christmas!

christmas is over!  can i get a high five?!?!  everybody is always talking about how this is their favorite time of year.  not me.  i think we need to skip everything and just make it a religious holiday.  call me scrooge if you like, but our tree came down christmas night.  i'm excited that the radio stations are back to playing regular music.  wal-mart will go back to being just plain horrible instead of super duper horrible.  and i won't have to try to remember to move that durn elf every night.  i will, however, miss those christmas m&ms!!  :)

we started out with parties at school last week.  i only managed to get pictures of wes' party.  he built a gingerbread house with his daddy.  i'm thinking all the creative/artistic genes must have gone to aunt holly.

wes and sam

i came back after walking over to william's party and found these two snuggled up in the reading center!

shortly afterwards, we made our way to madison for the henson christmas.  we were sad the jackson hensons missed out on the festivities due to the flu, and reed really missed his playmate!  but we survived.  presents helped!  and somehow i got no pictures of all the cousins.

and it didn't take long for the first of the lego creations to get put together!

back at our house on christmas eve, we worked hard on some slice and bake cookies.

and then we went outside for what may be the craziest thing i've ever seen.  my mom saved three paper lanterns from one of her recent weddings.  paper lanterns.  you light an attached piece of tar on fire.  it somehow fills up the paper lantern and floats off.  paper lantern.  on fire.  i was certain that we were going to burn somebody's house or yard up.  once they got on up into the sky, i felt a little better.  and i laughed thinking what the cars on the road must have been thinking while looking at these fire balls floating through the air!  i was surprised we didn't wake up to a picture of it on the front page of the paper asking if anyone saw the unidentified floating object on christmas eve!  it was pretty cool, though, and they did get super high before they eventually disappeared!

when all that relief that we didn't catch our neighborhood on fire excitement was over, we opened our christmas eve present and went to bed with christmas ninjago pjs.

despite the fact that william said the "nighttime takes forever," christmas morning came, and they were all ready.

well...not really.  reed would have been happy to sleep for a few more hours, but the other two weren't going to let that happen!  he perked up when he saw presents!

yes.  the 5 year old is obsessed with the titanic, and the light sabers are a big hit!!  after reed finished his annual christmas breakfast of a box of whoppers....

they had to go on a scavenger hunt and find clues that lead them to their last present!

and they got to ride them for about 30 seconds before the monsoon came through!  so the rest of the day was spent inside playing with the rest of the new loot!

so that about wraps up christmas over here.  it was fun while it lasted, and my house is still a disaster to prove it!  but now let's bring on the new year!!