And So This is Christmas...

I love Christmas as much as the next person.  Well, I should be more specific, I enjoy parts of Christmas.  I love the food, the excitement, the feeling of "good cheer", the gifts, and the gathering of family.  Parts I don't like are decorating, UN-decorating, wrapping gifts, and being at Target with about 10,000 crazy people desperately searching for something to gift another person.

Christmas this year was pretty low key.  Christmas Eve was spent cooking and preparing Christmas desserts that I would bring to my parents on Christmas day,  with a mid day break at church to watch Bella sing.  Christmas Day started with a very upset Harry who thought the festivities (ie. opening gifts) would never begin because he was convinced his two sisters would never wake up.  I relented at 8:15am and let him wake them up.  Then off to Grandma's and Grandpa's house for more gifts and food.   The day went long and as usual, by the end of the day, I was ready to collapse and be done with Christmas for another year.  It was nice to see my littlest brother at Christmas this year.  He is headed off to Iraq for a year of contracting work.  We pray for his well being while there and his safe return.

The day after Christmas we had Erick's brother, Matthew over along with his wife, Justine.  They also brought Justine's sister and her baby since they had just picked her up from the airport.  Erick was the perfect husband and handled the lunch of sandwiches without my assistance.  After all the cooking I did on Christmas Eve, I was a little burnt out on the cooking.  Have I mentioned what a great guy I am married to?  In addition to the human visitors, we also had a surprise animal guest when Matt and Justine also brought over their dog, "Little Guy".  Needless to say, Ika was quite intrigued by Little Guy, and after a bit of a rough start, they seemed to enjoy each others company by the end (sort of).

As if the weekend hadn't been enough fun and excitement, we extended the holiday into Monday when we made a visit to the Mall of America.  My sister had purchased tickets for our family to go to "MagiQuest" as a gift for Harry's birthday.  I'm not sure what my reasoning was, (it seemed sound at the time), but I didn't want to go to the MOA before Christmas as I was sure it was going to be crazy busy.  For some reason I had convinced myself that the Monday after Christmas would be safe and that crowds would have died down after the holiday.  I could not have been more wrong!  It took 1 1/2 hours to get there, (usually would have been about 25 minutes).  Most of the delay in getting to the mall was in parking.  All of the entrances to the MOA were blocked off, (I'm assuming all of the parking spots were full, which is kind of hard to believe, but oh well) so we wound up parking in the overflow lot across the street.  The adventure at MagiQuest was fun, but mostly for Harry.  Basically, it was an interactive, role playing game where you walk around with a wand to solve mysteries and find objects.  My wand kept frustrating me because I would find all the things and then it didn't save it, so when I got to the end of the "quest" I was on, it said I didn't have everything I needed.  Bella just enjoyed pointing her pink sparkly wand at things.  Erick seemed to get into it quite a bit, but once Harry got serious about becoming  Master Magi (someone who finds all the objects), he dropped Erick because he said, "he was slowing me down."

Looking forward to some downtime before the new year kicks off...