and a month later...Christmas!

Better late than never, right?!

The very best part of December was lots of visits from family...meaning lots of extra hands to change, feed and hold the babies. We got spoiled by all of the extra help so settling back into the reality of having just the two of us to take care of 3 kids was pretty tough at first!

Anyway, let's move on to the real reason anyone comes to this blog: pictures!

First up in December (well actually, this was late November for us) was Christmas tree decorating. We thought Benjamin would have fun doing this, but he lost interest after hanging 2 ornaments. Oh well, maybe next year...

Mid December brought a visit from my Dad and Vivi. I put them right to work and had them feeding babies and changing diapers...yes, even my dad! It turns out the last diaper my dad changed was mine 29 years ago.

Grandpa and his newest grand kids!

Have I ever mentioned that taking a cute picture of the twins together is almost impossible? They obviously can't sit up, they aren't easily entertained (so getting smiles is near impossible) and they are almost never looking at the camera at the same time. Honestly, most of the pictures I take of them together end up looking a little awkward. Pretty sad considering photography is a hobby of mine! I can't wait until the babies are a few months older and I can start getting cute pictures of them sitting up side by side smiling. Until then, you get to see a lot of separate photos. This was over a month ago and they truly look different now (well, more so Zoe).

Oliver

Zoe

Looking festive on Christmas Eve!

Check out Zoe's Christmas bling

Oliver dreaming about what Santa was bringing him...

So anyway, you know those Pottery Barn "anywhere chairs" that seem to be at everyone's house? Well, there's now one at our house too. Benjamin loves those chairs! Since before he was a year old, he would always go right for them whenever we visited someone that had one. We were actually going to buy him one for his first birthday, but decided to hold off a year. Since we didn't want to wrap it up, we just left it out for him to see first thing on Christmas morning along with his easel from Uncle Jason and Aunt Janelle. We placed his stocking on his chair and he was so excited when he woke up and saw everything!

Once he realized that there were several items in his stocking, he got really into pulling things out. He was especially excited about his new Elmo shirt!

I don't think we really thought the whole chair thing through. Maybe we shouldn't have gotten his named monogrammed on it...because now we'll probably have to get one that says Oliver and one that says Zoe and we so don't have room in our house for 3 of these chairs!

A couple of days after my dad arrived, my mom and my little sister Brittni flew in. Benjamin just LOVES his Aunt Brit! We had a few small incidences where Benjamin decided to hit Aunt Brit when she wouldn't do what he wanted her to (oh hello terrible twos...how nice of you to arrive) and it upset her because she didn't realize that she had permission to give him a firm 'NO!' (Aunt Brit is only 10 years old after all!) This about sums things up...

Thankfully, Brittni is super forgiving so she and Benjamin got along quite nicely most of the time and she was a HUGE help to us! She's great with the babies and could even change their diapers without help!