A houseful of cousins made for fun gift opening over at Grammy and Boppy's house. Dylan absolutely could not get enough of his drill. 
The kids all gather around Grandma to look at her brag book.
The dogs wanted to get in on some of the food action!
Dom's favorite gifts of the morning were his StarWars galactic heroes and his clipboard loaded with a supply of paper!
Evan enjoyed a couple of rounds of intense "Transformers" chess with Uncle Paul.
The boys were shepherds in the St. Mary's Christmas program. It was a little hectic getting them there in time with the snow falling and lots of families arriving at the church. We barely got there in time to save a partial pew for the Deming clan. Luckily everyone comes to Christmas mass with a Merry Christmas attitude. We then proceeded to Mom and Dad's house for a festive Asian meal. Kevin made his wonderful Chinese pork loin and I made lumpia and pancit. Before dinner we took all the kids out into the wintery night and rang some neighborhood doorbells to sing some carols. The kids loved it so much, I think this will definitely become an annual thing. It was a perfect snowy night to go carolling. 
Santa came! We were of course awakened very early by our dear Evan. Mel and I always think of the line from the Family Man movie when the kids wake us up. "Strong Coffee!"
This is the first Christmas that Evan and Dom got ready for Santa to come without us spearheading everything. They got the cookie plate ready and wrote the note themselves. I like Evan's choice of words here, not "I have been good this year," instead, " I have been having fun this year." Well every kid knows that by Christmas Eve it's too late to tell Santa whether or not you have been good!
Every year we have to be reminded again how much fun it is to keep track of mittens, snow boots, hats etc! With snow comes the joys of sending the kids out to play. They always come in before you want them to (through the wrong door, of course. "Didn't we tell you to come in through the laundry room?) The fun is all worth it!
(I don't think the mailman is coming today!)
Got up early this morning knowing that it would be a little work to get the driveway shoveled and make my short trek to the transit center to catch the bus. We got one side of the driveway cleared after 1/2 hour of Mel and I both shoveling. I warmed up the Subaru and backed out into the street attempting to crank the wheel just right to get into the center of the street where a couple of cars had already driven. Well, I didn't get any further than that. Tried to pull forward and got stuck, tried to back up again and got stuck. Mel had to shovel out the front tires and push to get me back into the driveway. I know this sounds wimpy and silly because when you are a Montana native, you're supposed to be able to deal with snow. In this case there is just too dang much of it! The news last reported that we have gotten accumulation of 26 inches in Spokane Valley and guess what, it's still snowing! I'm going to just enjoy and share these photos!
