and the Christmas Chaos begins....

This weekend began the craziness of Christmas Exchanges, parties, and December birthdays.

Our first event (and of course out of order photos - thanks blogger!). We had our annual exchange with the Slenker family.


Abby has received her first BB gun - not sure if it's really more for Tim to kill rabbits in the garden or for Abby, but she was pretty happy to see it.


Megan received a Tinkerbell hair set and we are all the more beautiful now because of it.

And here are the presents before they tore into them.

The next morning we packed up the truck and headed to Carrollton, IL for the Schmidt Family Christmas gathering. It's entirely too much food for the whole day, but I don't think it stopped anyone from eating because it was so good! We did have a special visit from Santa though.....



And by some miracle Megan actually sat in Santa's lap - what you don't see is me taking her up there and talking with Santa to coax her into it. It helps that each child got a present too from Santa. And Megan stuck with the same request - "I want a football."



Then it was on to the little kid gift exchange - Abby and Megan are waiting patiently for the green light to open their presents. We now have a couple more Barbies to add to our mix, they were very excited.


Here's the post opening photo of the little kids. Most of them have run to their parents to get their presents out of the boxes so they could play with them right then.


Sunday we spent the day in Collinsville, IL for our nephew Theo's 2nd Birthday. The theme was Fire trucks/Firemen.


An out of order photo - Abby with Santa in Carrollton. Also a miracle that she is sitting in Santa's lap, she watched a couple kids get some presents ahead of her so I think that was her motivation.



Theo and Tim's birthday's were celebrated on Sunday.


After presents Betsy and BJ had set up for the party to go to the Collinsville Fire House for the kids to check out the trucks.

Abby and Megan enjoyed all of it.

Here's all the kids, Theo had a new fire truck he carried around the whole time.

Our birthday boy!

So that rounds up the festivities for this weekend. We still have a couple things left to wrap to finish our Christmas preparations and it should be smooth sailing next weekend. The girls are very excited to meet their cousin "Baby Kitty".

And maybe you'll see a Christmas card from us.......still waiting on the photos.