Wow, what a week we’ve had! We started out our week on Sunday with a brief trip to the zoo for Wildlights. We were meeting Amy, Andy, and the kids there – except we were delayed by the crazy traffic. What normally is a 7 minute drive to the zoo took us 45 minutes! So our meeting up with the Bethune’s was brief to say the least! But we enjoyed walking around looking at the lights with Grandma Armstrong. We also grabbed a bite to eat there before heading home. Grandma watched Finn on Monday and they enjoyed some nice time together. Finn loves the attention and Grandma loves to play with him.

Monday night we headed up to Mansfield for the holidays. Christmas Eve my dad, sister, and I headed out for our annual tradition of shopping! We hit plenty of stores and surprisingly not a lot of shoppers. In the evening we took family photos before heading to Christmas Eve service with my parents. We added lots of sound effects to the service with 4 kids under the age of 4! Griffin did really well and even sat in his car seat for the first 20 or so minutes. The official family photos that Amy took will appear at a later date!!  Here is Finn with his hippocampus from Grandma!

Christmas morning was loads of fun. We had four kiddos roaming about the room and six adults to add to the excitement. The 5 dogs were cozy in the family room out of the commotion! Griffin enjoyed ripping open the presents for a short bit but then found it more fun to either be cuddled with someone or roam about and get in to any and everything! Here is our little santa (in the same outfit Graham wore his first Christmas) and the rest of the Beilstein troop. You’ll notice Finn and Greta (and maybe Graham and Rowan) in awesome custom capes that Aunt Amy made for each of them. Super Finn sported his for quite awhile! Grandma and Grandpa gave the giant teepee to G & R and the kids table and chairs to Finn. He enjoyed sitting in the chair for a few minutes too. We wrapped up (no pun intended) our visit by putting the hostas to bed for the weekend on Friday morning, covering the hoop house in the woods until next spring! On Saturday we hosted the Armstrong Christmas at our house. We had a nice relaxing day filled we lots of lounging, chatting, and food. Kevin made “the breakfast” for brunch and we had a scrumptious ham dinner with lots of extras to top things off for dinner. We all enjoyed opening gifts together and especially watching Finn sit on his new bike from Grandma and Grandpa. It was an absolute hit – it plays tons of rock songs and Finn just dances and rocks back and forth. You must see the new scrunchy face that is accompanied by snorting. He makes it mostly when he’s dancing and excited. Check out the video:

And if you’re still reading…or scrolling…you’ll want to check out Finn playing peek-a-boo all by himself these days!