Post Christmas wrap-up

We had a lovely Christmas this year! Despite being more prepared than we have ever been, the only downside was that we did not get all the wrapping done before midnight on Christmas Eve. That's my goal for next year - be done by the first week of December and be wrapped by the second!

Right before the festivities started!

Nicholas got chocolate money in his stocking. He looks puzzled by it in this picture.... and I should have clued in that he was confused! A little later on in the morning he was chewing on something for a while. I asked him what he was eating, and he said 'My pirate money!' Now I knew that I hadn't helped him open it, so I said 'Did you take the wrapper off?' and he carried on chewing and said 'Actually, I did not.' And yes, he was chewing on tin foil! Yuck!

Boxing Day of course is sacrosanct - my favourite day of Christmas. Loads of fun new toys to play with and no dinner to make, because there's leftovers. A house full of yummy stress-free food and friends and games. It was great. I love Boxing Day!

 Jeff took a week off work between Christmas and New Year. It was so nice having him home for a whole week! We did some fun stuff in our week off, even if we didn't get in quite as much as we planned. I owe Adam a trip up to La Purissima - the mission he studied in school last year. I told him I'd take him, and we've never quite managed it yet. Didn't manage it this week either! But we took the kids to the movies, and one day we went up to the Natural History museum in LA. I was expecting it to be a little underwhelming (like the Science Museum right next door) but actually it was great. And par for the course, we bought a membership so we can go back. About half the time we do this we don't ever get around to going back, but this time we definitely will. We didn't even see all of it!

New Year's Eve was pretty low-key; we played games with the LeBarons and then took the kids home to wait up until midnight. Three of the four kids made it this year - Kate was fast asleep but Nicholas was not going to go to bed while anyone else was awake, so he stayed up too. At ten to midnight we discovered that a) only having Netflix as entertainment and b) living in California meant that we couldn't find a live stream of a midnight countdown anywhere! All the live streams were from New York and were totally over... So we counted down to midnight on the clock on the microwave. Utterly lame. We will have to do better next year!