Christmas 2006

Christmas has come and gone, but not without some much needed vacationing. This year we spent Christmas with the Bourne side of the family over at my parents house. Christmas Eve fell on the Sunday, so we attended our Ward sacrament meeting and then headed over to my parents for Christmas dinner. It's still my favorite meal of the year. After dinner and clean-up we played some games and then headed down to Heritage Park to watch the Nativity Pageant. There was a line like I've never seen there before, but it moved quickly enough. It was a good thing there was a line though, Tammy and I had to head back to the car for a bit to perform an emergency diaper change on Emma. We sat close to the front for the performance and Emma kept yelling "Ride!" every time a donkey or a sheep walked by. After the show, I took her up on the hill to check out the sheep and she really liked their wool, but not their faces. They don't come across as cute as they do in the story books I guess. We spent the rest of the night putting excited kids to bed, wrapping presents, and playing some more games.

Christmas morning came all too early as my brother forgot to turn his alarm clock off before lending us his room for the night. When everyone else was finally up and at 'em, we began the slow burn of opening 4 families worth of presents. After about 2 1/2 hours of gift exchange, we ate a mighty breakfast and spent the remains of the day playing with our newly acquired games and toys. Tammy and I had decided that our new computer and monitor would serve as our Christmas present this year, along with a couple small items, so most of the loot in our little family went to Emma. We almost got talked into staying another night but we decided we should head home so we could get some things done before returning on Boxing day.

Tammy got up early on Boxing day and headed out to the shops with her sister Jodie to do some bargain battling with some of Calgary's worst. She claimed it wasn't that bad, but the scars tell a different story. I went out with my brother after Tammy got home and picked up a new monitor at Futureshop. It was a pretty sweet deal and I've been pretty pleased with the product so far. After all that was taken care of, we spent the rest of the day at my parents again, just hanging out and playing games.

I had to go to work the next day and was supposed to be there the rest of the week, but after spending almost all of Wednesday at my desk with nothing to do, I decided to take the rest of the week off. All of our sub-trades had taken the whole week off, along with most of the office staff, so there was really no point in hanging around, that's what vacation pay is for right? I'm glad I did because it seemed like it had been a long while since I had taken that much time off from anything.

Tammy's parents came by during the week with some gifts for each of us and we had some for them, so we had our gift exchange and then visited for a while. With the combination of parents, grandparents, cousins, and Santa, it's surprising how much one child can get in a week. On Saturday we went to Jodie and Aaron's place for the Olsen Christmas dinner and some rough-housing. I think in the next couple years we're going to have to move that party to the community center if we want to comfortably fit everyone in. Next year we spend Christmas with the Olsen side, and we will hopefully be in Carstairs by then, so it might end up happening at our house. If it does, I think we'll skip the 8 hour meal preparation followed by the 3 hour clean-up and just order in some festive specials from Swiss Chalet.