Christmas...

Our Christmas starts on December 24th.  Every year my sister has an open house for family on December 24th.  It's the one evening of the year that we KNOW ALL the family will be together.  It was especially wonderful this year.  My brother and his family have just relocated back to the island this past summer and were finally able to be at Christmas eve with the rest of the family.

What a wonderful evening.  Mostly.  My youngest (being the youngest of the 14 children in attendance) is in a full on crash.  With all the excitement of the season and the preparations for our 2 day Christmas extravaganza, my little one had had enough!  Because dinner doesn't start until at least 6 pm our littlest was ready for bed and very cranky.  (His bedtime is 6pm.  We can't keep him up longer no matter how hard we try.)  So for 2 hours he ran around my sister's home screaming and getting into things he shouldn't be.  Every time he tried to follow the older kids upstairs he had a minimum of 6 cousins jumping on him to keep him safe.  All they really succeeded in doing was making sure he got hurt.  Which just exacerbated his crash. So by 8pm we were saying our goodbyes and heading for home.

Despite his crash and our constant apologies, it dawned on me that I was having a wonderful time.  I'm not terribly close to my brother and his wife but we had a nice evening.  It was the first time my sister in law had met our children.  Someone during the evening had made a comment about us adopting again.  Something to the effect of lucky kids, silly parents.  It was in reference to us openly wanting more children with special needs with our 2 and half year old going through this particular screaming and uncooperative phase. lol  It was meant as a compliment and that's the way I took it.

After all the kids were given their Christmas eve gifts to open we made a hasty retreat.  Little one HAD to get to bed and our oldest was tired and wired but readily went to bed so Santa could come.  As tiring as it was it was a fantastic evening!

Christmas morning was a world of surprises.  We actually had to wake our kids up at 9 am because they had slept through the night and didn't wake up with anticipation at the crack of dawn.  I did!  My mum called at 8:30am to see if the kids were up and waiting for her to come and I had to tell her that they weren't up yet and that we hoped to be ready for gift opening around 9:30.  Nope.  10:30 we finally started opening the gifts.  Little one was done after he opened his first stocking gift.  It was a bag of real fruit gummies and he didn't care to open anything else.  He had candy and that was enough!  We finally coaxed him into opening all of his gifts and to our surprise and delight he climbed up on our love seat with his new V-Tech laptop complete with mouse and sat their quietly typing and mousing!  It was the very first time he actually played with a toy and not just the packaging!  We were so happy.  He even sat at Christmas dinner with his laptop and ate.   I was so pleased that I had convinced my husband that getting him his own little learning computer would save our laptops and that I was right!
You haven't seen funny until you've seen this precious little boy sitting with his little computer on his lap and the mouse on the cushion beside him, looking very serious and pretending to type and mouse!  Precious memory for Mum and Dad.

Our oldest was very happy that he received a PSP.  He didn't know what it was to begin with but once we explained it to him and he looked at all the games he got with it he was ecstatic.  He spent all day playing (and getting frustrated because he's a perfectionist and the games wouldn't cooperate) and when he started getting the hang of his game he was so proud of himself and really started to enjoy the learning process of it all. 

My children were very spoiled this year and not just by us, but by all of our family and friends.

My Christmas wish for next year?  To have more children with glowing faces and huge smiles surrounding our tree.  For them (and us) having  the knowledge that we're a family now and forever.  That's my wish.

As an aside, I did get the opportunity to remind my oldest that Christmas isn't about the gifts, that the gifts are just materialistic representations of the gifts Christ received when he was born, but that this day is about celebrating the birth of Jesus.  It's also about being with family and loved ones and sharing in the joy of being together.  My oldest got it and that made me happy.

Hope you've all had a wonderful Christmas.