Battle of the camera

This year I considered not taking any pictures Christmas morning, since every year it's a battle to take any decent pictures. Pair excited fast-moving kids with super low lighting in the wee hours, and my camera struggles(at least I'll blame it on the camera). I don't know why, but it takes forever from pressing down to having the flash go off and taking a pic, and sometimes it wouldn't do anything. Anyway, I gave in, and tried to take some for part of the morning.
As always, it was fun to watch them open gifts and give gifts to siblings, hugging each other in thanks. They got each other some cool thoughtful gifts this year, and spent a large proportion of what little they had saved up on each other. I was impressed. Reese even told me his favorite part of Christmas was when whoever he had (we draw names) opened their gift from him.
Cameron gave Reese a nerf gun scope, Grace gave Cameron a fishing lure and swedish fish, Aubree (with a lot of help) gave Grace a bunch of chocolate truffles and a candy cane of skittles, and Reese totally nailed it with a "little live" mouse toy. While Bree played with all her toys, she spend the majority of the day carrying and following around her little mouse, constantly rolling around and squeaking and playing music. She wore out that battery in one day.
I managed to get a few decent pics of them that morning, so I guess I'll do the battle again next year.

We were done opening gifts by 8 am, which is totally record time for us, perhaps by hours. We had awoken to a beautiful white landscape, woohooo!!

 The snow kept falling all morning, and by the time for church, RD wasn't so sure our van would make it to church. Since we live so close to it, we decided we'd walk instead of risk getting stuck in the ever-increasing snowpiles on our unplowed street. To be honest, it was kinda more fun, an adventure suiting up and tromping through the snow with Bree riding the sled RD pulled.


The kids didn't like the idea of standing around in the flurries for a pic, and trudged on ahead. But they were ok with falling into the snowdrift when we got home.


 Going to church on Christmas just seems right. Whether it was cause we'd watched A Christmas Carol the night before or not, it made Christmas seem like the perfect Dickensian Christmas. Especially singing Christmas Carols in a large congregation. Woot woot! Hark the Herald Angels is my favorite; if you do all the verses, it covers all the reasons we rejoice in His birth! He sure has brought me healing, light, and life.
We came home, played games and read books, ate treats, Cameron and Bree and Grace played in the snow,  prepared and ate dinner, and played more games.

Grace made a snow santa on the house :)

  It's been fun to have Reese finally happy to play games with us all. Perhaps having cooperative games has made the difference. It's  fun to work together to try to survive Castle Panic or the Oregon trail game (perhaps more futile than the original computer game; we usually all die). It's still hard to find a way for all of us to play together, since Bree is so much younger. Usually either Bree or Reese skip out, but Bree seems pretty content playing on one of our "teams", sitting on a lap, or just playing on her own nearby.
What a very merry Christmas.
Bree asked the next day, 'when is christmas again?"