Schaefer Family Adventures: December 2020

The last month of 2020 came and went so quickly! The schedule was so full of travel and celebrating! It was the perfect way to end a very long and strange year.

The month began with snow! The children were delighted! A white blanket of snow covered our yard and the kids excitedly donned their snow gear.  Grace refused to put on gloves, very on brand for her almost two year old self, and she was pretty shortly inside due to “cold hands.”  John excitedly played in the snow and I had the honor of teaching him to only eat “white snow”, which is very important life skill to impart.  This is the first winter with our swingset and John thought it was so funny to slide down the slippery, cold slide, into the snow.  We finished the playtime with cups of hot chocolate and marshmallow. It was the picture perfect first day of December.

Later that week we flew to Dallas, TX for Veronica and Jon’s wedding. The day before the wedding we headed down to Waco to visit the land of Chip and Joanna Gaines.  I secretly was hoping to run into them and when I told Matthew that, he just laughed at me! Hey! A girl can dream! We visited the Silos and sipped on coffee from Magnolia Press.  We walked around Magnolia Market and Magnolia Home and ended our time at the Silos Baking Co. with some delicious cupcakes.  I could have definitely stayed a whole weekend there and Matthew agreed that we should come back for another visit!

We came back home for a week and used that time to catch up on our Jesse tree and other Advent things. This was the first year that John really understood the story of Christmas and what we were preparing to celebrate.  Both kids loved doing the Jesse Tree daily and every night we lit our Advent wreath while we sang “O come O come Emmanuel”.

Then we were off to Disney for a week and a half! We went to every park twice, except Epcot. The week in Disney ended with our very dear friends Allie and Will coming down to spend the weekend with us. We have always talked about vacationing with friends and after spending time with them in Disney, we are SOLD on the concept. Vacationing with friends is the best! 10/10 recommend!

When we finally arrived home, it was time for Christmas! The kids were SUPER excited this year and we did a few things differently. Normally we attend Midnight Mass on the campus of Franciscan University in the Port but due to Covid, that didn’t happen this year sadly.  So we attended a Christmas Eve Mass at our parish and then came home for a delicious dinner. We also started a new tradition of letting the kids open one gift on Christmas Eve.  We put the kids to bed in our matching family pajamas and then got to work wrapping gifts and putting together the larger items.

On Christmas morning, we made Mickey waffles, opened gifts and called family.  It was a restful, peaceful day. The celebrating continued all week with John’s feast day a few days after Christmas and then Grace’s 2nd birthday to end the week.

December closes out 2020 and it’s time for me to put together our family yearbook.  I never would have imaged our 2020 family yearbook looking like it does, with no big trips to Hawaii or another country and many “at home” images. But I am so glad I documented the whole year in images that we will be able to look back on, knowing we survived and thrived in the weird year of 2020.

Thanks for journeying with us this past year! If you want to look back at past Schaefer Family Adventures, you can find them HERE.

xoxo,

Laura

Hey guys, where’s our bus??  She was not a fan of waiting for the buses, or just waiting in general.