Merry and Bright

The tree is down, the decorations gone. . . if only there weren't a giant wagon full of Dustin's Christmas presents sitting in my living room. I'm not going to lie -- our Christmas was FANTASTIC!Also I had to squeeze some pictures of Luke in here to prove he was here!

Christmas Eve we had our usual dinner over here. This year we had 4 families, so there were people and tables everywhere, but I think everyone had a good time.
The kids made place cards so everyone would know where to sit.

We had Chinese for dinner and then our Nativity program. Nate was of course a very captivating Joseph. After that, we decorated sugar cookies for Santa (Mary envy)

and Azure so kindly provided a pinata for the kids.

This was the perfect distraction so Santa could leave pajamas at the front door undetected. Before we knew it were there were naked bodies and clothes everywhere (no one call CPS, the older kids changed in the bedrooms).

That's 15 kids, ages 8 to 6 months. Some children were less than thrilled at the idea of taking a picture. Poor little Aden was not having it. At least until everyone else had left and we were taking our own "new jammies" picture.

The house was clean, the kids were asleep and the presents were under the tree by 10:30 when I headed to bed. Nate was up bright and early at 6:20, so I told him he could grab one thing from his stocking to play with in bed while we waited for the girls.

Christmas morning was filled with lots of these faces:






And we had a nice leisurely morning/afternoon. I refused to make breakfast burritos this year since we always go to a lot of work and then the kids won't eat them. So this year we kept offering the kids food choices and they were too busy playing to eat. In fact, they didn't eat lunch either, so they were starving by the time we met up with our friends, the Larsons, for dinner.

Yes, we went out to eat on Christmas Day. The company was fantastic, nothing to prepare, and no clean up. Although Dustin and I were laughing about the crowd of people who go out to eat on Christmas. For the most part, everyone was slightly odd looking. We felt like we were in the scene from the Santa Clause with Tim Allen where he and his son are out for Christmas Eve dinner.

After dinner we all headed back to our house so the kids could share their new toys, the girls could chat and the boys could play Dustin's new PS3 game. I should mention that Dustin and Jeff got their butts kicked by Skylar who was texting half the time.

Around bedtime we decided to capitalize on the fact that our favorite babysitter Lyndsi was already at our house and had no more plans for the day. . . so we put Luke down and headed out to a late Christmas movie.

AS Nate would say, "I told you so." It was fantastic.