A Weekend of Family Fun

The official Christmas photo

This weekend has been a ton of fun -- good quality fun.  Saturday, we spent a ridiculously long amount of time trying to take our family photo.  As you can see, it worked out.

In the first batch, Sugar Monkey forgot to smile.  I honestly think he wasn't angry, he just forgot to smile.  Maybe he was bored or thinking about something else.

In the second batch, we had troubles with long shadows, and blurry photos.

But by the third batch, I think we were all just a bit silly and ready to be done.  So here we are!  Merry Christmas 2012!

Today at church, I was in charge of this awesome project where we made Christmas presents for kids in our local schools.  The school system is going to pass these out to kids who receive free lunches.  It was a one-week deal where we announced the project and picked the Christmas boxes up the following weekend.  We got approximately 300 boxes returned!  This evening we wrapped them and the boys were phenomenal.  As church members wrapped, they grabbed the wrapped boxes and headed to the other side of the building to stack and sort the boxes for the schools to pick up tomorrow.  They were incredible.  Just back and forth, back and forth.  By 7pm tonight, exhaustion was written all over their faces.

What I loved about it is that they were gung-ho to help.  We talked about how there are kids at their very school who didn't have money for groceries or Christmas.  We explained that the schools try to keep it very secret so that we don't know who are the kids who are struggling, but the schools even send (through local non-profits) food home with the kids so that they have something to eat on the weeknds.  After we explained all this to All-Star and Sugar Monkey, they were all about helping out.

Of course, it did help that we were having a pizza dinner beforehand.
:)

There are lots of times that it's hard to rally them into doing things for other people.  And so tonight felt like the way family is supposed to be.  We had a great time and it's a happy feel of exhaustion that has throughly wiped us out for the night.  I love it.

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Oh, and for those keeping score.  Blogging about my peanut obsession has helped!  I've not been near my peanut tin and I've lost a couple more pounds!  I'll give a total at the end of this week, but I'm pretty psyched about weight loss starting up again!