Catching up from Christmas

Wow, did the month of December fly by! I felt like I pretty much worked every dang day and when I wasn't working, someone was asking me to do something.
We did a lot of fun stuff. Let's see....we went to George's friend's house for poker night and I had no idea what I was doing, but at least we came home with more money than we left with.
The Young Women had dinner out at Arturo's for Christmas which was a good time.
A few days before Christmas we went out to do our annual Christmas light-seeing tour, which the kids love. When we lived in Middlesex and had to drive a long way to see lights, we used to order a pizza and eat it while we went light-seeing. It's a nice tradition.



The Wednesday before Christmas we had Christmas with Mom and Mimi. I'm not even going to go into that, but let's just say they had a really hard time getting to our place that day. When they finally got here, everything was fine, although I had to leave for work in about half an hour, so we didn't get a lot of time to visit.
The kids seemed to really like their gifts. Lucy loved the wagon. She just climbed right in and she sits there so nicely when we go out for walks. She looks like a little lady.

George and I actually got along this year (thank you, Prozac). He gets really weird and mopey on holidays and I get really hyper and anal about every little detail. So you can imagine that we have a bit of head-butting when it comes to Christmas. But this year was nice. We had a lot of fun picking out gifts for everyone and as I said before, I scaled back on my decorating and cooking. George tried to relax and not be a big old stick in the mud. Drake was really excited about Santa this year. Every morning he tried to convince me that it was Christmas morning and time to open presents.

My work had a little party with Santa there a few days before Christmas and I had George bring the kids so we could take them to sit on Santa's lap. The boys RAN to him. Skylar politely waited her turn. Lucy freaked out and wouldn't go near him. She does not like the Big Man in Red AT ALL. Santa gave each kid a little toy from his sack, pretty nice stuff like Matchbox cars and coloring books, but Lucy wouldn't even go see him for a toy. The only way I got her to let me give her back to George so I could return to work was by giving her a cookie.

Christmas Eve was busy but fun. We did our usual Christmas Eve stocking stuffer-shopping run to Dollar Tree. The Nicolaysens came over and we ate a lot of food. I gained probably five pounds over Christmas. The kids were so excited about Santa coming - especially Drake this year. He was all about Santa.

We finally got the children tucked in bed. I doubt they were dreaming of sugarplums, but they went easily enough. George and I did some wrapping and tucked ourselves into bed. Before we knew it, the children were waking us up at 7am sharp. We have a strict rule that no one can get us up before 7am. Skylar had apparently woken up at 2am and then again at 5:30. We allowed her to sleep in her alcove this year. Hopefully she didn't peek.

We always start out by seeing what Santa left. Santa had left each kid a book under the balcony tree upstairs. Bart had written Santa a note and he had written back! Bart was thrilled. We proceeded downstairs and found Santa's big gift for each kid. Bart got a skateboard, Drake got a Lightning McQueen scooter, Skylar got a pink beanbag chair, and Lucy got a wooden food set.



We opened our stockings and the boys ate candy. Lucy found her favorite gift so far - a bunch of little boxes of raisins. She ate probably three or four mini boxes before we were done opening gifts.




Drake got a pirate eyepatch and hat we found at the Dollar Store. He and Bart are totally into pirates. He looks pretty fierce, huh?


Drake is trying out Bart's favorite gift, his clone trooper blaster rifle. In fact, I think it was George's favorite gift, too. Drake is also showing off his underwear since he's a big boy now and only wears a pull-up at bedtime.


Skylar got a lot of clothes this year. She also got monkey socks that made her look like she has Hobbit feet.


Lucy's favorite toy turned out to be the $5.00 tea set from Walmart that Drake helped pick out for her. She loved it! She walked around pretending to drink out of the little teacups and pretending to eat the little teacakes and cookies. It was really adorable.