Friday, April 19, 2013

All About Christmas

This post is all about our Christmas in 2012.

Christmas decorating
We had lots of excited helpers. There's a tree under those garlands somewhere....
 

Christmas Cleaning
Okay, maybe not necessarily cleaning for Christmas. But you can't pass up a photo opp with a two year old drying your kitchen floor with maxi pads! She enjoyed those skates.
Christmas Parties
Noah's cute little pre-K class had a lovely feast with lots of dancing as a bonus for us [parents] to watch.
Isaac and the entire first grade had a big shin-dig of prize-winning pizazz in the cafeteria...and that grade has a lot of kids in it. Like, as many kids as my whole elementary school had!
Christmas Eve
Siblings. I love these kids.




Christmas
The "before" shots:
But what they weren't expecting was the roadblock at the bottom of the stairs, very badly wrapped and obviously from their parents.
These "gifts" were accompanied by this note:
They were surprisingly graceful about all the 6 months' worth of toys we'd collected from them whenever they neglected to clean their room. They were happy to see it all again and mostly put it all away while we slept a little more. But that didn't stop Ellie from finding her first real gift, opening it and waking her parents with a tea party.
There were some costume gifts, of course.



One serious superhero.






And we can't do with Jared's constipated "look what I got!" faces...



And...the aftermath. I couldn't even come close to cleaning up as we went. It took a while to get our house back to normal. We're going to have to lay down some rules next year!