Jacobs Jambalaya: O'Meara Christmas 2015

The day after Christmas is always O'Meara Christmas I look forward to this all year as I only get to see some of my cousins once a year (at Christmas) and some of them only every other year at Christmas. This get-together is always special to me and I'm so thankful that I now get to share it with my own babies as well!

I love watching our family grow every year. In this picture we are missing 4 people and there are also two sweet babies in Colleen and Sarah's bellies in this photo. I cannot wait to see next year's picture with two more sweet little loves added into the mix!

Before lunch, everyone hung out and visited and played...and Wesley got passed around from person to person like a hot potato...and he loved every. single. minute of it! He is just so social and loves people.

Right before it was time to open gifts, Wesley decided it was nap time :) Miles was upstairs sleeping in the crib, so Jim held him while he slept.

He took a pretty good nap among all the noise and chaos of 40+ people opening gifts. I have a very similar picture of Trey at O'Meara Christmas one year asleep on Jim as well, too cute!

My cousins and I decided this year that for the youngest generation, we would let them do a gift exchange! It ended up being super fun to pull names and buy gifts for each other's kiddos. Trey and Grady pulled each other's names which was pretty cool! Wesley pulled Miles and Leighton pulled Wes. :) Both my kiddos got the sweetest gifts from the gift exchange.

I absolutely love the chaos of a big huge family all opening gifts. I love the shouting across the room thanking this person and that person for the gifts. I love kids running to an aunt or an uncle to give them a big hug for their gifts. I love it all and feel so blessed to have such a large (and growing even larger!!!!) family!

Colleen had the great idea this year of making a photo book for Aunt Sharon and Uncle Karl. They are always doing nice things for everyone else and she wanted to do something nice for them. Everyone pitched in and sent her photos and she did a great job putting them all together.

Tommy and Sara got to be Mr and Mrs Claus this year (or Grandma and Grandpa!) I cannot believe we only have three more grand kids to go through and everyone will have had a turn wearing Grandpa's special Christmas vest and Grandma's Christmas necklace!

Here are photos of everyone wearing Grandpa's vest! :)

Uncle Robert loving on that sweet boy!

Trey had fun ziplining with Uncle Robert and Daddy. I was afraid he would be too nervous to do it but he had fun and asked to do it over and over and over again! Thank goodness they're such good sports!

After opening gifts, the men men men men watched a movie in the "man cave". Don't worry- after this picture they promptly kicked me out!

After movie time, we had a baby shower for Colleen and Chris who are expecting their first child in April!

It was a book theme and we decorated with books and quotes from books. It turned out really sweet and special.

I had to laugh at this... when the desserts were brought out, there were SO SO many with allergens in them. We tried to put the ones with allergens for Reece and Trey in the middle so they couldn't reach them. Katherine and I were talking about how funny this view was of all the desserts on the island with the boys' epi pens right up on the shelf! lol...

Sean brought this prayer request book as he was leaving the following day for Rome! He brought this book with him and prayed for all of us while he was on his trip- pretty cool. We are SO SO proud of him. He will be joining the Benedictine Monks in the summer so we will continue to pray for him on his journey!

We ended up staying SO late- way past 9pm visiting and laughing. I am so glad we got that extra time to visit. We changed the boys into their pj's and they fell asleep in the car on the way home. The next morning I took this picture of Wesley with his hand made stocking from Aunt Sharon :)

When it got dark, the boys went outside to do the crackers. I had never seen these before but they were pretty cool and the boys got a huge kick of out them!