Merry Christmas To All.

We had a great Christmas this year! All our kids (except for little Ella) were able to enjoy what was going on Christmas Morning and it was so fun to be apart of and watch their faces.

Click the link below to see a few of our pictures:

http://www.flickr.com//photos/mcgowanfam/sets/72157632395497364/show/


*The link will not work on your iphone, so find a computer or laptop. 

  (It should bring up a slideshow which you can pause or speed by clicking the pictures.  Also by the clicking the pictures, you should be able to see a small description I wrote for some of them. )

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We celebrated Christmas the saturday before the 25th because Michael likes to have a lot of time to play with the kids before he has to go back to work and my mom was able to come that weekend as well. Steve and my mom arrived friday evening.  The kids were excited to see them and excited for the following morning.  We visited with each other and read the Nativity story along with a Nativity play set that my mom brought us. Afterwords, we tucked the kids in bed and waited for them to fall deeply asleep before Michael and I invited Santa up from the basement.  It took Santa all night to put the TMNT Sewer lair, KK's doll house, and Logan's jungle set together.

The following morning we woke up and enjoyed our most favorite Christmas morning ever. The kids came downstairs and immediately went straight to their gifts from Santa. Even Logan went to his which made us happy since we thought he'd go to Haiden's turtle playset.  After that, we began opening gifts.  All three kids were able to open gifts and have fun which was a delight to watch.  Out of the three, Logan was probably the funniest to watch this year.  He has his own facial expressions that are sort of like his "language"- and yes, if he looses all his precious variety of expressions when he gets better at talking I will be sad. We absolutely loved hearing Kailey say "Merry Christmas".  It was her first year to be able to say it, sing Christmas songs, and really understand what was going on.  She was very cute and fun on Christmas morning, I promise. I think Haiden enjoyed having Kailey and Logan being able to be involved in everything with him. He and Kailey are like best buds at home and it was cool to have them each "give" each other gifts this year. And precious Ella was the beautiful baby in the background and we are very grateful for her.  It felt like we had our first Christmas as a complete family.

Here are some videos of our morning: 

I'd also like to take a tiny bit of words and say how thankful I am that by Christmas morning we all had medicine in our systems that helped us enjoy everything.  All of us were sick with throat, ear, and eye infections except for Michael, who ended up getting sick a few days later. I'd be silly not to mention that Heavenly Father had a hand it as well since Michael was spared and even though we all had just barely gotten on meds, we started feeling better pretty quickly. :)

For us, we enjoyed a great Christmas.  Christmas to us is love, family, service, and Jesus Christ.  I feel like we experienced all these aspects and made a point to make sure our kids understood the reason we celebrate Christmas. There is always that feeling that we could have done more, and I think that is a beautiful thought because we always can do more.  We can always strive to be better and to center our lives around the Savior.  I pray we all have a blessed New Year full of love, family, service, and Jesus Christ.