= New Additions =

I got to go shopping the day after Christmas to a few of my favorite stores and found some wonderful things at a wonderful 50% off. It was great. I was only sad that I had to put them away and that I couldn't do Christmas all over again just to show them off. Check out a few of them below.
Just click to see it closer if you feel the need.
I also was at Target earlier this week and realized all their Christmas stuff was 75% off. Wow! Who can pass of a box of Christmas lights for 50 cents? Not me, that's for sure. We're so set for next year.
And finally, my favorite new additions are two ornaments sent to us by people we love.
Kris's dad made the wonderful guitar ornament, which I think is so cool. My mom made the gorgeous bead snowflake. Something fun about that is that I found most of the beads she used at a little shop just a block away from my house. Then I sent them to her and she put that masterpiece together. We are so lucky to have such creative talent all through our families.
I love hanging these kind of ornaments on the tree, to me it's like hanging love up there. I know that sounds super cheesy, but it's how I feel.
I'll be sad to take the tree down this weekend, but it's time. Adios Christmas, hello yucky cold winter. Good thing we have a couple of birthdays to celebrate, they should tide us over into spring!

-> The Day itself <-

It's taken me so long to post about Christmas because I have a whole bunch of fun pictures of Christmas morning, and I was trying to figure out a way I could share a lot of them with you without the post ending up about 12 feet long. I think I've got it figured out, you'll have to tell me what you think once you get to them.
Now to the story:
We expected that Max would wake up pretty early Christmas morning, as he usually does every single other morning. However he slept in. At least an hour past when he usually gets up. It was really nice. But then we couldn't get him out of bed. He's funny because a lot of the time he calls to us to ask permission to get out of bed. He didn't used to do that, but now he does. It's funny. So anyway, he called out and said "Is it sunny?" Which is Max-speak for is it time to get up. We said yes and he should get out of bed and see if Santa came. He didn't get out of bed. Kris went into his room and said "Do you think that Santa came?" Max said no. He didn't think so. We were both like, "huh?" So weird. So anyway, once we finally got him out of bed and into the living room he was excited to see that Santa had eaten all his cookies and left him a note. He enjoyed his stocking too. Among other things he got a ball that's supposed to be easy to catch, and an orange. They both turned into Katamari balls almost immediately. Good job Santa!

Then we moved into the kitchen to eat what I'm told is the traditional Hendricks family Christmas breakfast. Captain Crunch with crunchberries. Or "Christmas cereal" as Max likes to call it.



Then, energized by all the vitamins and minerals in our breakfast we went back to tackle the presents.
I'm going to do my best to keep this post from turning into a list of the fabulous presents we received. Suffice it to say, our dear far away families took very good care of us, and we felt very well loved.
One of the things I really love about gift giving on Christmas is the opportunity to really think about the people we buy gifts for, and an excuse to spend money on them. It's usually really fun for me. I had a good time finding gifts for everybody this year, and it was obvious that others had done a lot of thinking about us. So fun!
So we went ahead and opened many fun presents, while taking numerous breaks for Max to play with his cool new toys.
Click on the pictures below to see them bigger if you want to.
Kelly and Lechelle came by right after lunch and we got to hang out for a while and swap gifts. It's fun to have them close, we always enjoy getting to be with them on special occasions. They gave Max a harmonica. It's almost driven me insane already, but not quite. He loves it and calls it a "furmonica."

After they left we turned on the video chat and got to watch everybody in my family open up the gifts we had gotten for them. It was fun to get to see that, it made us feel lots closer than we actually are, that's for sure.


After the chat we finished up our gifts so that we could get ready to go to our friends' house to have dinner. It was really really hard to tear Max away from his new loves.
My favorite thing that I got from Kris was an awesome ring that he made for me himself. It is so cool! I can't believe I get to wear something that 's so pretty that he made himself. I'm trying to encourage him to put up a post about how he made it sometime soon. We'll see.
It turns out this was a good Christmas for me as far as jewelry was concerned, check it out. The ring is in the lower left corner:

Between Kris my mom and Char I want for nothing!

We had a great time at dinner with our friends, and then headed home to go to bed. We were all pretty exhausted.
Thanks to all our family for all the hard work they did making us feel special and cared for. We really felt it. We missed all of you but we knew you were thinking of us!
I'll leave you with my favorite shot of the day. It's Max reading the directions to his new marble set very carefully and seriously. He "read" them like that for probably about ten minutes.

And to all a good night!

