Merry Christmas!

Yay, we can sleep in!!! I am sooo thankful. And yes, the kids are still asleep. We opened presents last night, but their stockings are filled this morning. But really, we've had a crazy couple of days and it's only going to keep going today, so I am going to let them sleep. Even Christian, who is usually up by 7:30, is still sleeping. :)

We had a whirlwind of a day yesterday and things did not go according to my plans, but they still worked out. And I did not get stressed out about it. :)

Yesterday morning about 9:15 am, we headed out to Matt's parents (after having a fun-filled evening the night before at my parents!) for their Christmas party. We had brunch, the kids played, we opened presents, and had a good time.

About 2:30, we headed back to Omaha. My plan was to leave around 2, so we would have time to clean the house before church (Have I really not vaccuumed since we put the tree up about 3 weeks ago?) I really like to have the living room/ piano room clean for Christmas, I just like room to open presents and I like things to look nice for pictures. :) We got home about 3:30 and we had to leave for church at 4. I wanted to get two things done in this time- clean and get our meal started for after church. I had hamballs, hash brown casserole, green bean casserole, sparkling grape juice, and ice cream all planned out. I was going to get out the good dishes and goblets to drink out of- make it a special event!

Well, here is where plans changed. Since we didn't leave Matt's parents' until about 2:30, we didn't get home until later, which meant I did a fast cleaning job and we had to head out the door again. I really like to dress up for church on Christmas Eve, but that didn't happen. Matt, Megan, and I all wore jeans to church. :( Courtney and Christian were actually dressed up. The sad thing is that 1/2 the people at church had jeans on! Ok, anyway, I didn't have time to get anything ready for our meal. I was kind of bummed that we were so rushed.

So, we finally left our house at 4:15 and church was full! We found a spot with 3 chairs and squeezed 4 of us in! Christian ended up going to the nursery. Church was very nice and when it was over, I said to Matt, "What do you want to do now? It's 5:30, nothing is ready at home, we're all starving." His response, "Let's go out to eat." Ok, it's not really want I wanted to do, but I wasn't going to stress myself out about it either. I said, "Great, let's go!" I also wasn't going to argue because along with having nothing ready, my kitchen was a complete disaster!! So off to Texas Roadhouse it was! Megan didn't like our plan AT ALL, but we went anyway. It was very crowded, but we got right in. We left the waitress a nice tip and then we headed home.

Now, in my ideal world, Christmas presents would've been put out before we left so when we got home the kids would say, "Ah look at all those presents!!" and get all excited. But no, didn't work that way either! So I said to the girls, "Ok, you need to go hide out in your room so the presents can magically appear." And they did! Matt and I rushed upstairs to get the presents (which I had wrapped the night before at 10:30 pm) and brought them downstairs. We got the girls and I got my "Aha" moment when they saw the presents.

We opened them one by one, of course, we weren't on top of things to get the video camera out or anything, so I just took pictures and movies with the camera. It worked. The kids all like their presents but then the girls said, "Wait, I thought we got three presents, I only got 2." I had bought them three and they knew they were going to get three, but where were they? Ok, silly mom again! I ran back upstairs and didn't see anything. I went downstairs and looked at their presents again and didn't see anything either. Then I went and consulted my notebook where I had been keeping notes about Christmas. I saw that I was indeed missing a present for Courtney and Megan. Christian had opened three.

Now that I knew what I was missing, I ran back upstairs to my closet and found that I had wrapped Megan's but not Courtney's. I couldn't decide between two things what to give Courtney the night before, so I had just left it and went to bed. I was going to ask Matt in the morning. Oops, that didn't happen. So I quick made a decision, wrapped it up, and took the last two presents down to the girls. They opened them and were happy. :)

Matt had also decided to get the whole family a Kinec for the XBOX, so the rest of the evening was spent playing the new games. Oh wait, Megan kept getting mad that her avatar kept turning into a boy.

Finally around 9:30, we kicked the kids to bed! I think everybody was exhausted!! But of course after they were in bed, we had to try out the new walkie talkies that grandma Lu had given them. What a great idea! It was so much fun talking back and forth between bedrooms!

8:30 and the kid are up and anxious to open thier stockings. I hope this goes well. Too funny that they am were with me when I bought everything! Hopefully they won't catch on....