Christmas!!!

We had a wonderful time having Christmas (a few days early at Mom's). Our week has been interesting, Wednesday at Mom's, Thursday is another story altogether which I'll save to the end of the post. We had such a tough time finding a date where we could all make it so a Wednesday evening it was. We had turkey a la king for dinner and then on to presents. We drew our adult gift inspiration from the letter "N" for Niki thinking the letter N would be easy inspiration for shopping on a limited budget. Not really! Mom got creative (which I ended up happily bringing home pj bottoms "nightwear" and both Bill and Jason picked up whatever they could find on the way to dinner. None of us really minded though, all of us but Niki were happy with our gifts. Poor Niki ended up with Jason's remote control helicopter, I don't remember how he translated that into "N", new toy??? Anyways, the kids had a blast playing together even though Brecken was a little on the cranky side for the first half of the evening and loved their new presents.

Camera hams

Always trying to get a shot of all 4 of them where someone is not crying or running away.

Ealier in the week Reagan and I stopped at my Mom's Club party, we walked in the room and Reagan shouted "hi Santa" with a great big wave. She has really started coming out of her shell. Well after getting our coats arranged we headed over to the big guy and up on his lap she went. It was cute, they had an entire conversation but every time she saw I had the camera in hand she turned to smile as if she were a professional model. Silly girl.
Brecken still has problems focussing on her own gifts, she was more interested in everyone else's. It's pretty cute to watch.

Piper's 1st Zhu Zhu pet, she has been asking and asking for these things. I haven't paid much attention but they are really cute little toys. Maybe I'll have to actually let the girls take me down the toy aisle from time to time to check some of these things out.

Grandma got her an art set with some sketch pads, which she spent hours using the next day.

Let's see how many girls can fit into a foot stool.

Ring around the rosie is one of Brecken's favorites and the girls are all too happy to help play a few rounds.

I was blown away by Grandma's gift, she made me a gorgeous quilt. I took it out and said "it's so pretty" to which Mom replied, that is exactly what you said when you saw the fabric at Grandma's last summer. I don't remember that but I guess Grandma did, lucky me!

Reagan and her Tangled doll, she is obsessed with anything from that movie right now.

We had a great time Wednesday and were all excited for our Friday and Saturday activities but come Thursday morning Jason woke up riddled with a terrible cold and spent most of his day in bed. Reagan and I were fine and ran some errands but Piper kept declining going outside, to the grocery store, to do just about anything. I didn't realize until around dinner time that she wasn't looking quite right, she was pale and developed a fever. We all sent her off to bed hoping she'd be fine by morning. Well the stomach flu hit her first, then Reagan, then myself all thourought the night. Jason was our superhero taking care of all of us while not getting more than 15 minutes of sleep at a time until around 8am the next morning when the girls and I all stabilized and camped out in our bed sending him off to get some much needed sleep. Needless to say we spent the entire day Friday in bed recouperating not even realizing that Mom was also stricken with the same bug at her house. We didn't get to do our traditional Christmas Eve with Jason's family going to church and enjoying our fondue dinner at his Aunt and Uncle's and Mom and Tim didn't get to enjoy their trip to see his parents in Omaha. Bummer! Saturday we started feeling a little more like ourselves but decided to skip our outing to his Grandparents in Glencoe so we didn't infect his entire family. We waited the 24 plus hours past the last symptoms and then finally headed to Dad's for dinner. That will be our next post. Christmas just isn't the same without all our traditional family get together's, we really missed seeing everyone!