Wrapping up the holidays

Our Christmas began at about 1:30 a.m. Christmas morning with Tatum waking to to sounds of Santa Claus in the living room. She was standing in the hallway gazing doe-eyed at the gifts and she told me, "Mom, Santa thinks we were really good kids this year." It is one of those precious moments a parent wants to save forever - after we get some sleep. Oddly enough, Tatum had apparently interupted Santa in the middle of his delivery. Some of the gifts were still inside the fireplace! Oh, my! So, we waited about two hours to make sure Santa didn't come back because he forgot to leave something.

We started opening gifts around 9 a.m. and had a great brunch when Rick's dad arrived at 10 a.m. Our weather was very drab, gray and rainy, but apparently there were several patches of icy road between Charlie and Joe's house and ours.



Charlie and Linda were both on hand for Christmas Day. Charlie shared a big photo albumn he's been keeping of the SeaTac Airport runway construction site where he's been working the past several years. He also had several photos from taking the kids to Mariner's games the past two seasons. Linda shared photos from Thanksgiving. She had a particularly good photos of Grandpa Dick and his grandkids and greatgrandkids.




There were several big highlights to our Christmas day. A turkey dinner with all the fixin's, toys, a new digital camera, books, toys, time to catch up with Charlie and Joe, phone calls to family,clothes and more toys. One toys in particular caused hours of commotion - the tea party book and accessories from Tatum's cousin Madison. We spent hours drawing placemats, making name cards, and deciding what to serve at our tea party. We ended up having paper brownies, paper chocolate chip cookies and imaginary wild green tea.

Our evening was capped with Keeli and I taking a fabulously quick trip to the emergency room! Keeli was after chocolate and successfully pulled her stocking down from the mantle, however the brass stocking hanger came with it. The corner of the hanger caught her squarely in the middle of her forehead. After about a two hour wait, she got her little cut glued back together and a big yellow bandaid added just for holiday cheer. The cut is only about 1/2 inch and hopefully won't scar too badly.