Merry Christmas!

I want to wish our family and friends a very Merry Christmas. I hope everyone had a wonderful day with family and friends. I wish we could spend the holidays together, but being spread out throughout the country makes that difficult.

We had a great day. Janese and I got up at 6:30 am and got ready for the attack. I think this is the first time in my life that I took a shower before opening presents on Christmas morning. Normally I am woken up and dragged out of bed, but not today. I actually had to wake some of the kids up.

Our tradition is to open gifts one kid at a time, youngest to oldest. With eight kids that can take a while. It went by pretty fast this time. As the kids get older they mainly want electronics, which lowers the overall number of gifts they get due to Santa budget constraints. We video taped a lot of their opening of gifts (courtesy of Panasonic) and caught the different squeals of delight and excitement.

After we were done opening gifts, the downstairs looked like a Best Buy blew up in our family room. There was stuff every where. I spent the majority of today assembling all of the different toys, adding batteries, and trying to keep everything organized. Janese and I also helped everyone open up the boxes and take the toys out. In their excitement to open the box, the kids practically rip the toy itself apart. It does not make it any easier that the toy is virtually cemented inside the package with all of the tape, wires, and screws they use nowadays to keep everything in place in the box. I guess the ride over from China can get pretty bumpy?

The favorites this year seem to be the Guitar Hero III, Nintendo DS, Legos, iPod Nano, cell phone, and the many Wii and DS games. Some of the kids have not been seen since we finished opening gifts this morning. I am sure they are creating Lego villages in their rooms as we speak.

Thank you again to everyone for their awesome gifts. We appreciate your love and support and wish you all the best in 2008. We love you all tons and can't wait to see you again. Merry and Christmas and Happy New Year! May you be blessed with all the best in '08!

Megan and Ireland

Megan loves babies and little kids. She goes out of her way to talk to kids younger than her and is very good with Ireland.

The other day we found some reindeer antlers with our Christmas decorations and her creative juices started flowing. Before we knew it Ireland was transformed into Rudolph the red nose white boy.

Service Projects

Our service projects continue. I have committed our family to at least eight different service projects for a video project I am putting together (more to follow soon). We started with the visit to the Nursing Home in Payson, Utah. Since then the kids have done extra things around the house to raise money for "The moms" for the Smile Train and last night we went to Big Lots to fill two shoe boxes with $20 worth of gifts each for needy kids in South Dakota. It is for a reservation in South Dakota where people on average make about $3,500 a year.

I think the workers and customers at Big Lots thought we were crazy people. Janese and I split us up into a boy group and a girl group and each group had their box. I video taped a lot of the event and got some great footage. The kids ran all over the store debating over what they were going to put in their box. The boys chose to fill their box for a 10 year old boy. The girls put their box together for an 8 year old girl.

Unfortunately my camera battery was low, so I wasn't able to get everything. If I had been able to record it all I would have gotten shots of Makena falling head first into a display, Zak being told his breath smells like poop, Tanner trying to get me to record his "little dance" any time I was recording, and finally my making the kids walk around with their hands in their pockets for the rest of the evening. For the life of them the kids could not stop touching every single thing in the store. I was in charge of the boys and I had to keep reminding them who they were shopping for. If I hadn't, this poor 10 year old boy would have ended up with a fake pink cell phone, a brown and white feather bola, shampoo and several tiny nutcracker dolls that played Christmas music in his shoebox Christmas morning.

I think the store clerks were very happy when we left. I was extremely happy when we left. We got ice cream cones through the McDonald's drive through and then headed home for the night to pack our shoe boxes with the purchased items, decorate them and then to hit the sack.

We watched the raw footage before we went to bed and had several good laughs. I am excited to get everything put together. I think every single kid in our home loves to ham it up for the camera.