Christmas Part I

I am feeling kind of overwhelmed by the amount of pictures that I have to post from Christmas. I will try to put them up quickly so you're not seeing Christmas pictures at the end of January! :) We feel extremely blessed to have so many wonderful opportunities to make Christmas special.

We hope that you all had a wonderful Christmas and look forward to hearing about them. We love and miss you all! :)

The Friday before Christmas, we had our annual Barker family Christmas party with my cousins and family on my dad's side.

We rarely get pictures of our little family all together, so I jumped at the chance to have Cindy take this one of us.

Grandpa and Emmy generously picked out some cute toys to give to all of the great-grandchildren. They were all very excited to be able to open a gift before Christmas. As soon as Mason got his open, he immediately said "Bear!" (It is really a beaver, but who would expect a one-year-old to know the difference?)

Later, all of the cousins were playing in the ballroom. Some of us moms were in there as well, and decided that we should get all of them together for a great-grandchildren picture. As I'm sure you can imagine, with that many little kids, it was hard to get them all to sit still...I wish we could see everyone's face, but what can you do? We wish that all of the cousins could be there, hopefully one day we will all be together so we can take a complete picture! :)

Here is Mason with his 2nd cousin, Alyssa. All of the sudden we looked over and they were walking across the room holding hands! It was the cutest thing to see, and of course no one had a camera handy. By the time I got mine, the moment was gone.

I really really regret that somehow I did not get a picture with my good friend and now cousin, Linsi. We grew up together and were roommates at BYU-where she met and married my cousin. I'm always so grateful that I get to see her at family functions when they are visiting from their home in Florida.

We ended the night with our tradition of singing Christmas carols. Linsi and I laughed so hard when we walked in and saw our husbands working together on tying this pink baby blanket. (Another tradition is to do a service project; this year it was to tie blankets).