Adventures of Natalie & Mark: Merry Merry Christmas

This year for Christmas we went to Boise to spend Christmas with Mark's family. We did a lot of fun Christmas activities and had a wonderful time seeing everyone. Emerson loves being around all the cousins

Saturday we went to "Santa's House", but really this couple's license plates are iamsanta and msclause. They deck their house out in every blow-up Christmas yard decoration available and ten-trillion lights. But it gets better... He dresses up like Santa, puts cut-out reindeer on his four wheeler, and pulls a red sleigh behind it around the neighborhood. He does it all for free all Christmas season long. It was a blast, a freezing long-wait in-line blast. Emerson kept pointing and saying "Ho Ho Ho" to all the blow up santas and whenever he saw "santa."

He would not stop looking at the lights, he loved it

We made gingerbread houses, Emerson was mostly interested in trying to eat all the candy off of them and even swiped the frosting bowl and was eating spoon fulls out of it.... He thought it was all awesome.

Jana & Mike played a white elephant game with everyone but with candy bars. A genius idea when there are lots of kids and you want to keep it low cost. All the kids loved it and were really good with all the taking and stealing in the game. Except for 3 year old Sawyer who told Uncle Matt he couldn't take his snickers from him, but who would let someone steal the snickers?

Gracee and Hudson helped us pick out some specialty Root Beers to have a little root beer tasting

We got to meet up with Melissa and her family Christmas Eve for breakfast

Emerson thought baby John was pretty funny and would always giggle when he made a funny noise or was kicking around on the floor. He would go over and give him hugs or rattle his toys in front of him - it was pretty cute to see him try and interact with him.

Emerson made a big depute as the donkey in the nativity. He mostly just wandered around

checked on on baby Jesus a few times

played with uncle Mike

Then the manager turned into a car and Lincoln pushed Emerson around the room.

Christmas Day. Emerson got his very first kids movies (since we didn't have any before) pajamas, clothes, 2 water bottles ( he is obsessed with water bottles), freezer-dried mangos (his favorite treat ever, I think this is what he was most excited about), a toy plane, and his very own snow shovel because he always tries to help mark shovel the drive way.