Christmas and New Years festivities

Frank posting this time...
Having successfully survived the Thanksgiving feast it was time to prepare for Christmas. 


The last few days leading up to the big event were a bit challenging because Mason, Maddie and Janet all came down with one or another illness, all one after the other. Maddie also is going through an angry phase that presents some challenges for the poor stressed parental units. Nevertheless some fun was to be had. First off Maddie and Mason's annual daycare Christmas play where each class of kids represented a kind of animal as part of a series of Christmas songs. Here are Maddie and her friend Susan and Grace are all decked out in chicken gear, loudly singing along:

Mason was a horned sheep, a very unhappy sheep indeed, who wanted to be held by Daddy instead of standing up on stage. Here he is seconds pre-meltdown.

Janet's parents made the trip to see the play and I think they enjoyed the songs.  No good photos of them, and very few good ones of the kids during the play.  But here are some very happy chickens, hopped up on cookies after the play:

Once we left the church where the play had been held Mason returned to his usual cheery self and had a blast playing with his sheep horns:

Just like last year, our Christmas elf made an appearance and baffled the kids by magically appearing in a different spot every morning, so he could report to Santa on the kids' behavior......not that that did much good.........

Mason was excited to help with getting ready for Christmas. Here he is organizing the multitude of presents under the tree by thoughtfully stacking as many as he could on top of each other.

Maddie loves cookies and also likes to bake them together with Mommy, here a batch of yummy almond macaroons:

And here a batch of sugar cookies:

The entire family got involved in decorating sugar cookies with icing, gingerbread men sprinkles and colorful sugar balls. The colorful sugar balls were the only thing Mason was interested in. I don't think he ate a single cookie but he ate many colorful sugar balls off the cookies.

The end product:

As a special surprise for me, Maddie and Janet made a banjo cookie, wasn't quite as musical as the real thing but tasty nonetheless.

Tada!!!!

Did I mention she likes cookies?

And we continued our Christmas tradition of eating cheese fondue on Christmas Eve night. Maddie really liked the cheese dipping this year and wanted another fondue night for New Year's Eve.

Another tradition is the opening of one and only one present on Christmas Eve. The kids loved their new pajamas, to be worn on Christmas morning:

Finally the long awaited Christmas morning. Our rugrats got spoiled rotten but I only have room to post some examples of the many gifts. Here's Maddie with a new tea set from Santa that she really liked.  She asked for one in her letter to him.

And a scooter, very high up on the wish list this year.

Mason got inundated with a couple of different Duplo (Legos for toddlers) sets and he really liked them. Here he's helping the fisherman from the camping set reel in his big catch of the day.

And a scooter for him, too. He was really excited about his helmet and put it on before we could even take all the tags off.

Maddie with a craft book from Great Aunt Rosemarie in Germany.

And Mason with a car transporter from Oma and Opa.  He played with it for at least an hour that morning.

One of their big gifts was a new play kitchen from Oma and Opa. As you can see, they wasted no time putting their pots and pans to good use in the new kitchen.

And here is Maddie's "Golden Dress and Golden Crown," her number one wish this year and one that was specially made by Santa's sewing elves.....too bad she had the dress taken away for a week just two days later as punishment for unacceptable behavior.......sigh!

Scooter time: both of them figured out how to ride these things really fast. Mason is definitely a boy. While he's taking longer with other developmental things than Maddie did, he picks up physical skills really, really quickly.

The next day Grandmama, Granddaddy and Uncle David came up for even more spoilage of the rugrats. Grandmama presents Mason with yet another gigantic dinosaur to cuddle with. Mason had been having some issues with not wanting to go to bed and not wanting to be covered up lately. Now the dino goes to bed with him, gets covered up and Mason does the same...yay dino!

Uncle David unwraps his camelback pak for mountain biking excursions while Maddie is yet again showing off the "Golden Dress".

I had not asked for very much for Christmas but really wanted to finish setting up my brewery in the garage. Thanks to a couple days off before Christmas in which I managed to start and/or finish a few projects, I was able to squeeze in an inaugural brew session on the new system...me likey! Another project which you will hear more about in the future.......chicken coop! Stay tuned.

New Years Eve was a gorgeous day, so we took the kids to a park and let them run wild for a while:

We brought a picnic lunch and ate it in the park. The kids really enjoyed it, although the wind was brisk.  Brr! Picnics are one of Maddie's favorite things.

Later that day we invited Salem and her family over for some pre New Year fun. Of course the girls wanted to play dress up......and Mason got right in the middle of it......

The kids were having a blast playing and then conked out in front of the TV, wrapped up in blankies. And the adults actually got to have some grown up conversations (or not depending on the number of Margaritas consumed)......amazing.

Everybody ended up having a late night and we were all very tired the next day. At least it was from having fun and not from working.  Hope everyone had a great start to 2012!