Christmas Preparations

Dylan would stack his presents (They were all wrapped in Thomas paper he had picked out.) up and then get down as low as he could to hide. Too cute!!
He enjoyed playing with his presents this year and didn't try to open any early.

Olivia had picked out Tinkerbell paper.

They both got a lot of fun out of playing with their presents. They were also really good at spotting if another present had been put under the tree by watching for their wrapping paper.

Olivia had a to-do list for Christmas Eve and none of it could start until Grammy Lee and Papa got here. So once they came we ate dinner. Mixed up cinnamon roll dough. Watched Frosty the Snowman. Followed by rolling out and cutting gingerbread cookies, baking them, and finally frosting them. I think we ended up with 38 gingerbread cookies. Olivia picked out a Santa cookie for Santa and a Reindeer cookie for Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. (In which she insisted I write a note to Santa instructing him which cookie was for which.)

Olivia was very excited to make Christmas cookies and was a helper for every step!

enough frosting cookies - time to eat the frosting!

Tom got to open another birthday present! Square foot gardening. We are excited to start a garden this coming year.

Time to get ready for bed. We read in our Christmas book and put our last ornament on our count down tree. We opted out of reading the Christmas story knowing we would never hold Dylan's attention and watched the Christmas Nativity movie instead. It was fun to watch it with the kids. Olivia was really understanding it. And then for Olivia's bed time story she wanted to read this cute book Grandma gave her that is called the Christmas Baby.

Once we got the kids in bed we headed down stairs to put the finishing touches on Christmas morning. Just as we were about done Tom put some boxes into our play room and steps in some wet spots. Under further investigation he found water pooling under the stairs and traveling through the play room to the laundry room floor drain. It took us until 4 am with 4 people trying to understand and work on the situation to get ahead of it enough to feel like we could go to bed. That gave us about 4 hours of sleep before the kids woke up excited for Christmas morning.

We are counting our blessings that we were home and downstairs to find the situation and that we had my parents help. Also that the problem was in the floor were we could get to it and not on the walls that would have required our paneling to come down. We were also very grateful for a syrup incident with Dylan that made us purchase a wet vac because that was really really handy to have in this situation. We are very grateful for all the blessings of that night.