Feelin' Spoiled

The view outside our window Christmas morning; snow, snow, snow! And lots of it

piled on our screens, too. It practically dwarfed my homemade snowflakes...

We had a low-key Christmas celebration this year, which was nice. The in-laws came over Christmas morning, after digging themselves out of a couple feet of snow drifts. The kids woke up at their usual time between 8:30 and 9:00, and we kept them downstairs until the in-laws got here so they could see the kids' faces when they saw all the loot under the tree. Drew and Owen were pretty excited. They ran around for a couple minutes yelling, "Presents! Presents!!" before they even thought to sit down and see which presents were for them. Samantha was interested in pretty much every present Drew and Owen got, particularly the trikes that we got for them. Whenever we handed her a present and helped her unwrap it, she promptly threw the contents of said present on the floor and toddled over to play with whatever car or truck her brothers were playing with.

Santa brought the kids a Thomas the Train set, and expansion kit (it's sorta visible in the bottom of the phot0). David and I got them a trike and Grandma and Grandpa C. got them another trike.

I got so much good loot this year. I wasn't expecting much because whenever David asked me what I wanted and I told him, (take new frying pans for example) he said, "Why would you want pans? You've already got pans, and they work just fine." (Except that they don't, because they're warped, because a certain husband loves to hear the sizzle of a hot pan under cold tap water.) I also asked for a drill, to which he replied, "Why don't you just borrow my dad's?" (Because I never know when I'm going to need to fix something or put a new hole in the wall real quick, and it's kind of a pain to be borrowing stuff from people all the time.) Finally I got sick of trying to justify my wish list, so I told him to get me some textbooks.

After all that, I was pretty surprised when there was an electric griddle and a cordless drill under the tree with my name on them. And my father in law loves to get people tools, so I've got a gazillion piece drill bit set, three tool boxes to put stuff in, an electric screwdriver (not sure how that's entirely different than a drill fitted with a Philips bit, except that it has thirty different sizes), a leveler, and a new tape measure.

It seems like Christmas is still going on; I'm still finding bits of wrapping paper here and there, and I haven't even started sorting through old toys to figure out which ones to donate (and where to donate them), which ones to keep and which ones to put in the trash. I'll have to do all that when my boys aren't looking, though, because they seem to think everything is a toy, even if it's missing the majority of its parts. A beloved favorite of Drew's is a red truck that has no wheels, no bed, only one door. I don't know why I haven't thrown it away yet; at clean up time we just throw it in the toy box with everything else. Drew digs it out from the depths of the toy box on a regular basis to play with it, and it's one of his preferred toys to take to bed with him. So tomorrow I've got that big project to do, as well as pretty much scour the house and get it all fresh and clean so I can try to keep on top of things (it's one of my New Year's goals, and I figure I might as well start right away, before school starts--only two more weeks!).

So much snow! We went out and shoveled a couple times on Christmas day, just to stay on top of it all. We got even more snow Christmas night, so the next day David went around the neighborhood with a few of the neighbors and various plows, snow blowers and shovels to dig people out. Then of course the good ol' Idaho wind picked up (not that it ever really stopped) and blew all our carefully shoveled snow every which way. Happily, though, it didn't cause too much trouble.