Christmas 2013

This year we had another great Christmas.  I'm starting to notice a trend in our holidays recently - they've all been great.  I strongly suspect that this has something to do with our children getting older.  We've started to leave the phase of young family-ing that is known as Child Management Stage.  This stage is characterized by spending all of your children's waking hours chasing them around and trying to keep them from breaking something, fighting with each other, or breaking things while fighting.  Mealtimes usually end in tears and every minute after four o'clock is spent counting down to bedtime.  Holidays are even worse than regular days because you're trying to do all of the normal tasks (protecting valuables, separating combatants, spoon-feeding everyone) while attempting to 'celebrate' a holiday.  And by the end of the day everyone's pretty grumpy with everyone else and we're ready to not celebrate that particular holiday for another year.

But, thankfully, we seem to have (mostly) left that stage behind.  It appears that CMS only occurs when all of your children are small.  If only some are small but the rest are bigger, CMS no longer occurs.  I'm not sure why this is, but I'm pretty happy about it.  Happy enough, in fact, that I'm willing to keep adding small children to our family.

So Christmas this year was great.  Brandon and I didn't even roll out of bed until past 7:00 and the children patiently watched cartoons while we showered.  After dressing and tidying we had my favorite breakfast of the whole year - breakfast ring made from croissant dough.  If cinnamon-sugar, walnuts and date filling aren't already pretty tasty, rolling them up in croissant dough only makes them that much tastier.  I enjoyed my breakfast so much I temporarily forgot about the fun the rest of the day was bringing.

After cleaning up breakfast, brushing teeth, and making beds we finally let the children loose.  Everyone had a least one present they were happy with and enough candy to give them diabetes which created a very important stage of Christmas Day celebrations: post-present fat-dogging.  Joseph and I took a nap after awhile but everyone else had a great time eating candy, playing with their presents, reading books, and just hanging out.

After my nap Brandon and I worked on dinner (roast pork, mashed potatoes, raspberry jello and bread) for awhile and paused in the middle to go and visit the only member of our branch in town for the holidays.  He is recovering from breaking both legs in an accident this summer and his wife was out of town so we went to visit him and give him some much-needed company.

After dinner we cleaned up, had ice cream and cookies, and put the children to bed.  Even though Brandon had work the next morning we stayed up as late as we wanted to.  He talked to family and I read a book while indulging in my own Christmas stocking booty.

I know that there isn't peace on earth throughout the world, but this Christmas we had peace in our own little corner of the earth, joying in the pleasure of family love brought by the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ.  Merry Christmas indeed.