Happy Merry!

The Christmas Post! The Christmas Post! (Take that New Year's Resolutions! In your face!)

Now that we're a full family of 5 with commitments to both Arizona and Indiana in-laws, it looks like we're officially on the "Every Other Year Every Other Holiday" plan. We spent last Christmas in Utah, which meant Thanksgiving was spent in Arizona so that this Christmas could be spent in Indiana.

We officially began the official activities on Christmas Eve by having the missionaries over along with Megan's parents and brother. After a delicious and delectable meal, we sat around the piano to sing Christmas carols (despite the poor accompaniment by the pictured below) and hymns. After we were all sung out, we moved into the family room.


In the family room we read the Christmas story from a beautifully illustrated book which compiled the relevant events from all of the standard works. This has been a Christmas tradition of ours for several years (ever since we got the book).

After that, we allowed the kids to open one selected gift each (which gift was, of course, selected by Megan for them to open and which contained...

...Pajamas!)

We're not sure if this is going to be a tradition or not, but we tried it this year. Let's see if it sticks next year.

After the pajama-ing, Max thought he would contribute to the festivities by starting a new Christmas tradition of his own: eating toothpaste.

While this was certainly sticky, I hope that this tradition doesn't stick around next year.

Then, it was off to bed for the kids with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads. While the kids were busy trying to figure out what dancing sugar plums looked like, we conned the Elders into playing a few rounds of Boggle with us before they had to head home themselves.

Before sending the children to bed, I gave them strict instructions that they were not to wake us up before 8:30 a.m. the next morning. As I was giving them those strict instructions, Megan reminded me that we had a scheduled meeting (involving delicious and delectable cinnamon rolls) with her parents and her sister's family at 10:30 a.m. and that we needed to be sure we had enough time to open our presents before heading to that meeting. We settled on a start time of no earlier than 7:00 a.m.

At 7:01 a.m. I felt the gentle shaking of 3 sweet, excited children.

We made our way downstairs, but not without peeking over the edge to see what, if anything, Santa had left for us.


Kaitlyn examined the stockings which were overflowing with sugar related items (perhaps the very items about which she had been dreaming). Max thought another great new Christmas tradition would be to consume all of the candy in sight as quickly as possible without regard for pesky chewing.

We quickly noticed a note from Mr. Claus indicating that we should go downstairs to the basement for a family gift he had left:

Foosball! (Or as we now call it when we all play, "Family Foos.") Santa also left a treadmill downstairs (my new favorite gift--also New Year's Resolution related). However, he must have spent too much time assembling the foosball table because the treadmill was still in the box!


Additionally, each of the kids got a bunch of presents (more than they really knew what to do with), but the unwrapping was done in a comparatively orderly manner--with enough time to capture at least 2 pictures. (Note Kaitlyn's nose scar from "sledding" down the stairs on Max's old infant mattress and coming to an abrupt stop when hitting the last stair).


We wrapped up the evening with a round of "Pass the Pigs." I was unable to win (or even come close), so I developed a strategy measuring the number of rolls (or "tosses") taken before losing your turn. It turns out that the distribution has quite a long tail, but that the optimal number of tosses is between 3 and 4. Of course, once I had developed this new knowledge, we were done playing.

In closing, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!