Picture Perfect Christmas

In order to have a picture perfect Christmas- 

 My front entry way.

you must have family around.  Emma was not going to be able to get more than a day or two off of Walmart so we decided it would be another away Christmas.  We generally don't like to go away for Christmas, but we did last year, so why not again this year? 

We stopped on the way to pick up a new addition to the family.  The boys have been begging for a dog for years and we always had a good excuse not to get one.  We no longer have an excuse!  Rob found this dog, after almost getting tricked into an internet scam "dog."  Luckily, I kept feeling it was a scam and kept nagging about it, so he made me check it totally out and we figured out it was indeed a scam.  Non-scam dogs are much more expensive! 

Angus is a full bred Scottish Terrier.  He is cute and smart and also too smart for his own good, but more on that later.

We also stopped to see a couple arches at Arches National Park as we headed up.

Next we stopped at my parents house to give them their presents and get our.  The boys got a day at a fun center with go karts and mini golf and laser tag, among other things.  I got a night out with Mom to see the Nutcracker Ballet by Ballet West. 

It was wonderful!  There were all kinds of little girls all dressed up with their moms there.  It is obviously a tradition for many people in the area.  We just had never done it before.

Rob and Sam hopped over to Rob's brother's home and did some picture perfect snow machining.  

Lots and lots of snow is required for a picture perfect Christmas and we got just that!  

The kids made a snow dog to go with the snowman.

Poor little Angus was buried in the snow every time he went out!  I don't think he enjoyed going out much- besides that he still wasn't trained to potty without a door open all the time.  He pottied a lot on many different rugs!  Oops! Sorry!

Lots of dog friends, family and fun games made it even more perfect.

Christmas day was nice.  They don't get excited as they used to, but they still play along pretty well.  Sam wrapped Joe's present that he really really wanted, but I refused to buy, up with some bullets for his nerf gun.  Joseph said, "oh, I know what these are.  Yep, bullets." And then he saw the game he had wanted.  He went crazy!  It was super fun!  Best thank you ever.

Before New Year's we left, since Robert had to go to work right afterwards.  We had a super subdued New year's.  In fact I don't think anyone actually stayed up.  We were woken up by gun shots at Midnight however, because that is obviously a thing you do here in New Mexico on New Years!  We have since had one snow day.  This was our crazy amount of snow that day-

Dosen't quite compare, does it?  We had a few heavy presents that couldn't come with us visiting, so we opened those too.  One was a basketball hoop and one was clay thrower for Rob.