Chistmas '08

Christmas '08 started out with a bit of hard labor. I got home around 12:30 from work. Jen and I had a couple of things that we wanted to do before going to grandma's house. I had heard that we were expecting 1 to 3 inches of snow that night so I wanted to get the driveway cleared before it started. There was about 1/2 an inch of ice caked on the drive, but it was finally above freezing which gave me the opportunity to get underneath it. Grandma C's car actually slid down the driveway and into the street while she was watching the boys. (yes our driveway is steep and it sucks). The traditional snow shovel wouldn't work so I had to break out a regular shovel to break up the ice. For the most part the ice came up pretty good, but with only a 6 inch blade it took a lot longer than usual. After an hour I was almost halfway down the driveway and had shed my coat because I was just too flippin hot. At one point I stepped on the ice to get a better angle for the shovel and ended up taking a ride down the driveway. After busting my butt for an hour and a half, I got close to the bottom of the driveway and figured that was good enough. I found out later that the snow had been cancelled, but I still wanted to take the opportunity to get the ice taken care of.

Anyway, after the ice shoveling Jen and I did a few things around the house. Since the road conditions were still a little tricky I decided to skip church for the evening. Yeah I know I should have tried to make it, but the thought of dealing with 3 kids in a standing room only church for over an hour didn't sound like fun. We loaded the kids up and headed over to mom's house. Usually Jen has to close the store on Christmas eve, but somehow she ended up opening the store so we didn't have to wait for her to show up to mom's house. When Jen closed on Christmas she would show up and be half awake for the evening. I was able to talk mom into just doing appetizers instead of a meal for Christmas eve which worked out so much easier. Trying to get the kids to sit still for any food is a challenge. We had shrimp cocktail, cookies, crackers, chips, and some other snacks. We visited and snacked and started the presents early this year. It looked like we had taken it easy this year on the presents, but by the time everything was opened (along with presents being brought from other rooms) it was a madhouse of toys for the boys. The boys got a HUGE lincoln log set that Dan had set up in the front room that was alot of fun and destroyed minutes later. More snacking and drinking later we decided to head for home. I was amazed to see that we were loading up the car by 9:00pm. Last year we were delayed leaving mom's house due to me having to clean up Andrew's puke from mom's carpet. Yet another reason not to fill the boys up with food, especially Andrew. We got the boys to bed pretty quick and still had some present wrapping to do so we were up until after midnight doing that.

Christmas morning like almost every morning the first visitors come into our room before 7:00am (yawn). We trudge downstairs and the boys immediately start playing with the toys from last night and don't even notice the stockings or the presents under the tree. We grab a little something to eat before the present carnage II begins. I am not sure how many years ago,but I remember that a tradition started in the family that we have honey buns and orange juice for breakfast on Christmas morning. Now usually the honey buns were from the Morton company, but they went out of business or stopped producing honey buns years ago. So every year I search for a reasonable substitute. I have finally found a honey bun that is real similar and I can get it at Walmart/Sams club. The kids are finally getting the idea of gifts, almost too much, and started to get a little greedy toward the end of the day. One of the gifts that I found cool too was a miniature remote controlled helicopter. William actually understands how to control the helicopter and can hover it in place a couple of feet off the ground. Andrew (el distructo) only knows full throttle which drives the chopter straight into the ceiling and then bouncing off the fireplace. I am hoping that this toy will hang around a little while longer (yeah I like playing with it too). The funny part is that I sent one of these helicopters to my dad for Christmas too. I can never decide what to get my dad so I usually send him something fun to play with or something for the pool.

After carnage II we load up the boys to go to grandma and grandpa C's for carnage III. We had a very tasty turkey lunch and then opened more presents. Somewhere during the middle of present opening I look over at Andrew.... mouth opens... and hurl. Son of a B****. Jen grabs one of her brand new tupperware containers to catch the last bit of urp. So instead of my mom's house I get to clean up Jen's mom's house for Christmas. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful and pretty nice. I took Christopher into the in-laws bedroom to take a nap and ended up freezing my butt off while trying to get him to sleep. They like a cold bedroom for sleeping and so would I, if I would have had a blanket. Every time I tired to get up Christopher stirred and woke up crying so I was stuck. After a couple of hours (and a few cat naps) I took him back into the front room. We headed home around 8:00 or so.

Overall I think it was a very good Christmas..It was nice to start Christmas eve a little earlier and have Jen semi-conscious. For the most part the boys were very well behaved and Christopher stayed away from the tree. Their new thing is that every toy they have MUST be out of the box that it came in even if they don't plan on playing with it.