Miracles!

Yup, miracles really really do happen! Like when my wife painted this mural to hang in our dining room for the holidays AND managed to get the kids in front of it looking cute. (you should see some of the out takes though; it is hysterical.) The only one who stays sort of rigid and never moves is Chet. He freezes when his picture is taken. The only ones where he looks relaxed are when he doesn't know you are taking his picture and those are harder than heck to get. Somehow he has spidey sense for when a camera is near and just freaks. But they look cute and I could print these out and send them off in cards to the people who get that yearly picture of the kids. Lissa looks so "big kid" to me in this picture. Sniff, not a baby any more!

The other miracle is that our gifts for the kids are WRAPPED. This is so amazing. Even the stocking stuffers are done. With 4 kids, 2 of whom are not reading yet, I have a color coded system for gifts. It eliminates hubbub of the nasty sort and keeps the hubbub on the morning of the happy variety. Each kid has all the same color tissue paper for their stocking stuffers. For instance, this year Lissa has pink. Anything pink is Lissa's and no one elses. They each have their own wrapping paper. Santa will leave a note as always explaining and this will be read at the beginning of the great unwrap and life will be good.

I was worried about getting things wrapped though. First off we work at night. 3 to 4 hours doing piece work for a local factory. Kirsty has recently discovered (surprise!!) if she goes to bed early she has a lot of energy in the day time. So she has been retiring by 9 at the latest and 8 if she has been ill as she was this past week. So there has not been a lot of time to wrap. Also I have to have obviously all children asleep to accomplish this little miracle and that doesn't always happen either. But it has, two days running. So we are done. D-O-N-E Except that the guitar I ordered for KC hasn't come yet and i am hoping for yet another miracle (is there a quota for one family at the holidays) and am hoping it arrives tomorrow. The tracking shows it was shipped all ready. I ordered it early but it was back ordered. Sigh.

At any rate, tomorrow when the kids are asleep all we have to do is load this loot under the tree and assemble the wagon we got all of them and it is done. We will be prepared. I never know HOW the heck things will come together. But somehow, someway, they always do. It's like the Christmas magic that they talk about in Frosty the Snowman!