Home Parenting	Christmas Morning Mayhem!
My Christmas morning started officially at 2:55 am. We had just gone to bed at 1:00am after a great bottle of wine and assembling all of the Christmas toys from Santa. The girls came running down the stairs and thought it was time to open presents. They had already rifled through the whole tree and knew an official gift count before pouncing on our bed. You can imagine the joy I felt this early in the morning! We put them to bed and woke again at 5:00am and realized that they had yet to go back to bed. They were jumping on their beds singing some sort of a Santa chant! I quickly informed them that I would load up all of the gifts back on Santa’s sleigh if they didn’t sleep until the sun woke up. This held them off until 7:00am. At this point, Isabel (4 1/2) took it upon herself to start tearing open all of the presents. We still had to wait for the twins to wake up so I diverted the girls and let them open their stockings. This worked nicely so we had breakfast and then the craziness began. I couldn’t keep track of who gave them what – they were opening their gifts at warp speed! So our thank-you notes will for sure be vague, something like “thank you for all of the wonderful gifts you gave!” Highlights for the girls were the American Girl dolls ensemble. The boys could not be peeled away from their new train table and matchbox car semi-truck from their cousins. Randy’s highlight was a new hi-def tv and mine was a blackberry (woohoo!) and a weekend getaway already arranged and the date/location are TBD for me (double woohoo!). Randy has everything planned, including a sitter. Very impressive!