Dec 24, Bartel Christmas

Bartel Christmas was December 24th at my grandparent's house.  We ate tons of delicious food including everyone's favorite, verenika!  After a little nap time we all gathered round for Grandpa to read our Christmas story and hear a little piano music from my cousins and then time for presents.

Present time!

We couldn't stay late because I had to work that night and Luke was in his first Christmas Eve program at church.  I got ready for work and the boys got ready for church and I got to see Luke in his new outfit from Mimi and Papa in IN!  

Greg took the boys to church and my mom helped take care of them during the service so that Greg could get a video of Luke's group singing for me.  He did a great job but bounced and danced the entire time!

the toy of the day...

Luke and I had a lot of fun yesterday doing little art projects, playing with cars, cooking together and tossing the ball around.  The highlight though was turning some egg cartons into a bus and a semi truck.  We wrapped paper around them in a way that you could still open and close them so you could put things in them, then I drew the basics on them and Luke colored them in the way he wanted too.  Here are a few pics of Luke playing with the bus.  It was a big hit with him.

Aaron had fun watching us!  He is much more mobile now, though still not crawling on hands and knees he does the army crawl pretty fast and sometimes rolls to get where he wants too.  

Pulling up!

So I am sitting at the computer checking emails and I look over at Aaron who was just sitting on the floor playing beside me, and he had pulled himself up to standing by holding onto his bouncy seat!  I called Greg to show him and he said, "Oh yeah, he started doing that last night."  I hadn't seen him even try to pull up into standing position on anything yet!  Can't believe how fast he is growing up!  Seeing him next to Charlie really brings it home how much he has grown and changed over the past 8 months.