A Christmas Story

Its been a week since Christmas exploded all over our house! Since then we have experienced good times and bad. The stomach flu ripped through the family like a wildfire starting the night after Christmas. We are just lucky it did not strike a day or two earlier! I haven't posted in a while since the week has just flown by, but I wanted to add some photos for those of you far away who do not get to see the precious little ones often enough. Here is our Christmas story expressed photographically with a few comments(like I could ever keep quiet when there are photos involved)!
Christmas Eve brought the UPS guy to the door, which was good, I had goodies for him, but apparently he had some for us as well. He brought us 5 very big boxes from Grandma Peg, Grandpa Blaine and Grandma Great! We opened them and had the kids put the gifts under the tree, it pretty much doubled what was there before. It was so fun for the kids, it was like Christmas morning a day early! Annalina had tons of packages to put under the tree and you can tell she was very protective of them all!

Santa brought each child their own hot cocoa mug. This was smart since I can only find two out the dozen or so we once had. I am sure most of them were thrown away during Joseph's "clearing the table" learning phase a year or so ago! We lost the majority of our Spoons, apparently the mugs, and a few plates before I realized he was just throwing them away when he was done!!My little ones LOVE books, its something I am very grateful for. Joseph got a big package full of fun books(thank you, thank you, thank you) and he has poured over each and every one of them. It has been so much fun to read them to him!
Artist Adrienne got a wonderful art easel with supplies which she was very happy about! I can't wait to see what she creates!
Annalina got a slew of Madeline playsets which have kept her busy for hours!
Adrienne's sweet friend Mariah made her this fun monkey fleece blanket! Its so cute!
We got Jake this set of Blazers bobbleheads, Brandon Roy and Channing Frye. He LOVES them!

Richard and I already had slippers, but with the cold weather and the low thermostat, we decided to get everyone their own pair of slippers!

One last cute story about Christmas morning. The kids each got a couple of the HUGE candy bars. So after the gifts were open Annalina asked if she could have some Chocolate, then she followed up by saying, "I'll only have one!!" Turns out she could only eat a row of chocolate squares anyway! (And NO, I did not tell her she could eat the whole thing!)