::Christmas Eve::

I just love Christmas Eve. It's such a great magical sort of day. We had a pretty good one this year. We started it out by visiting the gym, and then we went home and cleaned the house in preparation for the big day. After that Kris had to do some studying and Max and I hung out for a while. We were planning to go for a late lunch to one of our favorite Italian restaurants in town. We drove out there only to find out that they were closed! I guess that's what we get trying to go to a small family owned place. We were disappointed, and went back home to regroup. Luckily we got home just in time to meet some friends from the ward who dropped by with delicious Christmas treats. After we visited with them for a while we headed down to the Plaza to get burgers.
This is us waiting in the car while Kris ran into the grocery store to grab rolls for Christmas dinner.

Burgers were good, but Max had a tough time concentrating. The fact that his meal came in a little red wagon didn't help with the concentration, but did for sure add to the festive atmosphere of the evening.

You can see from this picture that monkey (oh whoops, I mean SOCK monkey, I get in trouble for that all the time) also came with us to dinner. He comes with us most places lately.
After dinner we headed home where Max opened up his Christmas Eve PJs and his last advents present. I have to say I'm really really pleased with how the advents presents turned out. They were really exciting for him and I think even helped him get a better idea of the passage of days in general. Also, the Playmobil nativity was great, I think it really helped him relate to the story. So I'm happy with how it turned out. (Oh yeah, except that the day after Christmas at bedtime he was very upset that he didn't have a "number present" to open. That was a little tough to explain.)
We read the Christmas story in the scriptures and then acted it out with the Playmobil.



After that we read the nativity pop up book that's a classic from when I was growing up (I was so excited when I found the book at a used book store a few years ago).
Then Max put out Santa's milk and cookies (yum) and hit the sack. Nice and early. Then we had the rest of the evening all to ourselves, just the way we like it!

We somehow convinced Sultan not to eat Santa's goods.
More Christmas to come!! I'm sure I'll finish with the reporting sometime before Easter rolls around.

+) A Christmas First (+

Max had his first Santa experience this year. We'd never had occasion to have him sit on Santa's lap before, and honestly he probably wouldn't have been able to handle it until this year.
We have some good friends at church that were very anxious to have pictures of their kids with Santa. They invited us to come out to their YMCA for a santa/Christmas fest. We had a good time. Max told Santa he wanted "Big Cars". Santa looked up at me questioningly. I was like, "What's confusing about that? The man wants big cars!"

Secretly I was thinking how glad I was that I had bought him a toy camper for christmas, because otherwise there would be no big cars to be found.

After Santa the kids frosted a cookie and ate it:

Max and Michael and Katie all hard at work, all with messy mouths:

Then the kids decorated little popsicle-stick frames for a polaroid of them with Santa. It turned out cute!
It's nice to have friends with kids who Max enjoys.
See you next year Santa!

__Christmas at Max's School__

They sure knows how to keep Christmas at Max's school. I guess that's one of the benefits of a private school--the teachers can celebrate Christmas if they want to!
When I came to pick Max up on the last day of November his teacher was madly sewing. I didn't know what she was up to, but when we went back to school on the first day of December there they were: an advents calendar for each child, with their name on it. There was a small toy or trinket sewn to it for each day. How cool!
Here's a picture. I took this picture pretty late in December, so there's not much left on the calendar, but you get the idea I hope.

The names are kind of covered, but Max's is the one with the pink kooshy ball near the bottom. He dreamed about that ball all month.
I thought this was such a cute idea, and so much individual work for his teacher. I also found out later that the kids got to pick out all their goodies. The teachers passed trays of toys around and the kids got to pick out what they liked. What could be better? One of the days Max came home with a rubber cockroach. This cockroach was very realistic, and startled me several times. The worst was when I was doing the wash--switching clothes from the washer to the drier. I got to the bottom of the washer, and there waiting for me was the cockroach. I hadn't seen it for a while (I'm sure that was because it was hiding out in some pocket somewhere) so I had kind of forgotten about it and it really scared me! Max thought that was pretty funny.

At school they learned a whole bunch of Christmas songs which Max really enjoyed. He knows songs now that I don't even know, like "Up on the Housetop". Here's a little singing video we did that you're welcome to check out if you want. Max is definitely an enthusiastic caroler.


One day last week he came home with the lovely snowflake ornament that I highlighted in my post about the tree. I love it of course, and Max was very proud, and very excited to hang it on the tree.


