The Night before Christmas, Eve.

After a long negotiation with Santa, we were able to get him to come Thursday night to deliver presents. We made a deal with the kids that they couldn't wake us up until 7am. Ever minute before that, they would have to wait a minute afterwards to go see what Santa brought, so 6:45=7:15. It worked. 7AM on the nose we were up and heading downstairs to see if any presents had been delivered.



We put ourselves on a pretty strict budget this year, but the kids didn't seem to notice and were thrilled with what they got. Madeline ended up getting a guinea pig cage and a gift card to pick out the guinea pig on Monday. She spent the rest of the day reading through the guinea pig book while taking notes and periodically asking me lots of questions, because my brother Jon used to have one, which makes me pretty much an expert in her eyes.

Nate got the new Rachet and Clank Deadlocked game for PS2, which has cool multi-player capability and online play as well. We made a couple different kinds of Christmas cookies and mostly hung out playing with the kids new toys. Emily got the game "Whack-a-Mole", which I've been able to beat her at every time.

I think it started because of the number of people in our church who go out of town for Christmas Eve, but we end up doing a Christmas Eve-Eve service. The girls love getting all dressed up, and we normally put on a big 'ol extravaganza. This year we had an awesome choir (my friend Nicki was in it), a five piece orchestra (is that still considered an orchestra, or is it just called something else?) and a 30 minute drama that was excellent. There were a ton of people there - around 400. I got to see a lot of people I haven't seen in a while, which was great. The Kohne family came with us to check it out as well. A ton of people worked really hard to pull this whole service off and the end result was great.

We topped the evening off by having some friends over - The Shinns and the Kohne's joined us to hang out - eat, drink and be merry. The kids played hard. Emily asked to go to bed around 11:15. I went up to check on her five minutes later and she was in her PJ's, out cold in bed already.

Today, we're heading to my Mom's church in Haslett for a 3:30 Christmas Eve service, then over to my parents with the whole family - My two parents, 10 grandkids, 8 Kurt kids (yeah, we count Kevin as a Kurt). It's total chaos, but it's my favorite family tradition. More on that when we're back on Monday.