Christmas..."Oh damn!"

This Christmas countdown has proven quite crazy so far...I always start out with good intentions of a quiet, peaceful, Heavenly focused season...taking time to enjoy each other, the humble reality of Christ's arrival on this earth as a babe to save us from our sins, to worry less, spend more time with family, and on and on...

Well, my family is the first to pull my head out of the clouds and remind me of the reality of LIFE...our life...ha!

Before Leah's Christmas concert

Leah and Autum all prettied up

Opening presents...

Drilling with Papa's help

• My mother-in-law sends 25 gifts to us as a fun way for the kids to count down the days til Santa arrives.  Well before I got smart and set up an order in which each kid would open the gift on a designated day...we had WWF smackdown at 7 AM every morning before school started.  Autum is always the early riser and therefore had a jump on the gift unwrapping, but she couldn't always get the gift down quietly enough...and to add to her struggles the gift box containing each day's surprise was down in Blake's room-which required her going down the stairs and through a sticky, noisy door to get there...in the dark.  The first morning, Leah heard Autum's not so quiet tip toeing down the stairs and busted out of her room door, sprinting past Autum, tripping down the stairs, and grabbing Autum on the way...both girls rolled to the bottom in a pile waking Blake up with their screaming and crying...I knew this was going to be a great start to the month...

• I decided to try and help keep the focus of the countdown to Christmas on Christ and the true meaning of the season by reading to the kids from Unwrapping the Greatest Gift: A Family Celebration of Christmas each morning...written by Ann Voskamp.  It is full of pictures and colors and kid-understandable stories.  I was really excited to delve into its meaning, hoping it would lead to great discussion and questions.  We got started a little late in the game so our first day of reading was from Habakkuk.  It discussed Habakkuk climbing to the top of his watchtower and drawing near to God and shouting about his joy in the Lord.  One of the questions at the end of the story asks: "is there something that has been stealing your joy lately?"  So I asked Leah...and her half-slumbered response while eating breakfast was, "Yeah...Mr. Boots, our Christmas elf hasn't arrived yet..." 

UGH...I chose not to invite Mr. Boots to our countdown to Christmas for fear it would steal from the real reason I wanted to focus on the Advent.  Obviously this tactic wasn't working...

• So...Mr. Boots made his arrival the week before Christmas.  He landed on our snowman centerpiece in our kitchen...with a note that said, "I decided to come visit and make sure you are behaving this last week before Christmas..."  Leah was beside herself when she woke up that morning and found Mr. Boots waiting for her.  She read the note and immediately wrote a note back, thanking him for coming and that she was definitely going to be a good girl.  When Autum finally pulled herself from her morning cartoon fix and made her way into the kitchen she took one look at the elf, one look at the note and said, "oh geeeeeez, Leah...MOM wrote that!"

Ha.  Well, guess it's going to take more than I thought to convince her of his magical presence from Santa's workshop.

Mr. Boots got caught stealing the kids' candy canes so Leah left him a note...

• One evening my dad came to watch the kids so Jerad and I could have a quick date night.  We left an "easy to put together" Gingerbread house for him to assemble with the kids while we were gone.  2 hours later we came back and my dad was laughing and laughing...which was a good sign because the gingerbread house could have gone one of two ways...He waited until the kids were asleep before calling us back and enlightening us with the details of the house making...apparently they got the whole house together and my dad got up to get some more candy to decorate with and one of the walls came crumbling down...and before he could even get turned around to help, Leah yells in all seriousness and panic,  "OH DAMMIT!"  He said he started laughing and laughing...could NOT stop laughing...could NOT get himself together enough to fix the wall as Leah scrambled around to save her house...he is still laughing a week later...

Blake at his school Christmas party making reindeer toast

Autum has been entertaining us with her concerts every night

• Leah and Autum participated in the Mini Christmas festivities downtown while Jerad and I were gone.  My in-laws took the girls down to shop for us and for each other and to see Santa.  They had all the gifts wrapped while down there shopping and I recently found them in a bag downstairs...I looked through them and was puzzled by all these boxes that read, "To: Leah, From: Leah"....

Ummmm...I thought this was a shopping experience for the kids to shop for their family members...I later talked to my Mother-in-Law and she informed me Leah did her own shopping and made the executive decision that she was NOT leaving that place until she bought her own self some gifts because she was a "family member..."  She may or may not have been the only kid there who took advantage of this opportunity...I bet she will be surprised when she opens her own gifts. :)