Merry Christmas!

Well it is ALL OVER but making dinner! The FREAKING turkey isn't thawed, it has been in the fridge 3 days, so I now have it sitting in the sink in cold water and am going to go wrestle with it here in a bit...we don't plan to eat until late tonight....Brett is heading to Sarah's Great Grandma's house for lunch at 1 PM, so we are holding dinner until they get back here...probably around 6 PM.

The kids were all THRILLED with their gifts (amazingly they let us sleep until 8 AM, good thing since Jay and I were up until after 2 AM "celebrating"...lol) and everyone is happily playing with their new toys! Things went OK at my mom's last night, we ended up staying about 5 hours and she acted like a human the entire time, a real plus for her....my brother, on the other hand, decided to show up at her house at 2 PM and left at 4 PM, knowing that my family and I wouldn't get there until 5 PM......he just really pisses me off....have I mentioned that he has yet to see Luke?

My mom bought our family our YMCA membership for the year, a zoo membership, a museum center membership and gave us $900 to pay for our trip to Kalahari Water Resort in Feb (she gave me $300 in Nov to put down the deposit and $600 yesterday to pay for the remainder when we check in)! Have to love that she sees spending $$$ on you to mean she LOVES you! I much prefer these LARGE family gifts over toys the kids will break and leave scattered on my floor! Will was so excited when I told him Grandma gave us money to go back to Kalahari, he was jumping up and down and screaming! And she was worried he would be mad about not having presents to open. We gave her a picture of our family in a silver frame, the cd from the musical Jersey Boys (she went to see that with my aunt Judy in the fall and LOVED it) and the calendar I made her for the year....I chose to highlight 12 family vacations through the years, it turned out really nice!

We went to 3 PM services at our church, minus Hannah and Emily who decided they would attend midnight services with my mother. Even though we got there 30 minutes early, there wasn't an entire pew left, so we had to split up, Brett, Will and I sat in chairs along the back wall and Jay and the other kids jammed into a pew. I was VERY distracted by the guy standing next to me.....he had his two sons with him (maybe 6 and 9 years old) and he had them watching MOVIES on their ipod the ENTIRE SERVICE....I guess I should be surprised, after all he was sending text messages the entire time as well.....but WHY EVEN SHOW UP??? My guess was he must have promised someone that he would take those boys to Christmas services, I certainly can't figure out ANY other reason you would fight the traffic, park blocks away and then NOT pay attention at all to the service....OK rant over! The music was gorgeous and it set a great tone for the rest of the day!

Hope everyone is having a great day!