Christmas after action report

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas Day. We had a very nice Christmas here in the blunoz household.

Last night, we were waiting and waiting for the boys to go to sleep. As I mentioned in my last post, YB was still awake when my wife checked on him at 10:18, but finally asleep at 10:35. That gave us the green light to do the things we needed to do as Santa's helpers.

I had something else up my sleeve though. I got my wife a sort of china hutch display cabinet for her antique tea cup collection, and I was waiting for her to go to bed so I could put it together. She finished with her stuff and said she was going to bed. I knew she'd be asleep within about 5 minutes of her head hitting the pillow, and so I got to work. It took me a little longer to put it together than I thought, and I didn't go to bed until 1:20 a.m.

That being said, would anyone like to place any wagers on what time ES woke me up this morning???

8:00???

7:30???

7:00???

6:30???

6:00???

Yep, 6:00 a.m. I was startled awake by thumping from downstairs. I went downstairs to find ES digging through all the presents that Santa left. Now, I'm not a morning person by any means, and my brain wasn't functioning well on so little sleep and so early in the morning. In the absence of coherent thought, the gremlins in my brain didn't know what to do and decided to hit one of the prerecorded sound-bite buttons. Granted, the "Merry Christmas, ES!" sound bite might have been better, but the gremlins opted for "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT TIME IT IS???"

ES momentarily stopped his present examination. He looked up at me with one of his pensive looks and contemplated the question.

"Yes... It's 6 o'clock," he said matter-of-factly.

I told him he could sit and watch TV quietly until the rest of the people in the house woke up, then I went back upstairs to bed.

Thank goodness the next time he woke me up was when my wife sent him upstairs to poke me at 8:00. Not very surprisingly, YB was still asleep when ES came to wake me up.

For the next hour or so, we had quite the Christmas carnage going on in the family room. I got a lot of blurry photos the boys were moving so fast...

ES shakes his stocking to see if anything else is in it.

YB empties his stocking.
I guess he got over the whole "I don't want Santa to come" thing.

ES unwrapping presents.

(CENSOR NOTE: Sorry, no pictures of groggy Daddy or bed-head Mommy.)

The family room looked like a bomb went off afterwards. Oh, who am I kidding - it still looks like a bomb went off! :-)

My wife really likes the display cabinet for her teacups. I was just a little frustrated that this morning with the lights on I discovered I installed the doors upside down. Luckily the fix wasn't too hard. I just undid the screws for the top piece and lifted it up far enough for the doors to fall out (the left door landed on top of my foot OUCH).

LW's new display case (some assembly required).

Note: Those curved parts in the tops of the doors look MUCH better this way than they did on the BOTTOM of the doors when the doors were upside down.

We spent a lazy day around the house reading, playing video games, playing ES's new Stratego board game, playing with legos, watching movies, doing puzzles, etc.

Kudos and high praises again to my wonderful wife for another awesome dinner she cooked today. She made prime rib, mashed potatoes, spinach, and garlic bread, and it was all really good. Sorry, I didn't take my camera with me to the dinner table this time, so you'll just have to believe me when I say it looked and tasted really good.

As predicted, YB ran out of steam tonight and started getting a little grumpy, but not nearly as bad as I expected. He fell asleep pretty quick.

Speaking of running out of steam, so am I. It's time to hit the rack.

Special thanks to President Bush for declaring tomorrow a federal holiday!