A Christmas Recap

I think the past two weeks went by in fast forward. Honestly, it seemed like it was just a few days before Christmas a couple of minutes ago and now here we are in January. Well, I sure hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year. We sure did. Here is a little recap of our Christmas...

Christmas Eve we had the chance to meet some needs of one of the families that we delivered LOVEGAVE Food boxes to. We took the boys shopping and stopped by a friends house for donations to get the things that were needed. It was neat to be able to talk to Will about sharing, giving and serving so close to Christmas.
That night we went to church and were treated to a service that was largely child focused. For us, this was awesome because it allowed our boys to be a part of the service, but it also allowed them to hear from someone else about the things we had been teaching them at home.
Once we got home, we had a bowl of vegetable soup that had been in the crockpot all day. (Thank the Lord for crockpots!) Vegetable soup is a Fessler family tradition on Christmas Eve. Now that we are a ministry family, it made sense for us to have a quick easy meal to eat after church as opposed to a fancy meal that I needed to prepare.
After dinner we let the boys open one present before putting on jammies and heading to bed. This has become a tradition of ours as well.





Christmas Day was peaceful, relaxing and enjoyable. Since we got married we have always made sure that we were in our own home on Christmas morning. Now that we live away from family and our boys are getting older, it is important to us to allow our boys the chance to stay home and play with their new toys on Christmas Day. So, that's what we did. We let the boys take their time opening their gifts and we let them spend all day playing with them. And they did!









We left for our big family Christmas trip the day after Christmas. We went to my family first this year and spent a couple of days with them. Will and Luke got to play with their cousins and all was good until Wednesday afternoon. We noticed that Luke started running a fever and then started coughing. We called the pediatrician's office and got some advice from them. The next morning we got up and got ready to head to Mike's parent's house. Luke still didn't act like he felt great. He was still running a fever and did most of the day. In fact, we could not get it to go down. We finally felt that we needed to have him seen and we ended up spending
four hours in a local emergency room to find out that Luke had a bad ear infection. He was put on antibiotics and we thought things would be ok, but the next day Will came down with a fever and was coughing as well. His fever was manageable and came down with a dose of Tylenol, but it happened again on Saturday and by Sunday, they both felt bad and would hardly eat anything. We came back home on Sunday afternoon. Monday, both boys were miserable and just wanted to be held and Mike and I started to not feel good either. The doctor's office was closed so we all had to suffer. We finally got them in to see the doctor on Tuesday and found out that Luke's ear had not cleared up and was still infected and that Will had a double ear infection with a slight case on pneumonia! What! That was not exactly the way we wanted to spend and end our Christmas vacation.

Despite the sickness, we were blessed by the chance to go home and be with our families. Our boys were spoiled by their grandparents, got way too many toys and ate way to many Christamas cookies. But that's ok. It only happens once a year!