Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve morning we went to the zoo with Matt's parents, Jaymee (Jayna's little sister), Christian, and Declan (our nephews). It was a lot of fun as always and was actually not very crowded.

In front of the Sahara exhibit...

Shaylin seems so old when she's walking around by herself. It looks like she's working on her cool walk here..


We take so many pictures in our family that we end up with pictures of people taking pictures...


Matt's dad got some very good shots of the animals - here's a few:


This time we visited the Stingray Bay exhibit - Matt's parents were nice enough to pay for us all to go in! It was fun to get to touch the stingrays and little sand sharks.

On Christmas Eve night we went up to the Brugman's (Jayna's parents). It's a tradition in their family to cook up a lot of appetizer type food and play games on Christmas Eve.

One of Shaylin's favorite toys is the recorder that the Brugman's have. She giggles every time she gets it to make noise.

She's always happy during and after bath time.


Shaylin stole Nikki's (Jayna's good friend) camera and ran around pretending to take pictures of everybody. We don't know where she learned that from :)


The Money's (Nikki's family) and Jaycob's friend Devon came over for the festivities.


One of everybody's favorite games to play every Christmas Eve is the 'chimes.' They're basically just different lengths of pipe that you bang with big nails that actually make specific notes. They have a bunch of Christmas carols mapped out with specific numbers that correspond to the different pipes. It may sound a little funny, but it's actually a really good time trying to go all the way through the different songs.