Moran Family Fun

The big day finally arrived and Santa actually came!  The girls woke us up at six in the morning, earlier than any Christmas before.  We dragged ourselves out of bed and stumbled down the stairs to find filled stockings and presents under the tree.  Since we take more pictures on Christmas than probably any other day in the entire year I decided to put together some collages and spare everyone from looking at the bazillion pictures I wanted to put on here.   Every year we hide our pickle ornament somewhere on the Christmas tree and the person who finds it gets to open the first present and Emily was the winner this year.  We hung our stockings on the coat rack in our entryway this year and I think I love them there.  It is a perfect solution if we never have a mantel. It was a challenge to get a decent picture of Natalie because she was so excited and goofy the entire morning.  Her favorite gifts were a gigantic Kinder Egg, Barbie clothes...

When you live far from your extended family you have to find a substitute family for the important occasions in life.  This year for Christmas Eve we were lucky enough to celebrate with our good friends, the Frost family.  They are so much fun and it is always a good time when we are with the Frosts so we were very grateful that they invited us to share in their Christmas celebration and traditions.   It was a fun night - the kids had a pretty epic pool noodle light saber battle and the adults had a great time just talking and laughing. It was especially nice to have that sense of family at Christmastime.      After a delicious Christmas Eve feast the kids put on Nativity pageant.  The kids drew names to see which character they would play.  Samantha and Madison were wise women, Abigail was a shepherd, Emily was Mary, and Natalie was the angel.  Natalie was so excited to be the angel, but honestly, she wasn't super angelic.  We to...

Samantha Fenway is nine!  It doesn't seem like nine years ago that we had the most exciting Christmas Eve of our lives and welcomed this little one into our family.  I found some pictures of sweet Samantha so we could see how she's grown and changed since that crazy Christmas Eve in 2004.   It was such a crazy time that we didn't even take any pictures of her until she was two  days old and ready to come home from the hospital. At one year old, Samantha could crawl but not walk, had zero teeth, and was a tiny little girl. She had been growing steadily until around ten months and then she just stopped.  By one year she had dropped off the growth charts and we're still waiting for her to catch up to the other kids her age. By her second birthday Samantha was very verbal and loved to talk.  She was still very small for her age and looked closer to 15 months than two years.  People we didn't know were often astonished when she woul...

One of my favorite things about this time of year is the music.  I think music and Christmas are meant to be together.  It made me happy that we had a very musical Christmas this year.  Madison, Emily, and Abigail each had a band concert, there was a youth choir at church that sang "The First Noel" (with Madison conducting), our ward choir performed some beautiful Christmas music, and we had our annual Frauenchor Christmas concert and this year all the girls sang with me.   Madison's concert was great this year, but I sometimes feel like the percussionists just stand in the back waiting for their turn to ring the gong, or crash the cymbals, or play the chimes.  For a lot of the concert she looked pretty bored.  I did love the last piece they performed because it was percussion heavy and Madison was able to play the chimes (the tall instrument behind her in the pictures) which looks like a lot of fun.  It can be hard to see her in the video becau...

We kind of know for sure now that we will be moving away from our lovely German home this summer.  So, barring some sort of military miracle, this has been our last Christmas season in Deutschland.  Something we especially look forward to and love at Christmastime in Germany is Christmas Markets.  Two days before Christmas we took advantage of our last chance to enjoy the sights, sounds, and smells of Christmas in Germany by traveling to Wiesbaden to visit the Christmas Market there.  Our previous experiences in the town of Wiesbaden had all been centered around the Army base there and well, lets just say we weren't impressed. It seemed as if it was a dirty and run down sort of town.  Given those low expectations, you might be surprised we even chose to go there, but it was pretty much Wiesbaden or nothing within ninety minutes of our house as many of the markets had closed for the season the previous day. Luckily, we couldn't have been more wrong about Wies...

We celebrated Natalie's seventh birthday earlier this week and as I was wrapping presents and baking a cake for the big day I got to thinking about just how much she has changed and grown in the last seven years.  I felt grateful for digital cameras as I sat at the computer and easily pulled up pictures of our sweet Natalie all the way back to when she was brand new. Natalie at around one week old.  She was not our most pretty baby at this point - she was still kind of scrunched up and was obviously a little jaundiced.  However, she was one of our easiest babies and was such a happy girl.  In fact, she still is a happy person who finds joy in even the simplest things. That joy for life is easy to see in this picture of Natalie on her first birthday.  Even a cake mix birthday cake - a total mommy fail in my eyes - was wonderful to Natalie and she continues to have that attitude about life.  For Natalie every day is the best day ever and every e...