Crazy Christmas

As everyone has taken down their decorations and stocked their Christmas CDs until next year, I figured I better get this in now before you really don’t want to hear anything else about the holidays! (just a little behind)

Christmas, for lack of a better description, was crazy. Crazy!  Coming off of a Christmas Eve where Caden was already a bit overwhelmbed and Everett had a colic tailspin we were all a bit short on sleep (who wasn’t?) with a busy day ahead. 

Caden woke up and while Colter was making breakfast, started handing out presents…to himself. It appears he has that job down already. Not differing from the night before he wanted to open a present and play with it for six hours before looking at anything else.  I don’t blame him really, wouldn’t you want to play with the cool t-ball set you just opened?  He was pretty good about wanting to open/help you open and thankfully since it was just the four of us we could take our time…I mean he could take his time.  So much time in fact that when it was naptime he still had presents from us to open which I snuck back upstairs to save for his birthday!   The child was clearly overloaded and hadn’t even been to Nonna & Pa Pa’s for their gifts and his Auntie & Uncle’s so we hid a secret stash for later.

We thought we might make it to Bill & Carolyn’s before Caden needed to rest and start celebrating early but that obviously didn’t happen.  With six kids four and under all in attendance that was probably a good thing because he would have already been exhausted! We got there shortly after Colter’s brothers and walked in to see Cousin Locke happily bouncing around. So cute!  Carolyn had worked since Thanksgiving decorating the house from top to bottom and was busy being the chef in the kitchen. 

From last Christmas to this year, there were three new Kazmann babies there.  Locke (March), Kaylie ( August) and Everett (November) rounding it out at eight grandkids for Nonna & Pa Pa! While you would think Caden would be excited to see his older cousins( JP – 4, Braiden – almost 3)  and play, after a couple of overwhelming days he was terrified.  He just ran from them crying and begging Colter to hold him most of the evening.  Hooray!  We survived Christmas evening.  By survived I mean neither Colter or I sat to eat at the same time with either kid once and I think I saw Colter a couple of times. I was sad to be missing out of seeing Caden do things on Christmas (turns out I didn’t miss much) to tend to Everett who was a bit overstimulated himself.  Thankfully, Everett finally passed out in my arms and right before leaving I got to sit with both boys at the dining room table (Caden fresh from a bath and in his Christmas PJs) to make a few memories and see how sweet they were.

We didn’t quite get to gifts that night as all the kiddos were being put to bed at various times and meltdowns being managed.  Fortunately everyone was sticking around for brunch the next day so we headed back over there first thing to kick off the chaos.  By chaos it looks a little something like this…14 people, 6 of them  under the age of 4 exchanging gifts.  By exchanging gifts I mean the kids are opening any gift in sight, Caden’s afraid, Locke & Kaylie are sleeping and joining in at various times, Everett is in the Bjorn, paper is flying, no gift tags are attached any longer – madness.  Caden was scoping out other gift piles once they were opened and trading gifts when no one was looking (except Mom).  He figured he opened this one over here and cousin opened that one so why not swap?

JP got an awesome set of Lincoln logs and took them to an area to play.  My OCD son just kept icking them up and putting them back into their canister.  There you have one child trying to nicely play and another child trying to nicely clean up.  JP tried to explain that he was playing and showed Caden how.  Caden tried to explain that it was too messy and needed to be picked up. Ay yi yi.

Let that play on repeat for awhile.

So as you can see memories of the age of all the kids were definitely made and everyone was more than spoiled. We were lucky to get to spend time with all of our family this season even though it was brief and enjoy delicious treats.  Having kids during the holidays is truly fantastic although I think we all are looking forward to a time when all of the kids sit in their corners and excitedly open their gifts on their own while we sit back with an adult beverage. One day!