Ho ho ho...

This blog has been edited for content...topics that were deliberately excluded from this post to make our Christmas memories more jolly are as follows:

1) Mom being on call and having non stop phone and house calls on Christmas day.
2) Dad's near hospitalization for pneumonia.
3) Vomit palooza in Grandma Bingham's master bath.
4) 104 degree fevers during the night.
5) Eddie drinking the water in Grandma Nelson's denture cup and then throwing the "rest" in the garbage.


Having said that...

Christmas vacation this year has been lovely. Honest it was! We had a nice FHE Christmas week and made little paper angels for the tree where we each wrote down something we would work on to be better. I said I would be patient all the time! Jacob wrote that he would share. We voted on Eddie's behalf and said that he would not yell. Saren would smile a lot. Done. Dave wrote...I will quote the angel he made directly "Daddy...stop talking nasty, no yelling, a lot of patience, mind out of gutter". It was a moving little activity.

Later in the week, we had a fun visit with Aunt Annie, who is here every weekend, and Aunt Merrilyn, who is visiting from North Carolina. My kids love their aunts, especially these two.

Christmas Eve we took a picture of Eddie's 2 year old mustache with this lovely Christmas backdrop.

I wondered if I would need to put Saren's hair in some kind of tail before Christmas morning pictures. I did.

Christmas morning, Jacob took a lot of prompting to get out of bed before he remembered what day it was. Then we did a lot of this....

(opening presents)

And a lot of this...

(posing by our loot).

Santa brought a lot of things, but most beloved was a package of fruit snacks (which Mom never buys) and had the kids in a complete frenzy of joy. Eddie has never posed so nicely for a picture.

And, after tucking the kids in bed Christmas night, I was up late making a Spiderman birthday cake. Birthdays are a Christmas tradition in our family too. Merry Christmas!