Christmas at home

Christmas Eve we had Donovan's Aunt and Uncle come for a little visit. It was nice spending time with them. Then we read with the kids and tugged them in.
Christmas morning we awoke to Santa leaving string with each of the kids names tied to their own piece leading them to their stocking and gift. We opened gifts and then played with them and were pretty much lazy all day. Then we wanted to eat, but no one wanted to cook, so we loaded off in search of a restraunt. To my pleasant suprise there was hardly anything open! I was glad to see that people were celebrating. Even though we were starving. Dennys' was open and very busy, so was Jack in the Box. But we settled on a Chinese Buffet place that I'm going to describe as nasty and gross, with okay food. But they were open, and there was no line :) In the future I'll plan a meal. This was our first year doing it by ourselves and I planned Christmas Eve Dinner, but not Christmas day...oops. Anyway, here's some pictures. Hope you all had a great Christmas too!

Okay this is Hillarious... I really thought I took more pictures than this. But I guess what happened is that everything else we did with the video camera. So no I didn't make my kids rake on Christmas, they really wanted to. But the pictures do show Jada in her Barbie Island Princess Costume that Santa brought her. And Israel's present from Santa was Optimus Prime..thanks to Aunty Chantel telling Santa exactly what he wanted. ;) Santa brought Kawika a Leap Pad Radio that his siblings love. Donovan and I were really good this year and so Santa brought us the TV we wanted. (And here's a little plug for HD TV's; If you only use an antenna like us, and you get an HD TV then you pick up way more channels and the quality is wonderful! So if you don't pay a cable bill for just one year then you can easily afford a good HD TV. Since we've never had a cable bill we should have gotten something HUGE, but we don't care that much. Okay, I'm done, I was just so excited when we plugged it in and we could see!!)

Nursing home
I think the highlight of things that we gave this year is when we took the kids and went Christmas caroling at the Nursing home a couple weeks ago with the youth. We went last year as well and when they heard that Daddy was goign with mutual this year Jada threw her arms up and said, "Yeah, we're going to the nursing home!!!" To which Donovan replied, "do you want to come?"
We had a wonderful time. Israel is still a little freaked out by strangers, but at least he wasn't trying to shoot them with his lazer beams or spider webs. Jada is very kind to them. She is a little shy, but she loves the way they look at her and she warms up pretty quickly. And of course Kawika just smiles at everyone. It was a wonderful way for the family to do something to remind us of Jesus.