Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and My Birthday

Again I am writing this post way after the fact, so hopefully I can remember everything. I do know that as much as I love the holidays and all that comes with it, this year exhausted me. I am definitely going to blame pregnancy on that. During this pregnancy I didn't get too sick, but still didn't feel great. My biggest struggle this entire pregnancy has been fatigue. What I lacked in puking I sure have made up in exhaustion. I thought the second time around I would definitely be more active and try to keep my energy up, but that just didn't happen. From the very beginning I lost my energy and never really got it back. I think that really affected my ability to keep up with all the demands of the holidays, even in an effort to keep things a little more simple this year. Anyway, here we go.

This year we celebrated Thanksgiving with the Prusse side. We had a pretty low key day and a nice dinner at Sam's parents. After dinner we just played games while the kids watched a movie, which was nice. Overall we had a great day. This was also the day we announced that I was pregnant. I think because it was Thanksgiving people on social media didn't notice that it was a pregnancy announcement and thought it was just a Thanksgiving post. Oh well!

                                        

Here is a better picture to show that I am pregnant, ha ha. This was the photo I put on the back of our Christmas cards to announce my pregnancy to extended family and friends.

With my exhaustion and the very cold and long winter, a lot of our afternoons looked like this.

One thing I am really glad that we took time to do was participate in the activities that my Grandpa's assisted living community held for families. Since I am writing this in retrospect I can say that my Grandpa passed away in February. This picture is extra special to me because it is the last picture we took with him as a family. The quality is terrible, but I am really glad we took it. We saw him many more times after this but since most of those visits were when he was very sick, I never felt right about taking more pictures. I am grateful for the time we had to spend with him while he lived in Utah the last 6 months of his life and I will treasure those memories forever. I will definitely write more about this in another post. This picture is from a big Christmas dinner that his assisted living community held. It was a nice dinner with a choir that sang fun Christmas songs and then Santa showed up at the end. My Grandpa was so cute signing all the songs and just enjoying life. Gavin loved it too, especially when he got to sit on Santa's lap. Gavin LOVES characters and so he loves Santa and has zero fear sitting on his lap. He was so ready to tell him what he wanted for Christmas and I love this picture of him because he looks so proud to be there. 

In the middle of December we were lucky to be able to go to the Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert. The last few years we haven't always been able to get tickets and I really wanted to get them this year and by some miracle we lucked out. I had really been looking forward to this day and we had this big plan for everything but to keep a long story short, the evening didn't quite go as planned. Salt Lake City and Temple square has become SO crowded over the years. We thought we were giving ourselves enough time but basically instead of having a nice relaxing date night, we found ourselves rushing to even find a place to eat that didn't have an hour long line. We literally scarfed down some food from the food court at City Creek in barely enough time to make it to the concert. The concert was amazing and did not disappoint, which improved my mood a lot. But then after we totally could not remember how to get to where we parked and walked around for a good 45 minutes before we figured it out. By then my mood had dropped again, my pregnant self was sick of walking around, and it kind of ruined the vibe from the concert. So the concert was awesome but the night was pretty stressful. But here is a pretty picture from after the concert!

We were glad to be able to make it to our ward Christmas party this year because we missed it last year. The decorations were amazing and there was tons of food. They did a Christmas song sing along for the kids, which was right up Gavin's alley. It was a really fun night!

It felt like we had about a million different Christmas parties and places to be this year and in the end some of our favorite parts of the month were the things we just did at home or with just the three of us. One of those was decorating our Gingerbread House. Its one of our traditions and Gavin was actually really good at helping this year. We all had stomach aches from eating too much sugary candy and in the end had a pretty good looking Gingerbread House. The rest of the month Gavin had fun sneaking candy off the house even though it was hard as a rock.

