Christmas moments

This Christmas Eve we planned to go caroling with some friends at a geriatric rehabilitation center, with their piano skills, RD's ukulele skills, and all our singing effort. ;) Renée unexpectedly had a late nap, so by the time she got up, ate, and I got her dressed up, (about 20 minutes after they started performing), I got a text from RD they were done. The group of 10 performed for 4-7 residents, one of which started choking during Joy to the World, and they kept singing, wondering what to do, as one of the staff slapped him repeatedly on the back. Memorable at least!
Christmas morning the girls gave great dramatic reactions to their gifts this year, which is a lot of fun. Grace was so exuberant that I only got blurry pictures.

But they gave each other great hugs, and were grateful and kind. Grace got into the giving spirit, and bought all her siblings a gift, as well as RD and I. She was super thoughtful as well, getting us some of our favorites. She had remembered a previous conversation we had as a family when RD and I were talking about having nesquik's strawberry milk powder, and she got me a bottle of strawberry milk syrup. Her gift of a family size bag of potato chips to Cameron was his second favorite gift, right after a star wars xbox game. She did good!

This year Reese had given us few suggestions, but we scored a hit with a laser-tag game (my idea, just sayin), escaping the infamous socks and underwear legacy, for this year at least. I gave RD a few more laser sets, so everyone in the family could play.

And I got  a set of the Harry Potter series, which I can share with all the kids. We already have two sets of the series, but they are the boys' books, so we needed a family set. yep. cause we are great at sharing and caring.

We gave Aubree a breyer unicorn, and as soon as she had it unwrapped and unboxed, she said "I need to go play horses", disappearing upstairs with her horses, and now unicorn, for awhile. "Glittery Ghost" has now joined the herd.
Renée's first christmas was fun; she slept in until the other kids had opened their gifts, then actually helped open one of her boxed gifts. Her favorite part was the plastic packaging, and any tape/stickers she could find among the unwrappings. Reese was mildly put out she didn't appreciate his sweet elephant toy gift as much as he thought she would.

The rest of the day was spent cleaning up stuff, taking away stuff Renée was trying to eat off the ground, helping kids get to play with their gifts (the playmobil zoo for Aubree was kind of a pain), talking to family, and getting dinner ready, and the kids reading and napping under Grandma's fabulous quilts.

 Even with all the cleaning, the mess never really ended.

Since we had missed the traditional Thanksgiving meal, we decided to do a similar version for Christmas, and it was great.
The rest of the week we hung out, played games, watched movies, RD and some kids went sledding (Reese said he didn't go cause RD and Cameron woke them up to go by running around the upstairs yelling), drinking cocoa, eating cookies, reading, and relaxing. It was a great break.