Why can't I be consistent?

I guess I just kind of fell off the blogging bandwagon once school vacation hit! We've had a very relaxing two weeks, and although I've enjoyed the "no schedule" life, I'm looking forward to getting into a routine again.

We had a wonderful Christmas. For Christmas Eve, we spent the evening at my parents with my three brothers. My sister and her family were with her hubbie's family that night. We did a short program focusing on the birth of Christ, sang some Christmas carols, and had lots and lots and lots of food. We just did appetizers, but we had a lot of them. My kids' favorite is making tiny shish-kabobs on toothpicks with chunks of ham, turkey, cheese, pickles and olives.

We let each of the children pick out a gift to open on Christmas Eve. They each picked one from home and took it with us to the Grandparents'. Cooper opened a Little People recycling truck which he loved and played with for the rest of the evening. Turner opened a Spiderman puzzle. Regan opened a reading lamp. Her reaction was priceless. She said, in a very annoyed voice, "A lamp? You got me....a lamp?" We howled we were laughing so hard. Poor thing just wanted a toy to play with like her brothers and opened something...sensible. Dang. Landon opened a Lego toy, Porter opened (surprise, surprise) a reading lamp, and Hayden opted not to open anything since he didn't have very many to open this year.

We were tracking Santa on Norad that night, which was oh so exciting for Regan. In fact, as I was tucking her in, she asked me to check one last time where Santa was. I checked, and found that he was in Arizona. She about burst with excitement! "That means that he's visiting Hailee and Victoria right now!" She still remembers her two best friends from Phoenix. After several Christmas stories (some at Grandma's, some at home), and putting out an apple and eggnog for Santa (we were plum out of Christmas cookies and decided a piece of fruit might be a nice change for Santa), the children were FINALLY asleep.

Santa was good to my children this year. I'll admit, they have been good this year so I guess they deserved it! Santa brought Spiderman scooters to Turner and Cooper, a pink scooter to Regan, a green ELECTRIC scooter to Landon, a blue electric scooter to Porter and a bicycle trainer (a stand that you put your bike on so that you can use it like a stationary bike indoors) for Hayden. They were all thrilled and spent much of the day outdoors playing--with the exception of Hayden who spent the day indoors playing. We opened presents and really enjoyed our time together. The kids were so excited to give gifts to eachother and wanted to make sure that they watched their siblings as they opened them to see how happy they were. It was a fun, fun morning. We then went to Grandma and Grandpa's house. Carolyn and her family were there already, as were a couple of brothers. After a while we got settled in and opened our funny gifts. We had such a fun time laughing at the silly things we got for each other. Many of them were based on inside jokes, so we laughed and laughed and laughed. I made a book for Carolyn based on the book "No, David!" that was called, "No, Rose!" I researched many of the naughty things Rose had done during the year and illustrated it. I'm not much of an artist, but it turned out really cute. She posted it on Facebook and tagged the pictures to me, so those of you on Facebook can see it. We had lots of other funny ones too, including Dale's gift to me: a guarantee that no matter how much my brood eats, we'll never run out of food. He gave me a jar of pickled pigs feet, can of sardines, bottle of clam juice, and a jar of stuff with tripe in it. Yup, my pantry will not be empty. Eeww.

All in all, a good Christmas. Wish we could've had more healthy people, and definitely more singing (which maybe would have happened, had everyone been healthy), but it was a good Christmas season.