My mom has started a new tradition of having a Santa Party for the Grandkids. It is pretty fun and the Santa that comes is the best. He is the real deal people, even though he comes in a pick up truck, ha ha. He is great with the kids and sings songs with them and its a lot of fun. Ha ha, can you tell how excited Gavin is from this picture? I couldn't get a clear picture because he couldn't stay still. He volunteered to be first to sit on Santa's lap and knew exactly what to say to him. It was pretty cute.

We also have an annual party with the Prusse side of our family. We had the annual Prusse Bingo party and here is Gavin dressed up for about two seconds as a shepherd. Gavin was very against dressing up in any nativity costumes this year because he just wanted to be himself, a very three year old boy thing to so. The party was fun, but a little crazy because Sam's mom Julie was very sick so she stayed upstairs instead of joining the party. Also Sam's brother Ben was very sick getting over a gall bladder surgery complication. Everyone seemed a little more tired than usual, so despite it being fun to get together and for Gavin to play with his cousins, it wasn't quite as festive and energetic as it usually is. 

 Sam dressed up as a shepherd for Gavin, which was pretty funny.

Another one of our favorite nights in December was when we went to the Layton City lights. We had never been there before but I kept seeing people talk about it so we decided to check it out. Originally I really wanted to take Gavin to Temple Square in the name of tradition but we decided to go here instead and I am so glad we did. I love Temple Square but it is so crowded and we live about an hour away now. It becomes such long and busy night that it isn't always that fun in the end. These lights were perfect because there were lots of animals made of lights, it wasn't crowded, and it was a lot smaller than Temple Square. We would definitely go back!

One tradition that I love that our Church has started is having just an hour long Sacrament meeting before Christmas and having it be focused on music and the Savior. It is so nice to have such a nice meeting and more time to spend as family. It is always a great service and it really helps me get in the Christmas spirit in the best way. Here we are in our Christmas Sunday best.

This year we had our Bethlehem Dinner with my family on Christmas Eve, which I guess I didn't take any pictures of. It was a great dinner and we had fun but by that point I was so exhausted and ready to be done with Christmas parties. It was fun because my Grandpa was able to come and we did a nativity and sang Christmas songs and everyone had a fun night. By the end Gavin was pretty much a wreck though and you could definitely tell we had maybe had a few too many parties and too many late nights. It was nice to just be home on Christmas morning and spend that part of the day at home.

Here is Gavin on Christmas morning. He had asked for Lion Legos and a bulldozer and Santa delivered. We don't make a huge deal out of Santa and all that but it is fun to see him get excited that the cookies and carrots we had left out the night before were gone and that Santa had "visited" our house. Every year Gavin gets older Christmas gets a little bit more magical.

After spending the morning at home we ventured out to visit family. We spent some time with Sam's parents first and then went to my parents and ate some dinner there. We got to spend more time with my Grandpa and had fun seeing some cousins. By the end Gavin was super tired and this was the best picture we could get because Gavin kept crying and screaming that he didn't want any more pictures. I can't really blame the poor kid.

Fast forward a few days to New Year's Eve, aka my birthday. It was a good but very unconventional day. In the morning we saw a movie as a family and then ate lunch at Slackwater Pizza in Ogden which is always delicious. We had planned then to get takeout or go out to dinner with my parents and just hang out with them and then go home and ring in the new year at home and put Gavin down to bed. Well it didn't actually happen that way because a few days before my Grandpa had gone into the hospital because he was very sick. We decided to spend some time with him because we weren't sure if he would make it through. It ended up being a really special day for me because although spending my birthday at Lakeview Hospital in Bountiful was not ideal, I got to share some really special moments with my Grandpa. We actually stayed at the hospital until about 11 pm with Gavin and managed to have some fun with my Grandpa. He was still really sick but had made kind of a turn around and was alert and talking and so it was really nice. We ended up just spending the night at my parents and I even still got a cake and everything.

We managed to make it through the year, I turned 32, 2019 came, and we survived another round of holiday chaos. It was fun but this picture of Gavin pretty much sums up how I felt after it all.