Best Christmas Break Ever (Told Through Instagram)

Good morning, friends! I hope that you all have enjoyed your Christmas and New Year’s with your families. The holiday break was just what our family needed this year to get our 2012 started out right. Thank you so much for giving me the chance to regroup and spend some much needed time with our family.

We did a whole lot of nothing this year while we were on holiday. My husband took the entire week off of work and for the first time ever, we had a whole week of nothing.

I bought a big box of Christmas puzzles that I thought the kids would enjoy doing with us.  Our kids could have cared less about the puzzles after the first day, but Ryan & I found ourselves sitting down every night and trying to put these together while listening to holiday tunes on Pandora. I think this was one of my favorite things that we did and I can’t wait to tackle these again next year.

As is the tradition in our house, the kids opened their Christmas pajamas one day early and we took them in their new jammies to see the holiday lights and for peppermint shakes at Steak & Shake.  All other traditions ceased to exist after our family was attacked with a rotten case of the stomach flu.

Of course the stomach flu happened on my daughter’s birthday, Christmas Eve, then Christmas Day…pretty much all of the important days to our family. We tried not to let it rain on our perfect Christmas break though.   On Christmas Day morning though, we were all feeling well enough for our baked gingerbread donuts and the kids enjoyed this fun treat with mugs of milk after opening their presents.

The week before Christmas break, I shut our cable off on our television. After I shut it off, I realized it was the week before Christmas break and banged my head against the wall. Surprisingly, we have done really well without our cable (more on that later). I figure if we could make it through this week, we could make it through any week since this is the most time we ever have to watch television.

The kids really enjoyed our old favorites (A Christmas Story, Rudolph, & Charlie Brown) and Emily discovered her inner superstar after she saw, “Annie,” for the first time.  There was a lot of signing and dancing in this house this year. It still turned out to be a great lazy week of television watching despite our cable shut down.

We had a wonderful NYE with friends and I am looking forward to seeing what this next year has in store.  God has been very, very good to us. I am thankful for all of the blessings that happened in 2011. I always like to start the year out with a few goals and this year is no different.

My resolutions for 2012 are:

Finish the writing of my first book

Read two literary classics

Read 60 books this year (in total)

Take a knitting class that pushes me out of my comfort zone

Keep a daily journal (that is not my blog)

I don’t know how I am going to manage to get those kids back to school this week since we have barely climbed out of our pajamas by noon each day, but I am sure it will feel good to be up and moving again once we get in the swing of things.  We were thankful for our completely lazy and indulgent holiday and hope you had a wonderful holiday too!

Happy New Year to each of you! What are your resolutions this year? What was your favorite moment from your holiday break?