Merry Christmas!

We hope you all had a great Christmas! It definitely didn't feel like Christmas here, at least to me. I have been trying to decide if it is because we had 6 less days between Thanksgiving and Christmas or if it is because we were missing three of our loved ones this year. B#1 and his wife weren't here and B#2 is down at my parents in MS spending Christmas with them. In any case it was strange. But as it is with all big families, there is never a quiet moment so we still had a good time. Its funny but DH and I are usually up before the children on Christmas so once we were up we started waking up the ones who weren't up yet.

 

 

You might think with 9 children still at home that Christmas must be mass chaos but we do try to keep things toned down. One thing that helps with that is that we do not go hog wild with gifts for the children. We typically stick to our usual plan of Something to Read, Something to Wear and Something to Share. Although for my little ones who can't read yet we do buy them one toy item instead of a book. Several of the received new rain boots this year and others got some much needed clothes or jackets. The something to share may be a game, or movies or sometimes a big item.

 

One fun item that was received by B#9 from his Secret Sibling was this minion. We are big Despicable Me fans around here and these pudgy little things remind us of our pudgy little B#9 so it was a fun gift to get. Everyone likes him.

 

We do things a bit differently around here than most people...our Christmas dinner is always pizza( a tradition started several years back when Auntie M came for Christmas). We love that it is a relaxing day for us all with a minimal amount of clean-up. We always start the morning off with canned cinnamon rolls. I love the orange ones!

We finished up the day with our birthday cake for Jesus!

 

                               B#10 got some fun toys from his Mamaw and Papaw to chew on.