Christmas Recap and Annual End of the Year Trip

My girls just came from visiting a retirement center to sing Christmas Carols to the elderly and make cookies with them.  Outfits are from The Children's Place.

Hey Yall!  How was your Christmas?  Did Santa give you what you wanted on your wishlist?


My families Christmas was a very laid back one.  We celebrated at home without visiting another family home, so it was great to have family bonding at our own house.

On Christmas Eve, Mr. M had to work so the girls and I hung out in our PJs all day and built our first gingerbread house.  I think we did a pretty good job considering we never did this before.  We managed not to eat all the candy before we stuck it onto our gingerbread house, well we did eat a few gumdrops and sweet tarts.  But I will say that it was a pain to build, it kept falling apart.  Our icing wasn't hardening up fast enough, which created a longer time to decorate the house.  However, the time spending with my girls was priceless; I wouldn't trade that time for anything.


It was getting late in the evening and soon Santa was going to make his appearance, so I sent the girls to bed.  They both were fighting sleep, the excitement of knowing when they wake up the next day the tree downstairs will be filled with gifts and wondering what old St. Nick was going to get them. 

I had to spy on them every hour to see if they were sleep so I wouldn't get busted placing gifts under the tree.  There have been times when the girls wouldn't fall asleep until 2 to 3 am which left me tired as heck, and yet they still managing to wake up before the sunrise.  Gladly, this year was different.  Michelle's fight with sleep didn't last too long, and she was down for the count at 11 pm, Lauren was right behind her at 11:30 pm.


Christmas morning, my girls were up bright and early, before the sun was shining.  They woke me up, and I looked at my clock telling me it was 5 am and some change.  Ummm....nope!  I'm not getting up!  Y'all is going to need to wait!  I allowed them to go through their stockings, and I quickly went back to sleep.  They hovered over their gifts with such delight in their eyes, and the anticipation was killing them having to wait.


7:30 am rolled around, Mr. M and I got up, then watched the girls tear open their gifts. 

Lauren made this Snowman canvas for me.  She is becoming quite the artist, just like me!

My daughters loved all their gifts they received, gathered it all up to take upstairs to their room to never be seen or heard from again!  LOL!  It was like, do I still have daughters anymore?  They were busy playing with their new toys and playing with their latest game system, WiiU.   I'm glad we got them the WiiU because the XBox One they have doesn't have a lot of kid-friendly games, and I heard the PS4 is not as kid-friendly either.

One of the biggest gifts that I give to my family is our annual End of the Year trip.  Usually, we go to one of the amusement parks in Florida to ring in the New Year, but this time, we wanted to do something different to avoid the crowds.

Can you take a guess where we are going?  I'll give you a hint, we went to this place this year and fell in love with it.