Calamity Christmas

My sisters, Mom and Dad and Jen met up in St. George for Christmas this year. We have rented houses for vacations before and it's always been great...St. George house? Not so much! It was so much littler than what it was advertised and NASTY! Not the kind of nasty that can be cleaned, the kind that just needs things replaced! But what could we do, right? So we made the best of it...even if I only took my shoes off to sleep and shower! Seriously gross! Almost everyone got super sick and stayed sick the whole week, it rained most of the time, Lukey broke out in hives, Mike forgot our presents from Santa at home {But one of my sisters friends who was in Vegas watching the bowl game brought them to us! Such a sweetheart!}, and the excitement only got worse once we got home! Our mailbox got broken in to and our mail stolen! Caleb had an ER visit, Lukey keeps breaking out in hives, Tessa keeps me up all night coughing, poor girl, and Mike's truck got broken in to! Yeah, the ignition and lock on the driver side door is all busted from them trying to steal it and his computer is gone! Punks! You'd think we lived in the ghetto or something! And, we're in a rental since my van is getting fixed from the german shepherd incident, so we have one car for the past 2 days! Ugh! Our luck better be turning around fast! lol! We all need a vacation to make up for this disaster of one! But I got to spend time with my most favorite people in the world and I got to shop!
p.s. I tried to take Tessa with us to see Tangled...not a good idea!!

Tessa and her cousin Quincee with their Grandpa Great. We made a visit to my aunts to visit her and my Grandpa. He's 90 this year and not doing so well, so we all wanted to see him!


Christmas for 15 kiddos!


Opening presents!


We have a tradition where the kiddos all pick names to buy




Tessa girl on her new pony! I've been trying to teach her to say giddy-up!

We have a few family traditions. We always make sweetbread, the kiddos pick names to buy for each other as do the adults, we read the Christmas story on Christmas eve, sing and this year we talked more in detail about the nativity. It was so special and really helped my testimony to grow! Even if everything went wrong, the spirit of Christmas was with us!:)

Ali & Dan and 3 of our nieces, Alana, Courtney and Caitlyn came to my house after Saint George. We went to the park, shopped and made it down to the strip to ride the NY roller coaster, MGM lions, TI pirate show and the Bellagio water show! It was so fun to hang out...even though the kiddos got really sick that evening! Boo!