Christmas Eve-Eve

We had our family Christmas yesterday. We celebrate Christmas eve and morning with my Dad, and then Christmas day with Cathie's family, so we started celebrating Christmas a few years back to give the kids a chance to have play with their presents and have some time as our family to celebrate Christmas. We woke up around 8 to 47 degree weather and gale force winds. We opened presents and then hung out and played with them for a while, and then cleaned up the house to get ready for our Christmas Eve-Eve post-Church party.




I was particularly proud of myself in that I had all of Cathie's Christmas shopping done by the end of November, which I've never done before. I got Cathie a Roomba floor cleaning robot. This was kind of risky because it had the potential to be the equivalent of getting her a vacuum cleaner as a gift. To understand why this qualifies as a decent gift, you need to understand Cathie's o.c.d.-like-love of clean floors and well vacuumed carpets. My thought was something that was cool and could do the job for her would be a good gift. It turns out she likes it (or at least is telling me that she does)

The thing is amazing (to me). It cruises around the lower level of the house, cleans the flooors and then goes back into it's dock to recharge. We've named it Rover (Maddie's idea) and it is fun to watch. It does a very thorough job of cleaning, even able to make it through Nate's room, including under his bed, without committing robot-ritual-suicide due to the mess. It can't be stopped (almost - short of trying to ingest an arm-cover for a chair) by much and it's a blast to watch. Before buying one, I checked with Anne Rays who gave it thumbs up, but warned me that you don't really gain any time because you spend the time watching the Roomba work.

Christmas Eve Eve evening we went to church with and then headed back to our house, where we'd invited neighbors and friends from to work to church with us and then over to our house afterwards to hang out. We hung out, did a lot of laughing, eating, drinking and being merry (not Mary).