Stay-cation

I'm pretty sure "stay-cation" is an American invention and I'm pretty sure it was invented to make staying at home seem less like work and more like fun.  These past two weeks we've had lots of fun, but we've also been busy.  We enjoyed the snow some--only managed one day of sledding though. (A weekend of rain and 48 degrees melted all of the snow we had so now we're waiting for round two).  We entertained.  In the past two weeks we've hosted a Christmas party, our friends from Indiana and a New Year's Eve party.  We also had a surprise visit from Uncle Mike, "the original" (as he has been named since we now have two Uncle Mikes) when he was stuck in Detroit on his way back home from New York.  And tonight we are hosting our small group. 

Out of all of this fun we have very little photographic evidence.  Very un-Tse-like of us.

Our first Christmas in our own home in 4 years was really nice.  We learned some lessons.

No matter how cold it is, it is worth it to have the kids bundle up and throw their reindeer food (oats mixed with glitter) somewhere other than right out the front door.  Every single visitor has brought glitter in the house on his/her shoes.  I'm sure those same visitors have wondered why there is glitter in their own cars and homes. 

This is the most excited our kids have ever been on Christmas Eve.  Ever.  I'm not sure if it is their ages or the fact that we were just "home" and not traveling or jet lagged, but it was a lot of fun to see how excited they were.  (And more than a little awesome how easily they went to bed that night).

Santa came.  Boy was he hungry!

Funny how his reindeer didn't eat much of that glitter though.

Happy kids...I was telling a friend that we didn't take any pictures of Christmas morning either.  I was wrong.  We haven't gone completely un-Tse--at least the original Tse hasn't.

The kids made me a scrapbook for my birthday/Christmas gift.  This is the first year we saved all of their school presents to open on Christmas morning.  It was a lot of fun.

I think the only other pictures from this break are on our phones.  Pathetic.  We did get one shot of our three little people before we completely lost all of their trust.  We, their parents, carefully piled them onto two attached sleds making sure they were all holding on to each other and then gently pushed them down the hill...straight into a post.  Thankfully we weren't the first genius parents to try this and the post was covered with both padding and hay.  Not our best moment and Hannah had hay scratches on her forehead for over a week.  I'm fairly certain that had that happened in Belgium, there would have been no padding or hay and bones would have been broken.  Moving on.

Today we are taking it easy.  Getting ready for much earlier bed times (the earliest bed time on New Year's Eve was 12:30--our neighbors set off fireworks and we watched the ball drop, freaked out the dog with noisemakers blown by the 10 kids in our house!) and much earlier awake times (our littlest sister managed to sleep until 11 AM on New Year's Day after the 12:30 bed time).    Daddy is braving the gym with (most likely) the masses of New Year's Resolutionists.  We've soaked up more than two whole weeks of having Daddy in town and over a week of having him actually at home.  Back to life, back to reality tomorrow. (And back to travel for Daddy--gone 3 out of 4 weeks this month).

But today.....

Trying out a new Dora book. (after a few rounds of the quite exhausting Wii Just Dance)

Watching the Lions and practicing catches and tackles. (No Wii Just Dance for this guy today).

Trying out her new Orbeez after leading her sister (and her mom) in a few rounds of Wii Just Dance.

And me?  Just a quick blog in between laundry, dinner for small group, cleaning up for small group and recovering from losing at Wii Just Dance.  I'm starting to develop a complex at how bad I am at this game.  Oh well, I can always use the "I'm trying to let my kids win" excuse.  Yeah, that's it.