Christmas and New Years

About a week before Christmas we got a dusting of snow. The kids didn't care that it was barely any snow. They had a blast playing it it.

In order to try to maintain some sort of Christmas tradition, I wanted the kids to only have their Santa stocking on Christmas morning (the one I put together). The Coomers have had a long standing tradition of doing stockings on Christmas Eve, but after Aaron's grandma died, they decided to send the stockings home with each family and let them make their own new traditions with them. As a bit of history, the way the stockings worked was people were supposed to find free or very cheap items to stuff into the stockings. Everyone got a stocking. The problem was it started to get out of hand with each person having a stocking and an overflow bag. Most people loved the tradition but some (like me and another family member with a large family) didn't enjoy all the cheap junk and random stuff that we had to cart home and figure out what to do with. So Deb had these stockings and still wants to carry on the tradition of doing stockings for everyone in her family. We decided to have the kids open them Christmas Eve morning before we headed out to Uncle Tom and Aunt Sally's for the Coomer Christmas Eve party.

Christmas morning they woke up to all the presents under the tree and their Santa stockings waiting to be opened. They were allowed to open their stockings first thing and they even opened their Santa gifts with just us. They had to wait for Uncle Mike and Aunt Lanae to get up before we dug into the rest of the presents. They were very patient though I'm sure it was torture having to wait to open all their presents. I even enforced a one person at a time rule so it didn't turn into chaos.

Later in the day I busted out the big box of presents from Papa Mark and Grandma Cyndi and Uncle Billy, Aunt Angie, Kenny, and Kyle. I kept their gifts separate from all the Christmas morning gifts in an effort to help the kids realize who each gift was from. Plus it spanned it out over the day a bit more. They really did get spoiled this Christmas with the amount of toys they received.

On Saturday afternoon, we decided to go to a really good burger joint between us and Great Grandpa. He and Charlene met us there, and then we went to a friend's of his that lives on a farm. He has cows, chickens, pigeons, goats, bees, and even peacocks roaming around on his farm. The kids loved running around and seeing all the animals. He had two black and white shepherd dogs, a black and white cat, and even a black and white cow that looked like an Oreo (black front, white middle, black behind).

We had the annual Coomer New Year's Eve party at our house since we didn't want to travel several hours up north with kids that late at night. The kids went with Grandma to the dollar store to get decorations for the party. We used the Netflix countdown to do a 10pm New Years Eve Countdown with the kids, so we could get them to bed earlier than midnight. Of course Sarah ended the year by giving everyone high fives and then bumping into Grandma, violently ricocheting off of her, and getting a rug-burn type scrape under her chin from the side of the couch. What a way to end the year!

On New Year's Day we went out to the Hand on Children's Museum in Olympia. We were way impressed with all the neat exhibits and stuff to play with. We ended up purchasing a year membership so we can go back as much as we want.