Unwrapping Christmas

What a whirlwind the past couple of days have been.  You prep, buy, wrap, and bake for days, weeks, even months before the big day - only for it to fly by so quickly.  I say the same thing every year, and it seems as my complaining about it still isn't doing any good.

I'll do a quick recap of the festivities, cause I'm sure you're all dying to know how my Christmas went, right?  Well, Christmas Eve was a lot of fun.  We all went to my pseudo mother-in-law's house for lunch.  She put out a wonderful spread of cheeses, meats, veggies, deviled eggs, crackers...very yummy.  After lunch, the kids got to make their own reindeer cupcakes.  They were so cute - I even made one.  I guess it's the teacher in me.  We enjoyed a good visit while the kids played. It was so nice to catch up.  We haven't seen her in too long - something to make sure doesn't happen this coming year.

We left my pseudo MIL's around 3 and then we stopped by the in-law's for a quick visit.  The kids dropped off their gifts that they had bought for their grandma and grandpa, and we chatted for about an hour.  The visit wasn't very long, because Jelly was getting tired - and I did NOT want her falling asleep in the car.

We successfully made it home with no kids falling asleep around 5.  The kids and I baked cookies for Santa and then sat down to watch Four Christmases.  Jelly was the first to fall asleep, followed by Butter, and then finally Peanut went off to bed.  I enjoyed a few cups of Irish coffee, did my "Santa duties" and then went to sleep.  The next morning, the kids were awake at 5am!!  There was no way I was letting them out of their rooms' that early - so they sorted through their stockings and played with that stuff for an hour.  Then, around 6, I finally decided to let them out.

The kids had such a surprise waiting for them when they walked in to the living room.  For weeks, I've been telling the kids that they are going to have a very small Christmas - well, they had no idea that there would be so many presents under the tree.  I think the count was about 13 presents each.  It took them about an hour to open all of the gifts - being that I made them open one at a time, one person at a time.  After all of the unwrapping, the kids couldn't decide what they wanted to play with first.  I played with Jelly for a while and some of her new games, Butter tried out his new Paper Jamz guitar, and Peanut went straight to playing with her new MP3 digital camera.  After a couple of hours of trying out the new loot, it was time to get ready to head to my mom's house.

Dinner at my mom's was wonderful.  My grandparents were there, and it was nice to spend some time with them.  The kids got to open more gifts, and they played until it was time to eat.  The food was fantastic.  My dad, yes, my dad, did a great job of dinner.  After dinner, we spent the evening having a couple of drinks and laughing.  It was a lot tamer at my parent's house this year.  Usually, it's full-blown party mode Christmas night - but this year, it was very mellow.  A lot had to do with the fact that my cousin wasn't here from England like he was supposed to be.  He was supposed to arrive last Monday, but because of heavy snow his flight was cancelled until last night.  That meant that he had to miss Christmas with us, and my parents were pretty upset by it.  Now that he's here, I'm expecting that the family will make up for the lame-o Christmas party next weekend when we celebrate New Year.

OK, I've recapped enough.  Hopefully you all had a great Christmas, too.  Today, I need to get my house organized and cleaned.  I'm not taking the tree down until Friday - I like it up too much.  I also have some work I need to get done today, so that I'm not worrying about it this coming weekend.

Till next time.  ;)