Christmas Fun

We had a fabulous Christmas!  We started it out with a trip to Alabama to see my side of the family.  We had so much fun getting to spend time with everyone and the kids especially love hanging with their cousins.  We drove back Christmas Eve and celebrated with Lance's family that evening.  By that point the kids had already gotten more toys than they will be able to play with in a year and that was before Santa made his visit!  Christmas morning was very fun, the kids were so excited and loved their gifts and Katie even told me "this is the best day ever."

We started it out looking in the stockings and then opened presents once Ray-Ray, So-So and Uncle Matthew arrived.  Probably the strangest stocking gift ever are the scissors that the kids asked for and received!

Once the gifts were opened we began the torturous process of putting it all together!  The marble run was a big hit for Tyler.  Katie was loving her waitress set, her barbie dolls and car (with doors that opened - a big requirement that was hard to fill), and played dress-up from her trunk that So-So gave her all evening!  We still have some things that are unopened, and not put together (although Tyler made me promise to put his wall track together this evening) and Lance wants to put some things away, but I don't know if that will work since Tyler seems to remember all the things he got and will almost certainly ask for them once they are sidelined.  We definitely need to figure out a better organization/storage system.  I had the "bright idea" to move everything upstairs and make the playroom the main area for toys and left nothing downstairs to gather things, but realistically there will still be lots of playing downstairs (better for cars, puzzles, that's where the play kitchen is and has to stay, and the car tracks don't do well on carpet) and we need somewhere to put stuff so will have to do some re-thinking on that one.  

Yesterday afternoon we spent time with Lance's cousins and Aunt and had a great time (and fabulous meal) there too.  The kids were shy everywhere we went at first, but finally opened up and had a ball - I think they had a wonderful Christmas and we did too!