Christmas Day!

Welcome Christmas day! As usual on Christmas morning, Corey and I slept in while the kids tried to wait. They were up on their own, but thankfully not as early as their alarms were set for (4:30 am) because I had confiscated phones and unplugged alarm clocks. They slept in the front room under the tree. I came out first, and gave permission for them to open their presents to each other, which were under the tree in the front room.

Corey and I went over the list of gifts and checked it twice to make sure things were even between the kids.

We didn't have a big breakfast. We kinda didn't have breakfast at all... the kids were eating the treats in their stockings and Corey had bought lots of goodies that we just set out in bowls at the table. Things like dried mangos, chocolate covered acai, cookies, etc. You know, all the healthy stuff. Then we all voted to go over to the white tree to open presents.

I tried to get a kid picture in front of the tree. There were lots of moving parts though, so these were the two that kinda turned out the best...

Still a little blurry, or kids are half hidden - Daniel above and Hyrum below, but we called it good and the opening began.

Corey puts numbers on the presents and then has a list he goes from, so the kids don't know which gift is for who. Lily chose the first one, the biggest one. It was for Natalie. This was a last minute switch...

Corey had bought this for himself, but gifted it to Natalie last minute cause she needed another present. This is the Nerf Rival Prometheus MXVIII, a semi automatic blaster gun. It was bigger than she is.

Corey figured it was safe to give her, cause she'll more willing share with him, being the sweet 5 year old that she is, and cause if she did want to use it, she would probably tire of it quickly and be open to letting him take it over for her. Corey got lots of these Rival Nerf guns for the kids. They continued to pick up presents, tell Corey the number, and then hand the present to the lucky recipient.

Daniel made a cute face when he opened a toy car. It will have to be preserved in memory though, cause I didn't catch it on camera. He and Owen got lots of cars and loved it.

More opening gifts.

Natalie got an Elsa doll and Sophi got Elena of Avalor.

Gifts almost all opened...

and we have the mess to prove it...

Yeah. Post Christmas chaos.

I cleaned up a little bit, and the house looked awesome yesterday morning. But now that we don't have a "Santa can't come..." threat to motivate them to pitch in, looks like we're on our own for today. But we kinda picked up for a second before we had the real highlight of the day - a call from Joseph at 11:00!!!

HI JOSEPH!!! It was really fun to talk to him. My parents came over and we also skyped in Corey's parents. Owen and Daniel were up watching tv -

a good distraction so they wouldn't make it so we couldn't talk to Joseph. But we did have them make a brief appearance. Owen, do you remember Joseph?

He cried cause we had taken him away from his show and quickly left to go finish watching Big Hero 6, which is his current movie on repeat. Daniel stayed a bit longer and was more willing to say hello to his big brother. "Yeah... I think I remember that guy..."

So we talked with Joseph for an hour.

It was fun.

I took a few videos. Corey did too. I uploaded the three of mine to his blog here.

He's doing a great job. Corey asked him if there's anything he misses from home. And he said he can't really remember what life was like before the mission. I totally get that though, we've been there.

That's good, it means he's lost in the work of the Gospel. He's such a good kid, and we sure miss him, but he's not missing anything here and there's no place we'd rather have him be. Here's Mel's instagram pic in memory of the glorious occasion -

Corey and the kids headed over to his parent's house at 2. I am staying here for a bit while Owen and Daniel are down for naps, and since I had was Santa during the night, I'm going to take a quick breather too. Will post tomorrow with other Christmas fun we had today.