Sometime last week they had a big Christmas party too. Santa Claus came and brought everybody a present to take home, and they danced and ate a yummy Christmas meal and treats. It looked like lots of fun to me. They gave me a couple of pictures of it, but Max was so enamored of the pictures that he walked off with them and I haven't seen them since. I'm sure we'll find them when we move in a few months....
Here's a picture of him all dressed up and ready to go to the party. So stinking cute!

Hmmm, I'm trying to think what else they did...they cut out lovely paper snowflakes and hung them from the ceiling, they made cute snowman frames for small prints of their school pictures and they got a very exciting fiber-optic tree with moving glowing lights that made the kids very excited.
I'm always impressed at the work Max's teacher puts into her school, and this Christmas stuff was no exception. He had a lot of fun.

+) The Festive Preparations Continue (+

I think the following photos speak for themselves:
I love the sparkley ribbons below. They make me really happy.
I actually really like to wrap presents. Well, I like to as long as the house is quiet and the rug isn't covered with dog hair and if I can watch TV or listen to some music while I do it.
I actually tried to get Max to help me wrap some stuff the other day and it was a fiasco. It was like he all of a sudden grew about 10 extra hands and was grabbing and squashing everything in sight. There was nothing I could do to make him stop. Then he started jumping around and that was the end of it.
So I'm not going to try that again for a while.
If there's anybody out there that wants to trade cooking dinner for wrapping presents I'll do it. Just let me know!

I also like to make cookies. Ok, well let me be a little more specific. I love the IDEA of making cookies, and think about doing it all the time. I also like eating the cookies (I mean seriously, who doesn't?) but I don't so much like the stuff in between, I mean like the cooking and stuff.
But I do end up doing it sometimes anyway. Christmastime especially.
Do these pictures make you drool? I hope so!
Yum Yum.

|| Super-Cool Sledding ||

What could be a better christmastime activity than sledding?! Max has never yet gotten much of a chance to play in the show. It doesn't really snow as much out here in Missouri as it does in Utah or Colorado, and the snow usually ends up pretty icy. So anyway, we had a bit of an ice storm last week, and then this last weekend there was a fun snowstorm. The ice with the snow on top of it made our local park into a sledding mecca. It was great.
I was a little worried though because Max doesn't have any snowpants. He was just wearing his jeans with PJ pants underneath. By the end he was looking like a walking snowman, I figured he was soaked. So I decided we should leave and it broke his heart. We told him he could sled two more times and he said "I need to go LOTS more times!!" We got him home and he was cold and freezing but dry, thank goodness.
It was a blast! Hopefully we'll get to do it a couple more times before the winter's up.
Here's a fun video I made, it's kinda like being there except not as cold. Enjoy!

-> Christmas Decor Part 2 <-

Here is my mantlepiece. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I really don't have too much to say about it I guess, but it does make our living room feel really cozy and christmassy. I love having nice mantles or fireplace ledges or whatever to decorate. They're my favorite.
Some detail:
Some friends adorning the window sills:

The tree will be part three! Thanks for checking these posts out--these are mostly for my moms and family who won't be seeing us for christmas, but if they make anyone else smile then that's great!

-> Christmas Decor Part 1 <-

This year I spent a good amount of time thinking about how we should do our christmas decorations before I started working on them. The house we're in now is quite a bit smaller than our last house, and so I have a lot less "decoratable" spaces. In fact, we had to displace Kris's string base that had been living in the corner of our living room so that we could fit the christmas tree in! So it took some creativity to do everything I wanted to do.
I was thinking about ways that we could decorate that would be fun for Max, and maybe even include him somehow. I thought maybe an advents calendar would work. I couldn't really find any that I liked though, and I was reading a magazine that suggested giving small gifts as an advents calender. So I thought I would go for it and do it myself. I got a playmobil nativity scene and wrapped all the individual pieces, also wrapped up some boxes with little treats and a few christmas books that we already owned (that Max doesn't remember at all) and some PJs for christmas eve and then numbered them all. I didn't think this would be that hard, but it took me almost an entire saturday to do it!
I put the little presents in some pretty green and red bowls with some pine cones and ornaments and placed them on the table next to my lovely nativity.
What do you think?
Now I just wish I didn't know what was in the packages! They look so festive and exciting.

So far it's been working out great for Max. He's able to keep track of what number each day is and he loves the playmobil. We've been talking about the different characters of the nativity as we open them up. I hope it's helping him to learn. It's definitely helping to build excitement for Christmas for all of us I think!

Stay tuned for part 2....