We celebrated Christmas

The holidays came and went, and now, a month later, I'm finally posting pictures.  Once we shared our exciting baby news, my focus turned toward printing, addressing and mailing Christmas cards and making Christmas candies for our friends and neighbors.
Sometime in there I hosted my annual Christmas cookie exchange party and Santa came to the house for a visit.

One of my favorite things about moving is trying to deciding where to put holiday decorations.  This spot between our living room and dining room was perfect for the Christmas tree.

On December 23 I started getting a tickle in my throat, which led to coughing.  By Christmas Eve I had a horrible sore throat to accompany the cough.  I woke up early that morning puking, but Cory was at Care Day, so I had to carry on.  It was such a blessing that he finished earlier than in previous years, and I got to crawl into the guest bed at 12:30 that afternoon after puking another time.
Long story short, Christmas Eve was awful.  I had a lot planned for the day, mostly involving food prepping and cooking, and none of that happened.  I think the kids ate cereal for dinner.  I had to instruct Cory as to how he could be "Santa's helper" by typing it up on the iPad because it was too painful to speak.  By night time I was able to drink some beef broth and I desperately wanted to be over the flu by morning.  Cory gave me a blessing before I went to bed at 8:30.
At 1:24am I slowly sat up in bed.  After a few minutes of sitting and not feeling dizzy, I decided to try standing.  My stomach felt better, a miracle!  I hustled out to the kitchen and happily made my two overnight breakfast entrees and got them in the fridge.  I was back in bed by 3:00 and ready to wake up by 8:00 to see the kids' surprised faces.  Too bad things don't turn out how you plan when it's Christmas and your family thinks you have the flu.
Cory, Brady and Brooke all woke up at 6:30 and decided to check out their stockings.  It's good I heard them moving around above me so I didn't miss everything!  The camera was still put away and the kids had already seen part of their Santa gifts.  My throat hurt too badly to get mad, and I didn't want to have any contention on Christmas morning anyway, but I was not pleased to miss out.
Finally they woke up Colin and let him discover his Santa gifts (that the two kids had already rifled through, eye roll).  And now we have pictures that speak for themselves.

 

Gotta love that diaper-free bum crack.

Not pretty, but present

 

Colin's inherited Brooke's balance bike, so he's going to have his own wheels once the weather warms up.

Little stinker won't wear this cute shirt that cost twice what I would typically spend.  Poor thing had another bad cold sore on her lip, just in time for Christmas pics.

I was grateful to have recovered enough to make our Christmas lasagna for dinner.  Cory set up his new projector in the basement, so the kids watched a movie on the wall while we ate a nice, peaceful Christmas meal together.

A couple days later...

 Brady got Twister for Christmas, a game he'd been wanting for a long time. In the last month I'm pretty sure it's been played with twice.

I'm glad I took pictures as we may never see it out of the box again.