We got into Houston early enough in the afternoon so that the kids could run around (in the gorgeous 75 degree weather!) and burn off some steam and of course, my favorite - have dinner outside!
The following day was Christmas Eve. Santa spent most of the day wrapping presents and then that night, it was off to the children's service at the church at Annabel's school. We thought that it would be a cute thing to take the kids to and really, how long could a children's service last? Um.....try 2.5 hours?????????????????? Seriously? I mean, really - is there a need to sing every single one of the 14 verses of every Christmas carol? Don't get me wrong - I was embracing the opportunity for these pipes to be used again and I do love myself a good Christmas carol, but wow. It was a bit crazy.
Surprisingly enough, all kids were great. However, the parents were getting antsy and figured the kids would soon, so needless to say, we waited until communion, paid the $$ and hightailed it out of there. Before heading home, we took advantage of the nice night and the playground...
That night, we had a nice dinner at home and then drove around the Heights where everyone had their houses decorated - like, ridiculously decorated. It was pretty crazy. Unfortunately, my camera didn't do the lights justice, so I don't have any pictures. You'll just have to trust me on this one.
When we got home, we put out snacks for Santa and the food for the reindeer that Avery had made in school
and actually managed to get the kids down to bed early enough for Santa to come and eat the food and leave stockings and presents...
As you can imagine, Christmas morning was a bit chaotic with 1 5-year-old who was busy making sure she got the exact same number of presents as everyone else, 2 3-year-olds that were perfectly content playing with just the first present opened and still didn't quite get the concept and then a 1.5-year-old who really just wanted to continuously play with whatever her sister got and as a result, really piss her sister off. But, we all lived and the kids loved their gifts.
We kind of lolly gagged the rest of the day and then finished up making dinner right as the electricity went out! I swear - the Hollands are cursed - power outages follow us. ANYWAY...thankfully the men were able to do the manly thing and use their head lamps (note my father's hat that was actually a Christmas gift from William this year - quite good timing!). Also thankful that dinner was actually pretty much done at that point and it just forced us to have Christmas dinner via candlelight, which was very nice.
The rest of the week was spent with fun activities like....
Going to the aquarium...
Taking moonlight rides on our new scooters that we got from Opa and Grandma for Christmas...
Going to the zoo. Clearly Houston has a weird fetish with providing plastic tubes for kids to look through (see aquarium pics above) and clearly our kids took advantage...
Going to the Nutcracker. This was just a girls' day out with Lexi, Annabel, Avery and I. The girls did great and really got pretty into it! Granted, Annabel asked a couple of times when we were going to go home and nearly jumped off of the balcony in front of us, but other than that, it was a lovely performance..
Catching up with Jess and Amy (one of my favorite traditions when coming to Houston). As always, it was like we just saw each other yesterday.
Going to the children's museum, which I'll be honest - was a lot of fun and I do have some cute pictures, but they are on my other camera and at this rate, if I wait to download those and post them, it will be Christmas 2013 before I get this post up. Not to mention, I'm sure you have had enough pictures at this point, anyway.
Building Pizzas to be cooked on the Big Green Egg by Uncle Will...
And, just generally being silly and having fun with family....
Overall, it was a great Christmas! Thanks again, Lexi and Will for hosting!
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