December Daily: Day 23 - Merry Richards Christmas!

The evening of the 23rd Phase II of our Christmas celebrations began with Dinner and Presents at Brent's parents' house.  It was phenomenal! You simply cannot imagine the stack of presents when we arrived.  I have a picture and suspect you can guess which presents we wrapped (ahem, I blame B's love of wrapping.... ok, I give up. I'm just not skilled at this, but do greatly admire Jamie and Marilyn's wrapping talents). Anyway, everything was gorgeous and the boys were so excited to dive in.  M, meanwhile, dosed for the first round, but joined in later.

First, Santa's "elves" brought stockings full of treasures and then our own little elves helped Jamie distribute the gifts.  The boys opened their gifts first and we helped open Maggie's.  It was complete mayhem and tons of fun.  They got so many amazing gifts!  B got another INCREDIBLE robot, a huge dinosaur, a robot hat and much much more.  After the Dads had all the batteries installed and a first round of play in we moved on to grown-up gifts.  We were richly blessed and delighted by our gifts as well.  Brent, thankfully, got his annual Star Wars Legos, which the boys promptly put together via the snow storm the next day.  I think my favorite ended up being my subscription to the new Food Network magazine.  It is doubly neat as I'll get to enjoy it all year.  Everyone did such a great job of picking out presents and sharing in everyone's joy.  It was a great family moment capped off by Bill annoucing his big new promotion.  We are so excitedc for him!

The boys got one more treat as well as Grammy had hand-made special dinosaur (aka "dido") suckers for them.  We wrapped up the evening with baths and jumping into Christmas PJs.  I think John's favorite part of the evening might just have been Maggie.  My favorite Carl quote was when he told John "Maybe we should have gotten you a Maggie for Christmas." So adorable (yes, I love the hint of a possibility of another niece/nephew in my future:))

We had a wonderful evening and left with the promise of a big family gathering the next day.  Sadly, that didn't pan out due to the snow storm, but that made me doubly grateful that we had this early evening together.