Christmas 2010

Well our Christmas this year was a blast! Lots of fun surprises for all! But I will start with Christmas Eve: we spent that with Chan's family at his sisters home and had some yummy food and watched a holiday movie. Once it was getting to bed time we had the kids open their usual Eve present of Christmas PJ's! They all loved them! Then for us it was time to head home, so we did a quick drive past the Draper Temple and went home to get the kids to bed. The funniest thing about Christmas eve was a text we got from Carter at about 10:30 saying "I'm still awake"! He couldn't sleep!! I went down to talk with him and he asked for some NyQuil, and at about that same time Will walked in and said "me too"! We are not usually ones to do that sort of thing, but if we wanted ANY sleep we HAD to! So after a couple cups of NyQuil they were finally sleeping! The picture shows Carter's cute idea of putting their trees up in the living room so that Santa would leave their stuff by their individual trees!! LOVED THAT!

Santa finally arrived after all in the house were asleep! And just as the kids wanted he placed everything by their respective tree!

Finally the big moment arrived- and you can see from Will's reaction here- they were not disappointed!

But then came the fun part for us! Chan and I had been holding a gift secret since this past March when we arranged their "gift" and we had them open a series of gifts with clues to figure out what it is! Here's Carter reading one of the clues...

Each one of them opened a clue- this is Brianne opening the Dolphin clue...

They all helped open the final clue- we had them guess what they thought it might be before opening it. They all knew it was some sort of trip but all guessed wrong. Then Carter saw the "card" and they figured it out!

Their excitement shows well in this photo- we got our kids a cruise!! The exact one that Chan and I did for our anniversary this past year! We even booked them to swim with the Dolphins just like we did!! It was sooooo fun to surprise them!!

Then it was time for surprise #2- funny that the photo goes along with it! So once we opened all our gifts to our kids and the ones from my extended family we went off to have Christmas with Chan's family. His parents did a similar thing with the kids- which we were totally in on- and they each opened a gift with a clue, like the one Carter is holding.

Here's a shot of Chan's Dad trying to help the kids figure out what it all means!

The sentence so far, but what does the ????? paper mean?

Each of them had a final gift to open and it was a shirt rolled up inside out, so if they look confused it's because they were!

So Papa turned on a video to help them put the puzzle together! They thought it was Disneyland, but in fact it was Disney world!!!!

I LOVE this picture! You can tell just how stoked they were!! And like the sentence said we were to board a plane and leave at 10am the NEXT DAY!! We were off to Disney world for 10 days!! WOO HOO!!! Now, I have to say that had we known his parents were giving this gift we wouldn't have booked the cruise, but we had already done that when his parents decided to do this trip! So we left the 26th and returned on the 5th of January! I am going to do several posts later to show our "magical" time there! And I'll try to get them done before we leave on Friday for our cruise!! Can't wait!! Thanks Tom and Kathy for a fantastic memory making vacation!! It was the best gift EVER!