with a true blue Texan family!

Now, even in a camper, you can’t have Chrismas without a tree.  So, out came our little tabletop advent tree again this year.  I didn’t realize that I was basically making an Advent calendar on our tree, but that’s what we did.  We cut out 24 shapes and write things on them that we would like to do…such as reading a story, making cookies, or taking a moonlit walk.  Then every day we pick one to do off the tree!  Here’s a few pics of our tree….

We have made some wonderful new friends here at the park in Livingston.  One special one is Bob….he and his dog Beauty have become such a sweet addition to our circle.  I’ll share in another post how he showed me how to fix a leaky roof!!

We also had some great neighbors for a few weeks.  Mr. Stape and his wife were wonderful with the kids and even had us over for cookies and a movie!  They are on the road and the kids miss them being our neighbors!

The park has a great weekly schedule full of things like this….line dancing!  The kids will never be at a loss if we go to a hoe down!

 

Carl wasn’t supposed to be home for Christmas…but what we didn’t realize was that we could come to him!  He was/is working on a land rig in southern Louisiana…so we decided that if we can do Christmas in a camper, then we can do it in a hotel room too!!  So, here we sit, on Christmas Day, hanging out in a cool hotel room getting ready to hit the pool while Daddy naps before going back to work.

We had a wonderful Christmas morning 🙂  Carl came in after work around 7:30 and we had breakfast and presents!  Now that he’s sleeping and the kids are aware that there’s a pool, we’ll probably head on down for a bit and work off all those cookies we ate!

I realized this morning, as I was snuggling in a warm pile of giggles and hugs, that it’s the spirit of love and the joy of giving that makes this day so special.  And I hope that you all realized that the biggest gift was that of a baby born long ago that gives us the most wonderful gift of all.  I hope you all are having a wonderful Christmas and are able to spend it with those you cherish most.

Merry Christmas my friends.  Thank you all for being a part of our lives and for continuing to share our journey with us!  Much love and God Bless!