Christmas Update

So Christmas came and went and now it's New Year's Eve. Let me tell you that Christmas with four kids is pure craziness especailly when there are so many presents. When I set out presents on Christmas Eve, each child had a large pile - and that was just from Montgomery County DSS, us and Santa. I looked around while the house was blissfully quiet and felt sort of overwhelmed by the amount of presents. So when the kids woke up in the morning they were very excited by what Santa had brought. They proceeded to play with toys, rip the paper off of their packages to see exactly what they got. There were lots of toys and clothes and such. Colby got his firetrucks, Noah got his Cinderella doll (more on that some other time), and Ariyana got a TON of dolls (one of which I found disturbing enough to ban).

After breakfast we did round two. Brandon got the presents out of the truck that my parents had brought at my graduation. We Skyped my parents and let the kids open the presents while everyone in Hampton watched. That was fun! When we were done with that round of opening presents, the house was a hot mess. There was wrapping paper, tissue paper and toy packaging everywhere. I wish I'd taken a picture of the huge pile of trash that made it out to the curb on trash day...it was ridiculous. Of course Brandon didn't help much because he decided to throw wrapping paper snowballs at everyone, which then encouraged the boys to throw snowballs too. They had fun though! The rest of the morning was spent playing with toys, opening toys and generally having some fun.

After lunch and nap we went to Brandon's parents' house. We ate dinner and opened presents until very late. We had to leave the presents there to pick up the next day because there was so much! I washed all the kids' new clothes over the next couple days - a load and a half of just new clothes! I love new clothes myself and everyone has great taste in clothes so that was exciting! Now the dilemma is finding a place to put all these great clothes.

I decide that Sahara did not need all the presents that DSS sent over, so I put four of them in her closet to give to her for her birthday. I guess I just thought ten new toys for a eight month old was a little overkill. All in all, it was a great Christmas. We may need to make a trip to goodwill with some older toys or store some up in the attic, so there may be some more work involved, but I wouldn't trade everyone's happy faces.

Oh and I enjoyed playing my wii :-)