Christmas Day

Our first present of the morning was the girls sleeping in!  Hailey came in around 8:00 and waited patiently (playing on my iphone) until we finally woke Kai up at 8:30!  The video was in an earlier post but you see the reaction to the dollhouse....they have played with it constantly since then!  I think we are going to keep it downstairs and get more use out of it since the girls don't like playing upstairs by themselves. 

A goodbye letter from Snowy, our elf and stuffed stockings!  Snowy said he's excited to find us in our new house next year.  Sniff, sniff, I'm really going to miss this neighborhood!!!  No clue where we'll be going yet other than somewhere else in Germany...this post is closing in August!

Christmas morning mayhem! Actually, it wasn't bad...Kai took her time, like last year, wanting each present completely unwrapped AND opened.   And the girls probably played with the dollhouse and opened stockings for the first half an hour.  I need to make a note of the headache I went through to get that dollhouse shipped here.  Actually, not that dollhouse but the one I really wanted.  It was from the same company (Kidkraft, which makes wooden toys which I was really pushing for verse the plastic true Barbie dollhouse that Mattel makes)  There are about 10 models of this size dollhouse but the one I wanted had one more story (baby's nursery) and an attached garage.  I couldn't find anyone to ship it here, couldn't find an international company that sold it here and even went the route of buying one and shipping it to Tiffany who then tried to ship it USPS or UPS and they wouldn't ship it.  Amazon.com said they'd ship it to my German address........for $600!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   After a month of leads, I gave up and settled for this one.  I wish I could have looked at them at a store verses online but I'm really happy with the one we picked (it had to have an elevator like the true Barbie house and it also has bunk beds which the girls really like)  They love it and don't know what they could have had!  :) 

The girls got a lot of Barbies (and our first boy barbies...a few Kens, Prince Adam and Prince Eric...Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid) and Squinkies.  Kai got quite a few Belle things and Hailey got lots of Ariel Jewelry.  Leevi got his annual photo mug and calendar for the office and a bunch of Cowboy gear including a golfbag and I got a completely unexpected iPad!!!! 

The girls giving Leevi one of his gifts from them...they each made a Butterfly Garden Stone for him (since he's the one who does the yardwork, he can think of them when he waters the flowers!) :) 

By the time we got through the presents and made breakfast it was after 11am and we needed to get ready for Christmas dinner at our house.  Thankfully, we had cleaned the day before because it took me FOREVER to sort through all of the presents and packaging and get the new things in their place before our friends came over at 3:30.  We had a great dinner with two families from our neighborhood (Doziers and Harris') and one guy from Leevi's work.  After dinner we headed down the street to the Roberts who had people over for dessert and eggnog. 

Merry Christmas!!!!