Christmas!!

In the beginning of December we had a week of winter weather, complete with plenty of snow and freezing temperatures! It helped us to get into the Christmas spirit and for it to really start to feel like Christmas around here (too bad it didn't stick around for the actual week of Christmas)!

To get in the Christmas spirit, we took McKinley to visit Santa at the mall! She didn't even cry when he held her, she just kept a close eye on me to make sure I wasn't going to leave her with this strange guy with a beard. Santa told Travis that McKinley asked for a red Mazaratti for Christmas! She dreams big :)

One of my favorite things to do around Christmas time is some holiday baking! Here are McKinley and Travis enjoying the remnants of my baking adventures! Can you tell that McKinley enjoyed the tradition of licking the spoon :)

Here is McKinley showing off her cute Christmas shirt. Another fun thing I like to do with her around the holidays is dress her in fun holiday shirts!

On the 23rd, we headed off on the 6 hour drive to St. Louis to spend the Christmas weekend with Travis's parents and sisters! We had a great time! We went to a Handle's Messiah sing along, went shopping at a few malls around town, ate at a few fun restaurants, ate the traditional Christmas Eve dinner of fondue, Christmas breakfast of scones, opened presents, watched lots of movies, played games and enjoyed hanging out and talking with family we don't get to see very often!

We were so happy to spend a few days with Travis's sister Natalie and her family. We used to see them all the time when we lived in Utah and miss getting to see them! So it was nice to be able to spend a few days together and get to know their precious baby girl Violet a little better! McKinley still loves her Uncle Mike even though she hasn't seen him in a while.

One of my Christmas projects I was working on was making matching PJ pants for me and McKinley. Unfortunately, I ran into a few problems being the beginner sewer that I am. So I had my expert of a sewer mother-in-law help me out in finishing them when we got out to St. Louis. We just didn't get them quite done in time to wear on Christmas eve, so we took these pictures a few days later! Hopefully they'll still fit next year and we can sport them on Christmas Eve then :)