Christmas toys

Okay, so Christmas was laid back and fun this year. I love that part the best- the relaxing after it's over part LOL. Jared made pull-apart bread Christmas Eve, then got up Christmas morning and put it in to bake. We eat breakfast before we open presents [tradition we borrowed from Jared's family], so the kids are full of something healthy. They'll be snacking on candy, and fudge, and wassail, and cookies, -- all the lovely holiday treats that are mandatory for celebrating this season-- for the rest of the day. While it was baking, he took a nap under the tree, and that's where the kids found him when they snuck up the stairs. Thank goodness they slept in 'till 7:30am! That was my favorite present this year...

Opened presents- Frosty the Reindeer brought 7-up for the kids [tradition we borrowed from my family ;)]. Frosty is our 'white-elephant' gift giver. My grandpa always got presents from Cousin R, who supposedly lived out in the Uintah Mountains somewhere. One year Cousin R sent him a tiger suit; another year he got a box full of cans with the labels removed. And when we were little, Frosty the Reindeer came to our house with funny presents for us kids. Since we've grown up, there are a lot of funny present-givers: the tricky gnome came one year, Frosty the Reindeer shows up at my house every year, and some of the other reindeer got into the game this year [with some help from Alyson]: Comet, Dancer, Blitzen, and Dasher were all givers of fun presents. Dasher gave me some partially used sticker sheets. ;) This is another favorite tradition [although in my mind, only the favorite activities get repeated and become traditions, so technically *all* our traditions are my favorites LOL]. I love how creative people are, and how there isn't a rule about how many presents we can give/get this way, and also how much fun it is to open these and see what inexpensive little jokes we can come up with. Many times they're things already on hand, like those sticker sheets, or something that already belongs to that person that was 'borrowed' without asking LOL, or an item found at the Salvation Army. Never anything that costs a lot of money, and always funny in a nice way.

So after lunch, we headed over to my parents' house. Joy and my dad were sick, and stayed in their rooms the whole time we were there :(, but we got to visit with my mom, and Burke's family, Kyle, and Alyson. H and my nephew Tyler are the same age, and both are tough little boys. They wrestled and fought [mostly play-fighting], and behaved a lot like little puppies do. And W & M played with Alyson and Kyle, and for a little while, with the grown-ups. Burke has a game called "Settlers of Catan" which requires strategy- these kinds of games are always big in my family. And I fed Myles about 800 times yesterday. Didn't have a place I could lay him down, and the kids kept waking him up when he did fall asleep, so he ate and ate and ate... But he slept all night last night, and took a great nap this morning, too. It's all good!

M lost one of her Christmas presents this morning- she got nail polish from Santa, with my caveat: only use it in the bathroom. Yeah. Already on her walls, and so I confiscated it. And she was pouting and yelling how awful and not fair her life is [which is funny now, but wasn't then]. I finally sat down with her and asked her this: "If your friend came over and painted fingernail polish on the bedroom walls, would you EVER ask your friend to come over again?" she answered "NO." "So," says I, "when you do this to our house, you lose your nail polish. And you get to stay in your room. " arrrrgh. Definitely a blessing to find enough calm to discuss this without yelling or losing my temper.

Gametime- we scored a few games this year. Burke's family got ours to give presents to, and they gave us Clue jr and Scrabble jr. I think that the clue jr is more complicated than the regular Clue, but it's different, and kind of fun. Scrabble jr we're playing tonight [H has to take his nap, and wanted us to wait for him]. Oh, then W got Mousetrap from Santa. It's fun, but long, so we may end up tweaking the rules so it moves faster. ;)

and I'm hiding in the craft room with small and hungry baby for a bit of quiet time
j