Christmas Eve & Glorieta

MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODY!!!

I trust you're all having a WONDERFUL Christmas and basking in the rich blessings of the Lord. We are! :-)

It's been a great Christmas Eve around here. We got up and started the dough for the hot rolls and cinnamon rolls right away so it could rise, then had devotions, mixed up the dough for the gingerbread men and got it chilling and got the house straightened up a little bit. Sister Galaviz came over sometime just after lunch and stayed most of the day with us. It was GREAT!!! How fun to have company on Christmas Eve! The kids helped me make the cinnamon and hot rolls, then we all took part in the gingerbread men decorating! Here are some pictures of everybody with their handywork...




(I somehow didn't get a picture of Sam holding his gingerbread man, but here he is looking real cute while he's working!) ;-)





Naturally, James had to show the rest of us up. He is so good at stuff like this!

Sister Galaviz played lots of games with the kids throughout the day and they LOVED that. She even sat and watched The Grinch with them. It's just so nice and comfortable with her here. She just rolls with the punches and takes part in whatever happens to be going on at the moment. It's so great!

We had corn chowder for dinner and it was quite good, if I do say so. :-) Afterward we... ~sigh~ I still can't believe we do this... We let the kids open two presents. As for my side of the family, "We 'uz brought up diff'ernt!" My Dad taught me it was a SIN to open gifts before Christmas morning (although anytime after 4:00am is good!) and I never planned on straying from the narrow Christmas way, but for the past two or three years we've done it this way with the kids. We let them each do jobs here and there throughout December and earn a few bucks to take to the dollar store and buy something for their two siblings. Those are the gifts they get to open on Christmas Eve. I try to justify it by saying that they're not "real" gifts, but I still have to fight off a little twinge of guilt over breaking the rules! Ha! Anyway, here are their non-gifts... ;-)

Joe got Katie a bubble kit and Sam got her a stationary set.

A snake from Katie and police garb from Sambo.

A lantern from Joe and yet MORE pirate stuff from Katie.


After the gifts, we put another Christmas show on for the kids and the three of us adults played I Buy. It was so fun teaching Sister Galaviz how to play! Ha! She was pretty confused most of the time, but she did GREAT and was usually the first one to lay down each round. Can you believe it?! I ended up with somebody to play a GAME with me on Christmas Eve!!! Life is so grand!!!

Sister Galaviz left sometime after 7:00, I think, and we had all the kids take their showers, then had a good Christmas Eve devotion. The kids are in bed now and Sam's already asleep!!! Can you imagine?! When I was a kid I remember laying awake in bed all night long, anxiously awaiting 4:00 when we were allowed to get up... and finally drifting off to sleep sometime after 3:00! Ha! ~gasp!~ I just went to check and Joe's a goner, too! Freaks! Not Katie, though. She was sitting straight up in her bed in her Christmas nightgown and Santa hat with great big, wide eyes. That's what a kid is supposed to look like at 9:30 on Christmas Eve. ;-) James just got into the PJ's and I think he's wanting to watch a Christmas movie. I'll see if Kate can come join us. Then I'll be back to post about Glorieta, making this a WAY TOO LONG post. But I'm good at those. Ha! I'll try to make it mostly pictures, since I've got a truckload of them. Be back soon!

Okay! It's now about midnight-thirty and I'm wide awake. James opted to watch It's a Wonderful Life... in color! Whoa!!! I really didn't think I'd like it that way (just seems like a movie that was meant for black and white, you know?!), but they did a really great job with it and I thought it was pretty cool. Of course, we just watched it a few days ago and I wouldn't have been able to just sit through the whole thing again, so I dug out my diary and wrote for a while. For the first time in exactly TWO YEARS! That's so pitiful! It kept me occupied, anyway. I read through some of the earlier entries. WOW. It's amazing how much life has changed in the past few years! Some things I DEFINTELY would not have chosen, and yet God is sooooo good. Anyway...

James let Kate come watch the movie with us, which made for a very happy little girl. She was tired enough when it was over that she dropped right off to sleep. James and I went into the room and readied the stockings and Katie's BIG gift. We've been looking for a little desk for her bedroom and James finally found just the right one online, so we decided to buy it and call it her Christmas present. :-) She's going to LOVE it. And I always love doing the stockings. It's strange... I remember being a kid and feeling so sorry for Mom and Dad. We kids got so many more presents and Mom and Dad got so much less--and they always did stockings for us, but they didn't have any... It seems like I remember talking to Mom about it once and her telling me that it was just as fun being the Mom as it is being the kid. I remember it because I remember thinking she was nuts! But now... well, she was sooooo right! It is sooooo fun getting everything ready so your kids can wake up all excited and have a blast on Christmas!

