Christmas Time Rewind...

I just realized that I never put any pictures or anything up from Christmas! This years Christmas was a little different...we are usually in Houston for the Holidays, but several things kept us in Dallas this year. One being the fact that I left for London on the 26th. Anyways, Christmas Eve was so beautiful!! It snowed and snowed, and no I have no pictures of it, but I imagine that the images in my head will last for quite a while. Especially considering it was 75 degrees the day before. Seriously. I'm gonna tell you about the special Noche Buena that I was in charge of making this year....mainly so that years from now I can look back at this post and remember what a disaster it was, and why I'm glad Jared's mom has this responsability and not me:) First off, I forgot about the dinner all together. So the day before the 24th I ventured into Walmart (Kid free thanks to Ashley Howry) and got what I thought it was that we needed. NORMALLY the meal is a yummy pork roast, white rice, black beans, some yucca, and platinos, with a giggly flan to top it all off. WELL. I bought a pork TENDERLOIN, one can of black beans because we never finish them, no yucca (completely forgot about it), no platinos (they didnt have any), and I already had the stuff for flan and rice. I was pretty sure of myself. Until it came time to make dinner. The tenderloin needed to cook for about 45 minutes in the oven, and about 35 minutes into its cooking I open the oven and the thing still looks raw, so I thought...."huh, I guess it just cooks right up in the last 10 minutes...". Or maybe my oven spazed out and somehow changed the temperature to 80 degrees. I know what your thinking, "oh, she probably changed it on accident or something"...that's not the case, that would be impossible for me to do unless I were to stand there and hit the button 50 times to make it that low. It's just a Christmas Eve mystery. So I reset the oven and got it going...for another 45 minutes. I went ahead and made the rice, and Jared got one of his guys at work (yes he was working Christmas Eve) to pick some platinos up for him from a market out there. So Jared called him mom to find out what goes in the black beans. A little bell pepper and onion, easy. Only I put way too much bell pepper and onion, so much that they outnumbered the beans. And I only bought one can of beans if you recall. Oh well. As I was looking at the rice, I decided to make a little more because it just didn't look like enough.....and we never even finished the first batch. I forgot to mention that the plantains were GREEN....which meant they weren't going to be sweet the way we like them but at this point everything else had gone wrong so who cares. I made the flan that morning, which I thought turned out perfect, except that I accidently let the carmel at the bottom of the pan harden. Which made it REALLY hard to get out of the dish. Anyways, dinner turned out to be pretty good despite all the things that went wrong. So I'm going to leave it alone.  We spent a couple of hours at the McDonald's house that night and we sang carols and drank some yummy homemade egg nog. Then we went home to get the kids to bed and wait for Santa! I got to go to my Mimi's for Christmas morning breakfast, which I haven't had the chance to do for a couple of years now, so that was a really nice treat for me, and then we headed back to our house for some naps before it was time to go to my parents for Christmas dinner and my mom's side of the family. Let me just say, the kids were SPOILED...totally spoiled. You'll see in the photos. It was exactly the way I remember Christmas being while Dallas and I were growing up. They had a great time. And now I am going to document my mom's disaster of a Christmas Dinner....lol, because it made me feel a little better about my noche buena. We have mom's homemade potato soup every year...and she makes a HUGE pot of it, you could call it a vat I think. And I was so excited about having some. And we have a big ham to go with it and we make sandwhiches and stuff. But this year while we were getting the soup nice and warm we taste tested it...uh oh. Something was WAY off and we couldn't put our finger on it. It tasted like the sour cream or the milk was bad. she bought brand new of both for the soup so we ruled that out. Dad tasted it because he thought it was because we had just had onion dip....but even he made a face, and if you know my dad you know he will eat ALMOST anything. And he said to dump it. DUMP IT! AHH! Well at least we have the ham....the 20 pound ham that says to cook it I think 20 minutes for every pound. No one read that before hand. But its a ham...so it's precooked right? It cooked for about 2 hours I think and we all took our chances. As far as I know we all made it out okay. Anyways, that was our Christmas! Now on to some pictures :)

See what I mean by spoiled?

Dallas in McQueen and Wylee & Gunner in the Police car.

*edit*That would actually be JARED in McQueen...not Dallas. I mix them up quite often to be honest. Especially when I am yelling :)

Reading her new book.

Such a cute little guy :)

Sweet Wylee Bear