My family has always opened presents on Christmas eve, but my hubby's family usually opened presents on Christmas morning so when we got married we had to pick a tradition to follow. Because my parents like to be at our house when presents are opened, we ultimately decided to follow my family's tradition. The kids stay up late on Christmas Eve playing, and Christmas morning is more leisurely. The kids sleep while we are up early starting Christmas dinner. They have small stocking gifts waiting on them; then breakfast; get dressed and play some more before dinner!
Christmas Eve this year was especially chaotic. The twins had clogged the downstair's bathroom's sink, played in the water and left the water running until the wet family room carpet was discovered sometime later. So around noon, Mr. Workman started intensive clean up with the wet vac and using every fan in the house. As you might guess, this is the same carpet that I JUST had professionally cleaned two weeks ago and NO it was NOT dry by the time we opened gifts in the evening (or even yet this evening). So gift opening was restricted to the dry side of the family room, which made picture taking angles difficult.
We usually take turns opening gifts in an orderly fashion, but with three 3 year olds and a 4 year old running on crazy-high octane-Christmas-grandparents-candy-adenaline...well, orderly wasn't going to happen!!! So with paper ripping, screaches of joy and lining up for Grandpa to free their new toys from the packaging...the boys opened their own gifts AND each others gifts AND came to help each of us open our gifts in all of 10 minutes. (The clean-up took forever! But they didn't care or know since they were playing with their new toys.)
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Antonio & Pauline with their 2 kids & our kids from Haiti |
This year, a big dinner and church, were pitted against each other so we had a big turkey dinner with all the fixings last Saturday with friends and our special guests Pauline and Antonio who worked at "our" orphanage in Haiti. It was so nice to see them. They are currently living in Tulsa, but they will be moving soon to Florida.
So today on Christmas Day, we decided to go with something easy for lunch after church. We went Italian. All the kids ate great except the twins who each fell asleep on sofas in different rooms during the brief 20 minute prep-time. When they woke up an hour or so later, they feasted too. I got a long nap. Mr. Workman kept working on drying the carpet. The kids played with new toys or read new books, and it was a VERY good Christmas Day!
For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.~~Isaiah 9:6
This is the 1st time I've seen your blog. Thanks for sharing. I love it! Jeneen McEntire
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