Christmas Commotion

Our long Christmas weekend started off with a bang. We drove down to Price early on the 24th and hung out with Papa at his house for the morning and then it was off to Grandma Nette's house for her Christmas Eve get-together. Us girls have a long running joke with Papa Kevin about flamingos in his house so when we found these flamingo pants over the summer we all got a pair and saved them for a special occasion. Grandma Nette also had some flamingo visers to complete our taunting.

After we had a yummy dinner of lasagna with salad and garlic bread and goodies, it was time to open presents from Grandma Nette and Uncle Ryan. Here's Zaden helping Dad with one. We all got our new Christmas jammies and a toy from Grandma and then the kids got blankets from uncle Ry. Mike got a new hat and I got a scrapbook from him.

After we got back to Papa Ringo's I had brought down a special present from me for Caleb to open on Christmas Eve. I made him his own NY Giants blanket. He's been asking for one for some time. He LOVED it and of course had to sleep with it that night. Oh and these are the new Christmas (Hulk) jammies from Grandma Nette's.

Santa had it quite easy this year. Caleb was pooped from playing so hard with the kids and went to bed early. He was asleep by 8 and the boyz went to sleep about that time too. So Santa was finished with everything by 9 and ate his plate of cookies and sat around watching TV for a while before heading to bed. Here's a pic of the kids' stuffed stockings.

And here's the stack Santa left for Caleb.

And the stack for Zaric and Zaden.

The babies woke up around 6 ish and after snuggling with papa for a bit went right to playing with their new toys.

Once Caleb got up around 7:30 and realized that Santa had been there already and had indeed left his dinosaur he's been wanting so bad, he went right to playing with it and a couple times even scared himself making it growl.

After playing with Santa presents for a while we watched Grandma and Grandpa open theirs from under the tree and opened our presents from them. Here's Zaric trying to rip into the one from Grandpa Ringo and Grandma Judi. Zaden was on the other side trying to get it open from that side too.

And this is what was inside. They loved their new horsey.

Here's a pic of me and my Niece Maygun when she got to Papa's on Christmas day. Everyone says we look alike especially since she got her new glasses. So I put mine on for this pic. I can see it too. Too bad I am squinting.

Due to the snow. Papa got called out from work to go plow the roads at about 2:30 in the afternoon and didn't get home until after 1 am. So that put a damper on our plans to hang out and play games with everyone. So everyone just went home to get out of the storm and let their kids play with their new stuff. To make the most of being snowed in without Papa on Christmas night, Grandma Judi and Caleb built a tent over the air hockey table. He played in it for quite a while and invited us all in for a look. Here's some pics of him and Grandma Judi in the tent. He also took in his new Giants blanket from mom to make a bed. This is the backside of it.

We were planning on coming home on the 26th. But Papa kept insisting we stay another day since he'd been out plowing and such for so long on Christmas day. He pleaded with me and Mike a good portion of the morning and Schydi was told she could spend the night with Caleb if we stayed again. So we ended up staying an extra day. Which worked out well because Ryan and Tracey came back over and we got to play those games we missed out on Christmas day. We played a round of a dice game called LCR and Tracey won all our money. Then we played about 5 rounds of Apples to Apples. It was a good time.

After we finally got home yesterday morning, we got to open the presents still left under our tree (more pics to come of that tomorrow). But here was Caleb's favorite present from under the tree. It was funny he loved this so much because we had Great Aunt Peg grab it for us in Nebraska and ship it to us. We decided at the last minute to go ahead and wrap it up and throw it under the tree. Boy am I glad we did. He wore it all day yesterday and got up first thing this morning and put on the helmet to watch some cartoons. It's his very own Nebraska Huskers (or the Kari's as he calls them) uniform.

We've had a great holiday break so far. There were so many pics to share I couldn't fit them all in so will share some more tomorrow. And thanks to Skype we were able to link up Christmas morning with Mike's family in Nebraska and show them the big dino and wish them a Merry Christmas. We were also able to link up to Great Grandpa Howard's party last night and were able to actually pick our own gifts for his gift exchange instead of just listening to descriptions on the phone. Lots more fun.

Another Christmas for the memory books!