O'Malley Christmas 2008

Here's a photo summary of our Christmas Day so far for our families who we couldn't be with. We miss you all and love you and can't wait to see you in the coming weeks!

I'll start with last night. We went to the Christmas Eve service at church which is quite possibly the only church in the entire country that doesn't have a candlelight service and sing 'Silent Night'. We then came home and feasted on the Ortiz traditional Christmas Eve meal of tamales, homemade beans and sopa. We bought the tamales from a local Mexican store, they were quite different than my family's homemade tamales, but still good. Then we opened one present each.

This morning, I woke up at 4:30 and couldn't fall back asleep so I took a shower, surfed the internet and started cooking breakfast at 7:30. Mom, you'd be so proud of me. I made the strawberry shortcakes, from a box but still... Then we opened the rest of our presents and stockings. We took a nap and then headed over to our friends, the Verhey's. They were kind enough to invite us and another young couple from church over to their home for an early Christmas dinner. Both the couples had young babies so that was fun for us to be around. We even tasted pheasant! They had a really fun, but excitable, dog that Brandon played fetch with. We read from the Bible, had some good fellowship and prayer time, got some more advice about babies, and had a white elephant gift exchange.

We just got home and called our families and are about to watch Home Alone and eat leftover tamales. All in all, not too bad for a Christmas spent on the opposite coast from our families. We can't wait for next year, though, when we're all together and our boys are nearly a year old :-)

Brandon got me an awesome massager. I think he was trying to send me a message that he's sick of me asking for massages every single night. Silly Brandon, don't you know that there's no substitute for your massages though?

Here's Brandon in the sweatshirt I got him

Our unborn babies had at least as many, if not more, gifts than Brandon and I under the tree. Those babies sure are blessed already to have such loving grandparents and aunts and uncles!

Thanks for the 'fun money' Gary and Sari!! The frames are adorable too, we'll hang them in the boys' room.

Here's a picture of the families we had Christmas dinner with.

And here's Huck and Emma enjoying their Christmas feast, we got them some special food treats ;-) They're still roaming around the house looking- and begging- for more.