Christmas

Christmas morning! Quite possibly my children's most exciting hour of the entire year. Our family rule is you can get up anytime after the sun is up but you can't open presents or wake Mike or I up until 7am. At 6:58 I was informed that the microwave clock said 7am. Fair enough, I never specified which clock. We got up and the boys got to open up their bounty. We tortured the boys by making them open their gifts one at a time.

This was James' first Christmas. He really wasn't into opening the presents and his brothers were happy to help him. James thought his gift was all the wrapping paper and the boxes. He loved to crinkle the paper and drum/chew on the boxes.

Marcus got an easel and Bakugan. Nathan got a football launcher, and a skateboard, and Jason got an mp3 player and a book he has been begging me for. They all also got a tin full of popcorn, new shoes, books, socks, and a bubble gum bank.

Marcus was a little sweetie and found things around the house to wrap up and give to me and Mike. He took apart his old fire engine and saved the screws for Mike. It was cute because he wrapped them up loose in wrapping paper and every time it got moved, all the screws would fall out. Marcus gave me some pretty rocks he picked out of the gravel in the front yard so that I could start a rock collection.


As soon as presents were opened, Nathan went outside to try to break his neck on his new skateboard.


I tried too. I really did almost break my neck. Those cracks are deadly!

After, we headed over to my aunt and uncle's house for Christmas breakfast and exchanged gifts with the rest of my family. My uncle Rick made breakfast and decided to torture us by making bacon and pancakes one at a time. We were all starving and hovering over the serving plate like jackals ready to fight over the next slice of bacon.


Here is the master torturer. He had to keep the bacon plate close by or the jackals would attack.


Here are those jackals. Notice the plate with one pancake on it?


From left to right. Jason, Marcus, James, Ryan, Amanda, Daniel, Angel, Nathan, and Brianna.


The kids took turns opening presents. It was funny how close they would sit by each other. Eventually, they barely even had room to open the presents because they were crowded in so close. That black panther in the background would have terrified me when I was little. It looked like it was guarding all the presents.

We visited for most of the morning and early afternoon. When we got home we spent the rest of the day and part of the night wielding screwdrivers and batteries. We stood at the ready to open, assemble, and install batteries into any gift the boys could throw at us.