Well our christmas started out on christmas eve when my side of the family came over for a big dinner with roast beef, yorkshire pudding and all the fixings. we opened presents from family members, read the night before christmas and tucked the kids in only to have them come downstairs to see if they could catch santa in the act. luckily they fell asleep before the fat man came. unfortunately that was not the end of the evening though, there was lots of clean up and preparation for santa.
......oh and the kids spread out the deer food in the lawn so the deer would find our house and some yummy treats for santa along with lots of carrots for santa to give the deer.
once i got snuggled up in bed..... i found it didn't last long because annelies was up with an ear infection all night!!! poor thing, she was in agonizing pain. luckily i had left over chewable antibiotic from jakob and some motrin. she was not a happy camper once morning came though, hence the absence of her presence in the family pictures on the stairs. she was actually in her bedroom yelling at the kids to leave her alone!
unlike all my in-laws, we did not wake up to a white christmas, but something amazing did happen....quite miraculously rob was the first one awake and slowly crawled out of bed at 8:30 to wake the other kids up. ollie popped right up and jakob was at rob's side helping with the wake up calls. sofia was so eager to see what surprises santa left for her. all she asked for this year was presents, so she was sure to be happy with whatever she got.
once we got downstairs at about 8:45, the kids started with their stocking and soon moved to the tree where their presents were wrapped with their own paper. nico was transformers, jakob of course was spider-man, annelies was princess, sofia was dora and ollie had cute reindeer paper. this makes it much easier to identify presents not to mention the hassle of name tags. sofia caught on quick to the paper pattern and started handing out gifts while nico assigned everybody who's turn it was to open. they were so cute how organized they were. after all was said and done, rob and i could only come to one conclusion..... the kids are spoiled rotten and they got way too many presents. oh well.... nico's big gift was a keyboard (piano). jakob got a truck and trailer and an xbox 360 game (spider-man friend or foe), annelies got a stamp set and a barbie magnet fashion set, sofia got a dora doll and food for her play kitchen and ollie got a little scooter. then rob and i took turns opening presents. rob put nico in charge of wrapping mine, but nico got confused and long story short... none of my presents got wrapped and i got to just take them out of the bags. oh, well.
it was a fun christmas and we finished it off with our biggest tradition of all.... WAFFLE HOUSE. so yummy. the rest of the day we watched movies and ate! MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!
