Christmas Day

I ended up sleeping on one of my Dad's air mattresses, which seemed comfortable at first. My brother Jon shared with me this bit of prophetic wisdom "The only thing worse than no air matresss, is a half-full air matress". I woke up in the middle of the night to find that the dumb thing had slowly deflated enough so that more than half the air was out of it, and the only thing off the floor were my feet. I was pretty confident my brother Jon had come up in the middle of the night and deflated it, though he denies. If he'd done it, it'd have been a genius trick. Nate was kind enough to wake up about 6:30, and I held him off until about 7. In the past, my mother received a set of bells (we believe these have come straight from Satan) that she would send her grandkids running throughout the house to wake us up. This year, we missed out on them, but still got up somehow (there's a lesson to be learned here).

We started opening the gifts from Grandma and Grandpa, which everyone loved. The most impressive thing was that my Mom was still able to get Christmas Shopping done on her days while she was feeling well, which made them all the more special. Almost better was that my Dad had to help with christmas shopping this year.

We had a great breakfast, including oatmeal with Baily's, which was really, really, really good. After breakfast the kids played with their toys and I started getting all of our stuff together (with help from Beth and Susan). Cathie normally pulls everything together, making sure nothing gets forgotten and that it's all neatly packed away. Not so much this year. My Dad gave Em, Nate and I a ride over to Cathie's parents where we went to check on Cathie. Maddie and I then headed back to my folks where Maddie opened her presents and got a chance to hang out with my parents a little while

Around one, we started Christmas Celebration #3. Cathie's brother Ed and my sister-in-law Stacy came over (tan from a recent trip to the Bahamas) and we always have a fun time. It's a nice contrast to the craziness of my family Christmas, giving us all a chance to chill a little and enjoy the day. By this time, Cathie was feeling a little better, but it's tough to tell, because she rarely complains when she's sick.

Voice recognition stuff was big this year. Madeline got a voice recognition diary which only opens based on your voice password (which Ed was able to duplicate with a very high pitch imitation of a girl). Cathie's parents got Emily the creepiest present (but one that she loves dearly), a doll called Amazing Amanda. The thing recognizes your voice and interacts with you pretty realistically via voice commands. The face moves in a really detailed way, to the point that it's creepy. It recongizes the various acoutraments - food, outfits, toilet via electronic tags embedded in them. The thing even grunts when it poops on the toilet. If you don't get it on the toilet, it has an accident. Emily finds great joy in setting it next to me and getting it to say that it had an accident next to me. The instrutions say "Please replace batteries if doll starts acting erratically." I believe this means it will someday come at me with a knife in the middle of the night, like Chucky in Child's Play.

We had another huge dinner after presents. I crashed hard after dinner, taking a great nap, waking up with a stuffed animal stuck on my head and people laughing. The kids played with their presents and we hung out until about 8:30, when we headed out. We got home and Emily was crashed in the van. We unloaded everything, put the other kids to bed, and took a deep breath and exhaled, amazed that the whole thing was over with.

You can see more pictures of Christmas Eve and Day here, in the Kurt Family Gallery. If you're a real glutton for punishment, you can see everyone's Christmas pictures by clicking through each person's gallery.