The Humistone Family Christmas

While we are blessed to be near our families we still miss having "in town" family. The Whetstone family has become our Hannibal family. Paul will jokingly call us the Humistone's a combination of our last names. We are so thankful for this precious family and the blessing they are to our lives. In December we had a two part "family" Christmas. For part one they invited us over for a fancy dinner. It was delicious! Then they surprised us with gifts and took a family photo for us in our fancy duds. It was a great night.

I love their huge real tree.
For part 2 of our family Christmas we watched the boys while Paul and Karen went out on a date night for Mr. Paul's birthday. When they got home we got to share the birthday dessert complete with candles.


After dessert we surprised their family with our gifts for them. We love doing this crazy young children season side by side with the Whetstones and their boys.

Train Town

One of the fun things we went to do over Christmas break was to check out a place downtown called Train Town with Karen, Wyatt, Logan, & Micah. After seeing it I'm kind of surprised we never went before it was really cool. It had lots of trains and buttons the kids could push to make things happen. Like turn on lights or make the train go.

The Christmas village and train.


It also had lots of cool old train related signs and memorabilia all over the walls.

Titus climbs on a bench out of an old train station. Would love to have that.

Grace loved the purple train.
Titus pulls the train whistle.

Jeremy and I were just talking the other day about how we love to go downtown to go out to eat or walk and window shop or go the coffee shop. It kind of feels like you've left Hannibal and are on "vacation" without going anywhere. We were pondering why we don't do it more often. But I guess then maybe it wouldn't feel like vacation. Its definitely fun to be a tourist in your own town every once in awhile, thats part of the charm of living in Hannibal.

Christmas Tea

One of the fun Christmas activities we enjoyed was a Christmas Tea with our extended family. Our "China cousins" were back for Christmas so we took full advantage. The girls were VERY excited they had been counting down the days till they saw them again. My Aunt Di planned a gorgeous tea party.

The girls opened their gifts. A silverware set that included chopsticks. Very cute.




The kids enjoyed lots of different treats.
Wish I actually had some pictures of us ladies and not just the kiddos. We will have to work on that for our next tea. It was a lovely party. Now I just need to send the package to China with their Christmas gifts that I forgot to bring to the tea. Hoping the excitement of getting a package will make up for my forgetfulness.