Christmas 2014 – With Tim :)

As many know, my brother is currently a missionary on the World Race, which is an 11 month mission trip to 11 different countries. He’s not scheduled to return until June, but we recently found out he was due to have a layover in DC this weekend (10pm until about 7am – so overnight). Unfortunately, due to work and personal reasons, I was unable to visit, BUT my family and one of Tim’s best friends did get to go up there to see him! We quickly got to work with planning things. I had ordered two dozen cruffles from Got What It Cakes (totally craving them right now while writing about it) for him, aaaaand then my mom had the idea to celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving with him since he will be in Africa at that point. She brought up the miniature Christmas tree, we wrapped him up some presents, she made him some pumpkin pies, and we planned to facetime the whole thing! We weren’t the only ones excited about Tim’s arrival though, so as he spoke to his friends, my sister and I did what we do best…

See, how adorable is this?! Here’s Rachel – another World Racer!!, Tiffany – my brother’s friend, and then of course my parents!  My brother has tortured us with the idea of making US wait until Christmas to open his gifts, but he caved 😉 Dad got some legit COFFEE! AND MY PRESENT THAT I LOVE!!!!! A Guatemalan leather purse! AH!  Tim got my very first personalized business thank you card – thought he deserved it 🙂 My first gift to him was Forest Gump – clearly.Aaaand of course my mom got him some new shirts while I got him the Duck Dynasty Christmas album….. Best gift though? SPACE JAM. A CLASSIC. So Tim has been really craving some Sour Patch Kids, so my family scored majorly for him. I’m thinking the amount we gave him should last quite awhile 😉 While shopping for his gifts, I came across this pretty magnificent kitten calendar – complete with photoshopped backgrounds and all. To make it even better, I bought some stick-on speech bubbles to apply to each cat for each month. Little did I know, Tim had a running joke with a girl from his team about how much he hates cats while she loves them, so he immediately accused me of scheming with her even though I totally didn’t hahah.That’s how perfect it was. Meanwhile, padre was sound asleep lololol Rachel showed us her bag she also got while in Guatemala – LOVE.  And lastly, the cruffles!!!!!!! Needless to say, he loves them 😀

I’m so thankful that we were still able to have our Christmas together as a family (at 1am) regardless of the circumstances. These moments are some of the sweetest in our lives, and family is what matters. To hear my brother’s voice , to see his smile, hear his laughter – it was awesome. But now it’s his time to go out and change the lives of hundreds of people throughout the world! With his kitten calendar at hand 😉