Naptime Blog

With four kids and two crazy families, opening gifts on Christmas morning does not stop after the Santa Claus presents get opened.  As a matter of fact, this Christmas, we started at 8am and didn’t finish until 2pm!  After the Santa gifts, the kids opened gifts from Mommy and Daddy and each other.  We do a big breakfast with the family, so as we were finishing up, my two aunts gave the kids their presents, then my parents came in with theirs, followed by my sister and her boyfriend, and my brother and his roommate.  We stopped briefly for breakfast, and the kids returned to the tree to play with their new treasures.   Already, I was unable to find my living room floor.  Just as I was moving boxes and making a path to the back door, my mother-in-law and her husband come in with their bags, followed directly behind her by my father-in-law and his wife!  By one-thirty in the afternoon, I was very frazzled!

On top of it all, I was hosting Christmas dinner!  Luckily, my aunts helped with the artichokes and mushrooms and my mom had prepared the lasagna and meatballs.  My mother-in-law brought the antipasto, so in between TRYING to find my children amongst the toys, cars, boxes, ripped papers and garbage bags, I was preparing veggies and meat and other parts to our meal.  And every few minutes, I would glance into my living room and wonder WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE WE GOING TO HOUSE ALL THESE TOYS?

When all of our guests left, my husband and I decided we needed to do something, for if the kids woke up in the morning to this mess of toys, who knows where things would land and what would get misplaced or broken.  So we emptied their toy boxes and sorted out the old toys.  We opened all of the new toy boxes and he broke up the boxes for recycling.  We did our best to put what we could in the toy boxes, the new books went into the book case, the new DVDs into the entertainment center along with the new video games.  The board games we put in the closet, and all the new clothes went into a laundry basket to be brought up and put away. 

Could you imagine my delight when I could see my living room floor again?

Christmas is now four days ago.  This morning I was straightening up and found a shopping bag under the table with my Christmas Village on it (I had it covered with a long tablecloth and forgot I put the shopping bag under it) with more GIFTS for the kids!  My mom had brought them last week from a family friend and I was holding them until Christmas morning, and then it slipped my mind.  And don’t you know it – MORE TOYS!

We say it every year, and I know we will say it again next year – WE NEED TO STOP GOING OVERBOARD!  But then again, kids are only kids for a short time, and these memories they will have their whole lives.  I remember when my parents’ living room floor couldn’t be seen, and those were some of the best days of my childhood!

I hope you are all enjoying the (chaotic and sometimes messy!) holidays!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2011 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Holidays, Jennifer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.