About 5 days before Christmas, we got a wonderful surprise...Mark, Melissa, Tiana & Elijah were coming up to Seattle for Christmas!! They were going to show up on Christmas Eve and REALLY surprise us but my mom was actually in-the-know (she'd just been down to LA to help with wedding plans a couple of weeks prior) and she was having a really hard time keeping the secret. Shocking, I know.
Christmas Eve was a fun family filled day. Each year, both Jeremy's family and mine get together after church since we all attend the same service at St. Thomas. I had already volunteered to have everyone here and now with Mark's family and Jeremy's sister/husband coming (they're normally elsewhere on Christmas Eve), we had a full house! My mom and Cheryl had kindly volunteered to cook dinner so that I wouldn't be too stressed as I was hosting Christmas morning here as well. I figured that if I wasn't preparing any food, I didn't really have to think much about anything at all. That proved problematic when my mom went to plate up the food and I realized we had nowhere to sit! How in the world were we going to eat soup on our laps!? So I ran upstairs, got the dining table leaf and pads, a green tablecloth and quickly set the table with my Spode Christmas dishes. Voila! Very festive!! My table only seats 8 and we had 10 adults so poor Jeremy was stuck on a kid chair from the playroom. He said it was pretty easy to shovel soup into his mouth at that height but eating salad like that was more challenging. We had a good laugh at his expense.
Before the kids could go to bed, we had a few holiday traditions to attend to. First we got them all dressed in their Christmas jammies. Finding matching ones this year proved difficult so we took what we could get. The kids laid out milk & cookies for Santa and a carrot for Rudolph. They excitedly went to bed without much prodding and daddy read the classic The Night Before Christmas. This is a special tradition for me as my dad read it to Mark & me until I was in college.
After everyone left, I started wrapping. I have never in my life left wrapping until Christmas Eve and I can honestly say I'll never do it again. Not only could I not sit back and enjoy a holiday movie, I was exhausted and didn't finish until 12:30am. Let's just say there will be some changes to the Christmas Eve traditions in the Kiefer household next year...
As busy as it was around here with our raging Wii competition and the kids playing hide & seek, it was really fun to have a houseful of family!
Mark, Skip, Gretchen, both Bumpas and Jeremy watch Elijah and Ragen battle it out at MarioKart
One of the few times Maggie actually looks at the camera - she's that excited
A case of the sillies
I love how both kids have thier "ba-ba's" here, are in their matching chairs, and are both sucking the appropriate digit for each :)
Santa came!!!
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