Christmas morning

Christmas morning was a flurry of flying paper and grinning faces. Both Randi and Ryan thoroughly enjoyed opening and playing with their gifts, but the highlight of their day was when they heard a faint "Ho Ho Ho" somewhere off in the distance. They went outside to see where it was coming from and, amazingly enough, they saw Santa walking down the street toward our house. It seems he'd forgotten to leave a couple of gifts, so he came back to put them under the tree. The moment was priceless and the look of love on Randi's face as she hugged Santa made us remember how wonderful it is to believe in the true magic of Christmas!

Getting ready for Santa

Gee's Christmas Party

On Sunday, we had Christmas with Grammy Nancee, aka "Gee". Randi came up with that name all on her own when she was a year old, and it's just stuck. Ryan now calls her "Gee Gee". Uncle Rusty let all of us invade his beautiful new home, and we had a wonderful time eating a yummy meal, doing performances, opening presents, and having a giant slumber party. Thank goodness he has enough rooms for all of us! Some of you may be wondering what I meant by performances? Well, it's a tradition in the Kirk family that you have to do a performance of some sort before you can open your presents. They start with the youngest and go to the oldest and everyone does something different. This year, Ryan blew his train whistle and said "all aboard", and Randi had a sack with a surprise in it. Everyone had to guess what it was based upon her clues. 1. It's a girl 2. She has horns 3. She lives at the North Pole? Any guesses? It's Clarice....Rudolph's girlfriend! Later Michael, Nancee, the kids and I also sang a song. Nancee played for us and Randi was sure to tell us that she wanted to play her guitar too. We didn't sound too good, but it's the attempt that counts right!

Over the river and through the woods to Papa & Mimi's house we go

On Saturday we went to Papa & Mimi's house for an "Italian" Christmas. Mimi is a great cook, and she knows we've all had our fill of turkey around this time of year, so she whips up a huge batch of spaghetti and stuffed shells. She calls it our "annual carb fest!" And that it is, but it's also a wonderful day spent celebrating Christmas with the kids' grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Cookies, cookies, and more cookies

Our wonderful neighbor, Courtney, hosted a kids cookie decorating party last week. She outdid herself by preparing all kinds of fun cookies so all the kids had to do was enjoy decorating them. Ryan had fun but got a little distracted when he found a little cutie standing under the mistletoe. Randi got right down to business and impressed us with her pastry decorating talent! And to top the evening off, Santa even showed up to make sure the kids were making a perfect cookie just for him!





A few days later, Grammy Nancee was a little more ambitious and had the kids and cousins over to make cookies....from scratch! Ryan proved to be quite the little chef, intently rolling out his dough and cutting out his shapes. The only problem was, every time he cut out a cookie, he'd immediately wad it back up into a blob so he could roll it and cut it out again! So, needless to say, he didn't make quite as many cookies as the other kids did. Randi, on the other hand, made a boatload, and did a pretty good job of cutting them out and decorating them all by herself!

The tree is up

Earlier this week, we went and picked out our Christmas tree. We got it home, set it up, put lights and a star on it and then it sat for days without ornaments because we had so much else going on that we couldn't find the time to get to it. So, finally, this weekend, while Michael went hunting, the kids and I got the ornaments out and put them on our naked little tree. Ryan had a hard time with the hooks and most of his ornaments just stuck by accident, but Randi is an old pro at decorating now, even knowing to put the "breakable" ornaments up high so you know who can't reach them!