Christmas Day

 Christmas Morning in our house was a bit different than it normally is. With it being a Sunday and church at 9:00 we did not have time to open our presents. It takes us a good 5 or 6 hours to open our presents because we only allow one person at a time to open their gifts. The gifts from Santa however are left unwrapped under the tree so we decided to let the boys (and Sarah) enjoy their Santa gifts and then we all got ready for church.

Church was beautiful. I love to sing Christmas songs and with Kira and her Oboe it made it even more special.

After church we commenced with the gifts. I have to admit that Evan was a bit happier with his gifts on Christmas Day than he was with his gift from Christmas Eve. Santa was good to everyone.

Even the big kids were excited.

Ben pulled a very funny trick on Sharley. For Christmas they bought each other I-Phones. They'd been using them already for a few weeks so Ben stole Sharley's phone from her after she'd gone to sleep and wrapped it up. As we're all settling in getting ready to open gifts he uses my phone to call Sharley. He couldn't call from his own phone because she has a special ring tone for him that she would recognize. It was so funny to see everyone's faces when one of the presents under the tree started to ring. You should have seen the look of confusion on Sharley's face when someone handed her the ringing present. It was really funny. 

Of course, Sheba has to be right in the thick of it all. 

Lisa and I got all of the kids a pizza stone and pizza paddles to go along with them. We found wooden ones with long handles or metal ones with short handles. We really liked the wooden ones so we got them and cut the handles off for anyone who didn't want to pack the long handles. We also made the kids books about Waldemaar Christian and Ella Dora Lybbert. Lisa was able to get to the Lybbert reunion this summer and saw that Marsha (Smith) Nelson had put the book together using Heritage Makers so Lisa copied it for our kids. It is a very cool book and if anyone wants a copy contact Lisa, she will tell you how you can buy one.

About the time the presents were winding down it was time to get our Skype call from Alex. It was of course the highlight of our day. We plugged our big screen TV into the laptop and there was Alex larger than life. What was also cool was that we could also conference in Brandon from Texas. 

It was also pretty cool because for both Alex and me it was the first time we got to see little Rosalie. 

Hayley has also grown a lot since Alex lost saw her. I love that little girl. I sure miss those girls.

We even got to meet Alex's companion, Elder Carcamo.

Monday we had scheduled the tide pools but it didn't quite work out that way. Kira went for breakfast with her friends, Alycia went to breakfast with her friends, Ben, Trevor and Justin went and played football with their friends. By the time we got everyone back home it was too late to do the tide pools so we went to a movie instead. We figured "I Bought a Zoo" would be a cool movie for the kids. Wrong. It was a very adult movie and not at all what we expected. It was still a good movie but Evan and Landon did not enjoy it.

Following the movie we did Christmas Card Lane. Normally we walk the entire thing but it was late and we were tired so we rolled down the windows in the van and drove slowly. 

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