Merry Christmas!!

Wow, what a day! It is amazing that we can spend weeks, even months getting ready for Christmas day and then it's all over in a matter of hours!

I was amazed that I had to wake my kids up at 9! Yup, I had to wake them up!! Even the little ones!! The dog woke me at about 8:30 to go out, so I got up and started breakfast. We have a tradition that we eat a good breakfast before we open presents. We figure it will be the only decent meal they actually eat for at least a couple of days because of all the junk they get. Before I was done, Steven was up, he helped me get ready. Then we went and woke everyone up. We finally got everyone fed and downstairs ready to open presents a little after 10am!

We also have a tradition that we open presents one by one. It gives a chance for the kids to play with and examine each gift while someone else is opening their gifts. By the time it's their turn again, they are ready for the next one. But it can end up taking a while, especially in a big family such as ours!! We finished opening presents after 1pm. It's always a relief when everyone is happy with their gifts, and you know you did well!

It was perfect though, because then Nattie Girl was ready to go back to bed. She was safe in bed and it gave us a few hours of not having to be extra careful what was down and all over. By the time she was up again, the house was fairly cleaned up and in some kind of order.

The rest of the day, we just played games and watched movies.

We were excited the storm we were supposed to get was too warm to be snow, so it was raining in the afternoon. Unfortunately, it did turn to snow and we ended up with just about a foot of snow before morning! We finished watching Prince Caspian at 1am and decided we better shovel before going to bed because our newspaper carriers were going to have to leave soon. So we went out and shovelled for 1 1/2 hours! By the time we were done, it was 2:30am, Wow, we are crazy!!

All in all we had a great Christmas day!

It's just too hard to pick which pictures to put up!! I took quite a few!

Today we are doing much of the same thing, just being lazy and enjoying the day!!