Christmas

(note the "fallen" angel LOL, he was laughing )

It is our tradition to spend Christmas Eve with my family and Christmas Day with Jarin's. For Christmas Eve we got together and had dinner with everyone, minus one brother and his family, with sickness in the extended family they couldn't bring his little one around, we missed them. Then of course the kids put on the Nativity play and we opened the gifts from each other. Then we went home and opened the one gift on Christmas Eve, new Jammie's of course! By the time we finally got everyone to bed it was 10:00. Santa had to finish up a few things and finally made it to our house about 1:30 am! I went to bed but Jarin stayed up a little longer then also come to bed. Tyler then got up at 3:00 AM and was told to go back to bed!! We have an agreement in our home that if you get up on Christmas Eve you must go straight to Mom and Dad's room, no peeking if Santa came cause they know we, the parents, love to record and see their faces as they first see the presents! It started when they were Little, Alison was only 2 and got out of bed and looked at her presents including a seesaw and play kitchen, then found the little ball popper push toy and came down the hall with it loudly to our room! We were shocked she had already had seen everything but also glad she didn't unwrap the wrapped presents.

Attacking Uncle Karl!

My mom made these tiles for everyone!

Poor Tyler lay in his bed til 6:00 and tried again, he didn't sleep he just laid there! We told him 6:30, we didn't want to wake the younger kids to early, then it would just be no fun, they would be too crabby! Finally we got up to unwrap presents and everyone got what they wanted from Santa, (he only brings one present and fills the stocking) and they loved what Jarin and I picked out, they even liked the new clothes. Alison got a new ipod Shuffle like the one Tyler won at school, and a new Harry potter book. Tyler got his watch, Lego's, and transformers. Trevin got his sticker book from Santa and the Handy Manny tools he so wanted! CarliAnn received her cute Elmo doll from Santa that blows kisses, and Mickey Mouse clubhouse Jammie's, Blanket, and action figure toys, she love that show! I got Jarin a toy, cause you must have at least one on Christmas, a remote control Fly, sounds gross but it's just a little robot thing that flies up,, down, and sideways and lands, the kids like to play with it too. And Jarin got me a digital picture key chain and Photo shop Classes!!!! I am excited to learn more!
The big gift that we had planned since last year was a Nintendo Wii! They were just a bit excited, we expected more, but when Jarin announced it was set up and ready to play they did get excited and asked "you mean we get to play? Right now?" as if we were only teasing them! Since we had a ton of snow we stayed in and played it most of the day!! Def Boom Blox is one of the best so far! It was a fun day for us all!

Jarin made us some breakfast while the kids tried out the Wii and then the power went out, luckily the sausage and eggs were just finishing up so we ate without power. The kids wanted us to call the power company and we reminded them that it is Christmas and the workers have to leave there families to help fix it, they will get it done and we won't rush them. They had it back on in an hour!

Since we felt a bit snowed in with 2 feet in front (the wind made the drifts bad!, the snow was higher than our porch that is two steps up!), roads closed nearby and warnings of a new storm coming from 4:00-9:00 we decided we had better stay home from Jarin's family festivities and visit all the Grandma's on Friday. They live on the East side and they always get it worse than us! Amazingly we got it a bit worse but that's okay, we had fun seeing them Friday and we weren't rushed, it was nice and the kids loved it. We got some great presents too! One was a great quilted snowman hanging and another I thought was perfect for us was a full 6 gal bucket ( complete with orange Gamma lid) full of things to flavor our water in an emergency like jello koolaid etc. It is one thing I had thought about but aside from a #10 can of fruit drink I hadn't fullfilled that yet! I love it!

Here's a few pictures of our Snow on Christmas Day as Trevin helped Daddy dig us out! The snow drifts were amazing from the winds, notice the neighbor across the street have a mostly clean driveway at the top! An our back yard next to the house you could see the grass but in front of the shed was a hill and the gates on the side couldn't be opened casue the drifts gathered there, reminded us of Hyrum, oh we miss living there! We got another 8 or so inches by morning! Funny thing was the newspaper only comes on Sundays, 4 of them for my coupons, apparantly they decided to deliver a Christmas edition of all 4 papers, we had no clue and it was covered by snow so Jarin hit them with the snowblower, ticker tape anyone LOL!