Christmas Weekend Part 1: Leach Edition

This weekend is a busy weekend, as we have our Christmas with both sides of my family.  Today Dad and Deb are in town, and tomorrow is Christmas at Mom and Ron's house.  We had two different sets of Christmas outfits for the kids, one for each day.  For today Joshua wore a cute little airplane sweater vest, and Clara and Hannah wore matching Santa dresses with striped leggings.  We actually managed to get a decent picture of the three of them, although Clara is attempting to eat an ornament, and Hannah's dress is pulled up a little bit, but all in all, it's about as good as we can expect.

In the early afternoon, Dad, Deb, Julie, Andrew, Joanna, and Kirk all arrived at our house.  We had some tasty appetizers and then played Wavelength, in which Julie and Andrew had a comeback win, much to the chagrin of the hosts.  We would have won, but when I think of prisons, I think of Alcatraz, but Meghan thinks I think of Lansing and/or Leavenworth.  We weren't on the same "wavelength" on that one, and thus Andrew and Julie's Kate Middleton (Duchess of Whatever) answer won the game for them.

Later we had pizza for dinner, but our strategy of cooking two Papa Murphy's pizzas at once by alternating which one was on top in the oven failed, as both burned on the bottom.  Next time we'll cook them sequentially instead of in parallel.  They also failed to put pineapple on our Hawaiian and green pepper pizza, so they gave us a replacement for free, which we happily accepted since it meant we would have a non-burned pizza.  For dessert we had baklava, which Dad had the good idea to get.

Later we gave Deb a gift, but it was more of a joke gift.  Dad historically has wanted nothing but underwear for Christmas, so as a joking jab at him, we gave her some bright pink underwear, since that's all our father has taught us to give as gifts.  But we then gave her (and Dad) an actual gift, which was a framed photo of all of us in the big colorful glasses that was taken when she and Dad announced they had gotten married.  This represented all of us as a family and our excitement of having her as part of our family.

Finally, since that picture didn't have Clara in it, and because Hannah was still in the womb, we took a new picture that has all of us in it.  No silly glasses this time, but it's a nice family picture that is the first one that has all of us including all of our kids.

Honeymoon in Olathe

A month or so ago, my dad called me and said he and Deb would be in town in August and suggested that we (meaning my sisters and I and our significant others) get together. We determined the date (today) and the place (our house), and everything was set. Today everyone showed up, and Dad and Deb surprised us with the news that they had just gotten married! Julie, Joanna, and I had long speculated on when they would get engaged and get married and had hoped it would happen soon. But since they weren't engaged, we were all shocked to hear that they had just gotten married a few days ago. But it was very exciting news, as we'd all been wanting Deb to be part of the family, as she's a good match for Dad and we all really like her.  This trip isn't their actual honeymoon, but it made for a really great and happy surprise for all of us "kids", and we're all very happy for the newly-wedded couple.

Butyraceous Means Buttery

Usually when Dad and Deb come to our house for our family Christmas, we only have the evening to spend together.  This year everyone was able to stay for most of day today, so we played board games, which is something we often plan to do but often don't get to do due to a lack of time.  We had a lot of people, so we played Cranium.  We split up into two teams, boys versus girls.  Andrew, Dad, and I (and Joshua?) ended up winning (not that I care about winning, of course).  Here the girls work together on one of the challenges.