Santa Came to Town

The grown ups got to have lots of fun visiting.  This is a photo of me with my also-pregnant sister-in-law.  She is due about two weeks after me.  The woman brought O’Doul’s.  Gotta love a fake beer on Christmas Eve.

And then of course, the Christmas festivities began.  We opened gifts with the family, which is kind of crazy since my husband has five siblings.  There were 14 adults and 13 kids opening and slinging wrapping paper all over.

It was fabulous.

One of the biggest gift “hits” was this “Rody” for Miss from my husband’s parents.

Daddy blew it up and away she went.

It caused a bit of friction once Little Sister noticed it.

She was pretty upset at not being able to ride it right away.

But Big Sister is such a sweet girl, she let her sis have a turn,

hovering nearby the entire time, of course.

And, time’s up!

It’s a really cool toy.

Finally, Miss got distracted and Lass got to have a bit of time on it.  Oh, the holiday drama!

After family gifts, the kids all went downstairs to wait for Santa.  In my husband’s family, Santa arrives on Christmas Eve before the kids go to bed.  They have to wait patiently downstairs for him (while the moms put out stockings and all the Santa gifts upstairs).

When he arrives, he makes lots of noise stomping around and “Ho-Ho-Ho-ing.”  The kids scream and run up the stairs, hoping to catch a glimpse of him before he gets into his sleigh and rides off.

We all got to see him as he ran out of the house and back to his sleigh waiting in the grass.  Unfortunately one of the older cousins may have seen him a little too much.  He said to his mom something like, “I wish we got to have the real Santa, not the one with dark hair and eyebrows.”  I guess the wig wasn’t quite straight on my brother-in-law!

When we went back inside, of course the girls had a blast with all their presents.

Miss got the two Care Bears she asked Santa for, and they haven’t left her side since.  Here she is reading one of her new books to Grumpy Bear.

In my last post I wrote about how Miss has been insistent about wearing her “ballerina costume” of leotard, tights, and ballet shoes.  The trip to the Farm was no different.  I told her she had to wear some nice clothes for Christmas dinner and family gifts, and we compromised by putting her nice clothes on over the ballerina costume (if you look at some of the pictures above you can see her little ballet shoes). After getting her Santa gifts, the “real” clothes were off and she was back in ballerina mode.

I finally got her out of the ballerina costume when we went on a treasure hunt on Christmas day.  I told her she needed to wear warm clothes and that her ballerina costume really needed to be washed while we were out.

The weather was chilly but beautiful, and as always the treasure hunt was memorable.

Lass was a bit like the little brother in “A Christmas Story.”  she was so bundled up she could barely move.

Miss found some shells and some acorns for her “treasures.”

She got to check out lots of interesting things, like this deer rub.

She got to examine some mushrooms growing on these trees

And look at these little berries.

Lass fell asleep during our walk in the woods.

Overall, the trip to the farm was a great time for all.  And when we came home, the girls found that Santa had been to our house too while we were gone.  He left some gymnastics mats, a balance beam, and a baby doll high chair (which so far has only been used to feed pizza to Care Bears).

Oh yeah, Santa left bubble wrap too.

I am still trying to get things back in order here after so much holiday traveling. Yesterday I folded six loads of laundry and I still have more to do!  The toys aren’t all put away, but they’ve at least all made it into the house now.  The spare room in the basement still has wrapping paper strewn all over the floor.  But the traveling was absolutely worth it, and we had a magical Christmas.  I hope you did too.