Christmas

We usually spend Christmas Eve at Grandma and Grandpa Gazdik's house and have a traditional candle-light dinner. This year, though, Grandma and Grandpa had to be up in Idaho for a funeral. We missed them! We managed to have a good time on our own, though. Kevin and I were in the mood for fried chicken. So that was our Christmas Eve dinner: fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, vegetables, fruit salad, and lots of biscuits! We did manage to light a candle, too.
After dinner, we had a family program. We talked about the little drummer boy and his gift to the Savior, and then we had each of the kids play a Christmas song for us on their instrument. We thought of gifts to give the Savior in the coming year and read the Christmas story from the Book of Mormon and Bible. Then we sent those little ones (and the big ones, too) off to bed!

Kevin told the girls that if they woke us up before 7am, that they'd have to wait until 10 to open their presents. In the end, it turned out that they set their alarm clocks wrong and they didn't get up until 7:30! I thought that was quite nice, really. Here they are while dad makes them smile for the camera before they can storm the room where Santa has left gifts for all of them.

Santa brought a laptop for Savannah and iPods for Sarah, Megan, and Mariah. That makes us sound RICH, huh?? Actually, they are all Hong Kong knock-offs that I bought on eBay. Let's hope they last over a month! :) Hey, they might! And they were excited to get them. Cheyenne got a new bike and Calianne got a cupcake kit and a gumball machine (just for the record, that is a lot more affordable than an ipod -- even a Hong Kong iPod -- and that's what she wanted!)

Later, after our traditional Dad-provided french toast breakfast, we opened gifts under the tree from each other. It was a lot of fun. Savannah shopped for everyone at the antique mall (one of her very favorite places) and Sarah crocheted a scarf for everyone. The other girls shopped for each other at the dollar store. It was fun to see how excited they were to give presents to each other.

After weeks of Bethany unwrapping presents and having to rewrap them, on Christmas morning she wasn't very interested. Probably because she'd probably finally learned that she wasn't supposed to unwrap presents! With a little prodding, though, she managed to get through to most of her presents. It was fun to watch her. She is trying to talk more and more. Mostly this results only in lots of jibber jabber, but she has mastered the word, "MINE!" This, accompanied by her already mastered dirty look, convinced many of her sisters to surrender their gifts to her, even if only for a minute or two. We knew she'd give them back.

On Christmas day we just hung around and played with gifts. We had take and bake pizza for dinner (loving it!) on paper plates with Root Beer. I think that's pretty festive. That night Grandma and Grandpa Gazdik made it back from Idaho and stopped by to make our Christmas complete.

We had a really nice Christmas. What a blessing to have all our children with us and to enjoy them at these fun ages. I wouldn't trade being with them for anything in the whole world. I know we will always remember these fun times.

Here's to more fun times in 2010!