Merry Christmas!!

I hope you all have had a wonderful day celebrating the birth of Jesus! Our celebration started yesterday with something that I think will become a new tradition for us--we had our big meal on Christmas Eve! I made turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, gravy, sweet potato casserole, garlic green beans, and cran-apple-pear sauce, and we ate around 4:00. Then we cleaned up and went to the candlelight service at our church. When we got home, Nathan helped me put a sausage/hashbrown/egg breakfast casserole into the crockpot for this morning while I made cinnamon rolls using Elizabeth L.'s recipe. Since Caleb couldn't have them, I never thought it was worth the bother. How nice that he can enjoy them now!

This morning it was SO nice to have breakfast totally done! All we had to do was take the lid off the crockpot! It was good too--I'll post the recipe when I have more time. And the cinnamon rolls were delicious too! I let them rise the second time in the fridge overnight, then cooked and frosted them this morning. Very tasty!

We ate after the kids had opened their stockings. I try to get them something to do (Michael's dollar bins are a great place to find little crafty-type things), so the boys put together these little cars while the cinnamon rolls were cooking. Then we opened presents after I showered. The boys were very excited to receive bows and arrows from my parents, and Bob later took them out to an empty field not far from us to let them shoot into a box filled with wrapping paper trash! Other than that, they got a Lego Creationary game from us, as well as a book for each of them, some cool spy-type toys from Aunt Melinda and Uncle Dan (and Aunt Melinda's mom--thank you, Barbara, for finding and sending them!!) and some Legos and assorted things from each other. The girls were very excited to get a dollhouse from my parents, which Bob will hopefully be able to assemble this next week! We gave them a little shopping cart, which they are already enjoying playing with, and a Little Mermaid bath toy, and the boys got them some little things from the dollar store. It was fun stuff, and not overwhelming, so that is a good thing!

I took a nap after present-opening. I stayed up too late last night! What I was doing was finishing wrapping a few last presents, and I realized there was one last video that I had ordered, and I knew it had arrived--where was it?! I looked very thoroughly through my closet, and I couldn't figure out why the video wasn't with the other books that had come from Amazon, because I knew I had seen it with them! I must have looked for 30 minutes, growing ever more frustrated, when finally it occured to me that maybe I had been really organized and wrapped the video already. I went to bed at that point, but this morning, there was the video, under the tree! Good grief! I would have saved myself time by not wrapping the crazy thing early, and just doing it on Christmas Eve, if I am going to waste 30 minutes looking for it! I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere . . .

This afternoon I spent busily packing because the kids and I are driving to Ohio tomorrow, Lord willing, so see my parents, as well as my brother and his family, who have driven up from Texas. There is supposed to be a big snow storm here in D.C. tomorrow, so I am hoping we can get out early and not have problems from it. Please pray for our safety! Bob will be holding down the fort here, but we're only going to be gone a few days. So with that, I had better sign off and get to bed so that I am not too tired to drive tomorrow! Merry Christmas!!!