A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! So sorry I haven't been adding anything for a while. We had a fabulous Christmas in north-eastern Seattle with Dave's sister's family, his parents and his brother. We stayed overnight on Christmas Eve and had a fun morning with an overload of gifts. Micah did well, sleeping in his own room, waking up a little early but going back to sleep on Daddy for a little while. He was up and ready to go by 7:30 - just the time that Mike and Danielle had told their boys to wait until they could come out of their rooms on Christmas morning.

It was a little obscene how many gifts were there! I guess it might be the same thing in most families if you compiled ALL of your family get-togethers into ONE huge combined family gathering. My out-of-town family sent gifts, Mike's out-of-town family sent gifts, Dave's family (of which there is really only one side) had their gifts there, and Santa brought not only stocking stuffers, but huge SACKS full of gifts for the kids. Dave and I are probably not going to go overboard with the whole Santa thing. We're thinking our kids will get the bigger gifts from us and some smaller gifts from Santa. But our nephews get the majority of their gifts from Santa and just a couple things from their parents.

Christmas this year was the year of doubles, too. Mike got two of the same GPS systems, Danielle got two pairs of silver hoop earrings, Dave got two drills, and Joen got two popcorn poppers. It was kind of strange, but I guess when you know what you want and tell more than one person, this is what happens. That's why we get gift receipts.

We had a fun New Year celebration. We dropped Micah off and Nana and Papa's for the evening and left while he was almost asleep. We went to a friend's house to hang out and eat and play games. There were only 4 couples and one of the couples cut out a little early because the wife had to work at Starbucks the next day. The rest of us stayed and played Guitar Hero 2 (super fun!), we played a newlywed-type game (all of us have been married about the same amount of time, 5-6 years), and watched the pitiful fireworks at the Space Needle (the 8 minute show turned out to be mmm... 2 minutes)! And then we were all tired and ready to go to bed after midnight hit. Such is the life of parents of young children, right?