Christmas 2011

We had a great time!  Benjamin's brothers and their families came to our house for Christmas this year.  Our first Christmas in our new house and we were able to spend it with lots of family!
We spent a lot of time watching the kids play together, chatting, and playing games.
One sister-in-law is from Sweden and so we went to IKEA (being a Swedish based store) for lunch and walked around.  It's a neat store, they have the kitchen of my dreams there.
  We made sugar cookies with the kids, went for a walk, went to the park, and went to the Festival of Lights at the Washington DC temple.
On Christmas, we woke up around 6AM and opened stockings and played with Santa gifts.  Then we ate breakfast, got ready for church, had enough time to take a few quick pictures of the kids, and AMAZINGLY made it to church ON TIME!  There is absolutely no excuse for being late in the future.  If we can all get ready on Christmas, with 6 adults and 6 kids and be on time, then there is NO excuse to be late again - we'll see. :)  We had a yummy well prepared (except the burnt marshmallows) dinner, and pies.

The next day we played our new games, mostly the ones for the XBOX Kinetic.  We got some great laugh wrinkles from that.  Please watch following video for some fun times!

On the night of the 26th we went to the Washington DC temple to see the lights and enjoy the visitors center.  It was wonderful.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas at Arlington National Cemetery

Benjamin is one of the scout leaders for church and therefore he gets to go to the activities with them.  This last weekend, Dec 10th, they were going to Arlington National Cemetery for the Laying of the Wreaths.  It was an amazing experience.  We were able to see many of the tombstones of the people that have fought for our country.  Many of the tombstones were of people that had been able to live long full lives, but there were those we found that had died young, during a war.

When we first arrived at the cemetery, there weren't very many people, but there were several semi-trucks filled to capacity with wreaths that needed to be laid.  Honestly, I thought we'd be there all day trying to lay all those wreaths.  However, as soon as they were ready to get out the boxes, tons of other people showed up and it took maybe an hour to adorn the tombstones.

We learned that the symbols on top of the stones symbolized the religion or denomination of the soldier.  We were told that the tombs with crosses we could place a wreath at (of course), but the Star of David symbol we do not place a wreath at (however they hope to find something soon to honor that person during Hanukkah).  We found another symbol that was familiar but didn't know what it was until another person from our scout group pointed it out that it was the Angel Moroni.  

At the end of the morning we went to the Tomb of the Unknown and attempted to watch the changing of the guard.

Overall we had a great time and are considering doing this as a Christmas tradition.