Okay, so Glorieta... I'm sure I've lost most of my crowd by now (always happens in long posts), so I'll give a brief summary and throw a whole slew of pictures on here. :-)

Mom & Dad's 35th Anniversary is in four days, so in celebration of that they opted for us all to get together and spend a few days at a lodge up in the mountains. Wa-Hoo! What a great idea!!! We took lots of food and lots of games and stayed Wednesday through Saturday at the perfect little lodge up in Glorieta, New Mexico. It was PERFECT! We had sooooo much fun! We ate and played and explored and watched the kids run wild all over tarnation... it was GREAT. :-) So, here are some pictures!!! (At long last--sorry 'bout the delay, Mom!)

Um... before we start, a little disclaimer. These pictures are in no particular order, just however I happened to find them on my computer. Generally that would drive me batty, but after 1:00am on Christmas morning I'm just not going to take the time to try to organize them! They came from four different cameras and I'm just not up to the task. ;-)

I think this first shot came from Dad's camera. He has a certain knack for getting the weird to come out in the kids...

Okay, there are several of these pictures, so let me explain... We headed down to the lake one day with some bread to feed the ducks. That was fun, but only until the boys noticed all of the little minnows swimming around the dock! We made plans to come back later in the day so they could catch some. They spent the afternoon fashioning fishing poles from tree branches and such, but in the end the tool of choice seemed to be plastic cups. Caleb out fished the whole crowd. Here he is showing off his first catch of the day...

Joe was the last to catch a fish, but the most determined!!! His hands were red and throbbing from the cold water, but he just wouldn't give it up! He finally managed to catch this little guy. Scooped him up in a frisbee, I believe.

This was taken AFTER all of the dopey kids about froze their little fingers off trying to catch fish in the icy lake!

Ha! One night Katie was bragging about how long she could hold her breath. For the sake of squashing her pride (for her own good, of course) we had to prove her wrong. ;-) We just happened to have a stop watch on hand, so the kids ended up in a competition to see who could hold their breath the longest. The only way Jon could be sure they weren't cheating was to hold their mouths and noses closed until they slapped the table to signal they were done. Or passed out. Dad insisted that his children were going to "pass out" if any of his grandchildren did! Ha! It was fun and the kids had a blast. Katie did pretty well, but Nathan took the prize. All of the other kids were sure it's only because he has the biggest lungs. :-)

Luke, the mighty puzzler! (He really is good!)


Just loved this picture. :-)
Dad and Jon doing what they think is fun. When they could be playing REAL games with the rest of us! Weird-o's. ;-) They were quite frustrated that they hadn't thought to take a chess set with them, but it wasn't long before the computer geek had come up with a solution...

We wandered around the campground one day and found a playground... that was fun for one and all, apparently. :-)

Here's some of the crowd, "fishing." Can you belive we had 8 children down there leaning over the dock and nobody fell in?! Nothing short of miraculous, I tell you!

The make-shift fishing pole didn't work out too good. It would have, but the bait (corn) was too big for the little guys to be able to swallow. Oh well--it was cute anyway!

Granddad and Nathan patiently assisting Joe in his tireless efforts to catch a fish before going back to the cabin.

All 8 of the kids on the last night while we were singing songs and watching Granddad... well, watching him be Granddad!

The Mother Load! That's what the kids call Granddaddy's candy stash. He whips it out once or twice a day and there is an immediate swarm of grandchildren.

"Zekiel Boy" and Abby with Granddad

Kid games

Everybody piled in the back bedroom to watch some videos that were being projected great big on the wall. Everybody seemed to be enjoying this one...

But, of course! ;-)

Katie and Caleb spend a decent amount of time preparing and presenting lessons to a "class," even if the class was just each other!

Puzzle time again! --And see the great kitchen and all the table and counter space we had? It was PERFECT!


I just loved this picture of all the kids "fishing" from the dock... even if one might mistake what's going on, thinking that perhaps they all got sick at once. Ha!
We got SNOW the last night we were there (how much better could it be?!), so the kids roped Granddad into a snowball fight the next day.

We had a hard time getting the kids to smile for the camera the last day... until Granddad got involved in the effort. That's when we came up with this one. :-)

And that's it from Glorieta! Sorry they're all so jumbled. The only other picture I have is this one of Mom trying to play O Come, O Come Emmanuel at our house that night. It was... entertaining, shall we say?! ;-)

~whew!~ I did it! I'm going to go stuff James' stocking and go to bed.

Merry Christmas!!!