Keeping it separate

Christmas Eve is Mason's birthday and it's really getting to be a challenge for us to keep it separate from Christmas. We had hotdogs for dinner since that's one of Mason's favorites and tried to keep the day focused around his birthday.

The evening gets pre-empted for other programming however: Christmas mass and then preparing for Santa by laying out the cookies, carrots and beer.Yes, Santa gets beer from our family. We figure Santa gets milk from all the other kids and would probably enjoy a nice cold beer for all his efforts. I thought about celebrating his half birthdays with a party six months later since the poor kid never gets to have a party but that would make it days away from his cousin's who generally is visiting in Michigan at that time. I'm on the fence but I think we can manage a half birthday party in the summer.

Christie Rocks!

At least so far. Mike got Guitar Hero II for his PS2 and he tried it out yesterday. What we realized.... he sucks at it. So I gave it a go and am MUCH better. Hence, today when he went and bought new "shoot em' up" games that he's good at and told me he won't play Guitar Hero anymore because it's "impossible". It's nice to be better at something finally:)

The kids have been wanting nothing but to stay in and play with all their new toys. We dragged them out today to run to some stores: Target and ToysRUs. Mia got a giftcard to ToysRUs and they had the Leapster games BOGO free. So we drove to Muskegon (as the Holland TRU closed a couple years ago) and let her use her gift card to new games. We also went to Target where I bought wrapping paper, etc for next year and Mike finally broke down and bought some lights for outside. The kids have been asking us to make our house a "Christmas house" which in their lingo means put up some outside Christmas lights. I guess the two little wreaths I have framing the garage didn't cut it in their eyes. Now I have to wait almost a whole year to what I anticipate will be Mike on the roof with a lot of cursing.

I asked the kids what their favorite gifts were: Mason- "I don't have any" which means he likes it all. Mia- "the Leapster". So I guess getting up and going to Kohls on Black Friday was worth it.

Merry Christmas!