Christmas 2013, the highlights, and other random information

Christmas 2013 is officially in the books.  It was a wonderful Christmas filled with things the that Christmas should be.

 The kids and I jammed out to some fun Christmas music while we baked and decorated cookies on Monday morning.

We went to church on Christmas Eve (Yay for our new music director who picked all my favorite hymns!).

We had our fill of goodies at the in-law's house and exchanged simple gifts.  This included our new baby niece, who we got to share in her first Christmas.  

Santa came.

We had a "quiet" morning on Christmas morning and opened gifts here at home with our kids.

My dad and his girlfriend along with my brother, sister-in-law and nephew came for ham dinner later in the day.  The kids played in the snow and ate too many cookies.  We had a lot of laughs.

Now its all over.  The Griswold-ish Christmas tree that shed bucket fulls of needles is outside and will be filled up with assorted things the kids find to feed the birds.  The furniture is back in place and we can see each other without peeking through the branches of that enormous thing.

Now the living room is back together and thoroughly vacuumed and sap scrubbed off the walls.  I only have to return my laundry and dining room to their pre-holiday states.  Oh and find a home for the 1,001 toy kits my kids got for Christmas.  Their aunts and uncles hit the mark this year by getting them things they can build (oh and dinosaur stuff for Joey.  That kid is a nut about dinosaurs!) and I kind of want to hang onto some of those things for the next 4-5 months of cold/snow/mud/rain.  That means I need a place to put them, you know that's not on top of the laundry hamper.

Maybe today some of it will get done.  Today is a rare day when we all have the whole day off to just hang out together.  I'd hate to waste it on laundry.

I do know that we're going to town later this morning to see if we can find any artificial trees left on clearance (reference the above statements about buckets full of needles and gargantuan size trees) and to take the kids to the movies.  Movies at the theater are a pretty big treat around here.  Come to think of it, we've never gone to a movie as a family.  I have taken the kids a few times with some friends, but never all four of us together.  The last one we saw was Toy Story 3 in 3D.   There are a few good family shows playing so it should be a good adventure.

 The rest of the gang is still sound asleep at the moment. So, I think I'm going to curl up with my library book until they all wake up, which should be 30 seconds after I get comfortable.

Happy Christmas Vacation Everyone!