Christmas Day 2008

Early to bed, up many times in the night and early to rise. Is that how it goes? Well, that is how it was here at the Larabie house on Christmas Eve. Mama had a rough night due to a sore throat that kept waking her up, plus the puppy barking at 4am...because a certain 7yo little boy was wandering the house to see if Santa had come yet...and then up before 7am with a 10yo little girl that was excited about Christmas. :-) Everyone was up by 7:30am so we let the kids go down into the family room to see if Santa had left anything. We heard some squeals that he had definitely made a delivery at our house and so we took our caffeine of choice down with us and let the unwrapping chaos begin. Santa did good this year. Both kids got what they asked for. Alex received the EyeClops BioniCam , which is basically a portable, digital microscope and Morgan received a kit for doing the encaustic (melted beeswax) painting. It includes a low-temp iron (which can be used a variety of ways), a pack of 16 colored beeswax sticks, and then a pack of 100 4x6 cards to paint on. Both kids were beyond excited! We enjoyed a few minutes of happy squeals, claps & laughs. Then they started in on the other gifts. They received plenty of books and games of all kinds. We were finished before 9am and then enjoyed some cinnamon rolls and orange danish for breakfast. We had time to relax before getting on the road and heading east to Uncle Jon's & Aunt Jody's house for more celebrating. We were surrounded by family that we hadn't seen in a year or more. It was great! The kids had grandparents, aunts & uncles, and cousins all around them...and loved every minute of it. My MIL and 2 SILs have decided we need a ladies day out together. I had decided that it would be a great idea to do some family pictures since we would have grandparents, all the TN adult children and all the TN grandchildren together at one time. My brother let me borrow his tripod to help. The other family members thought it was a great idea so after food & gift exchanges we started with pictures. We got some really good pictures! I'm planning on getting a lot of prints. We had to drag ourselves away even though we were having such a good time. I was wiped out (not sleeping, feeling like ick) and we had to get home to the pups.

I have to say that this has turned out to be a wonderful, family-filled Christmas. We've enjoyed our celebrations with both sides of the family (and this is only 2 of the 4 parts lol). We are truly blessed.

Now to find a place for everything since it looks like Christmas exploded in our house a few times over. ;-)