Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We spent Christmas Eve with the Larsen's (as we do most years). We met at Mom & Dad's between 5 and 6 PM. We ate together, read from the Bible while the kids acted out the story of Christ's birth, sang Christmas carols around the tree, and exchanged gifts. Everyone had a great time, especially Mom & Dad who received new cell phones from Maren & Eric.
Christmas morning, the kids got up around 8 AM. Dell took pictures as the kids rushed for their gifts (and I directed them to the correct piles). Dell loved his digital photo frame. He put pictures on it right away and we all enjoyed looking at pictures of all of us. Brooklyn loved videotaping all of us with her new video camera. She and Savannah also spent the day Instant Messaging each other on their IM-ME's. Savannah also took a lot of pictures of us and her presents on her digital camera. Then she had fun downloading them to her computers. Jordan loved his transformers, especially his Ultimate BumbleBee. He also played his Transformers game on his Nintendo DS Lite. Troy loved his Nintendo DS Lite (a much anticipated item) and played his CARS game and his Little Einsteins game. He also loved his "UnderDog" movie. He kept calling it the UNDERWEAR DOG movie. We tried to correct him, but he insisted it was UNDERWEAR DOG! LOL!

Later, we headed to Dell's Dad's house. We ate with his dad, Bill, and his step mom, Alice Ann, and her children and grandchildren and Dell's brother, Eric, and his wife, Teresa, and their two boys. We exchanged gifts with Dell's family near the end. Alice Ann (as always) gave the most creative and wonderful homemade gifts. She made all of the kids flannel tied blankets and gave all of the married couples pj's with pictures of their spouses on the t-shirt. We all opened them together and laughed and showed each other. Then we put on the shirts and Bill snapped photos of each couple. She also made each family a calender (our third year she's made them) with personalized photos and birthdays and anniversaries. Wow! She always puts SO MUCH WORK into our gifts. Thanks Alice Ann!! :) Of course, all of our gifts were wonderful!

Now we're looking forward to celebrating New Year's Eve with family and anticipating new changes in 2008!