the sidlingers

We still don’t have all of our presents put away!  There was just so much stuff!  Let’s start off with Santa…

Daniel got a Star Wars play set, a 1000 piece Lego castle, a wooden shield/sword set, Floam (because Mama would never buy it for him), Iceman from Spiderman and Friends, a telescope, a robot and Santa left a keyboard for the whole family.

Then from everyone else, the list is just too long, but Daniel LOVES everything he got.  He has been busy for the past few days just going from gift to gift.

David and I also did pretty well and love all of our gifts too!

We made a quick trip to Target yesterday to buy some extra shelves for Daniel’s bedroom.  We got them put together, but still haven’t managed to get all his new toys up there yet.  It will probably take me a few more days to get everything put away and cleaned up….just in time for a little break and then Daniel’s birthday and time to do it all again!  What a lucky boy.

Oh…homemade gifts!!  I still need to take pictures of the cool things we received (from Bobbi, Tommy and Ryan), but here are the gifts we made.

Daniel had Aunt Honey’s name and made her a candy cane inspired bracelet. 

I had Austin’s name and made him a winter scene with an ice skater controlled by a magnet.

David had Ryan’s name and made him a name plaque made out of old computer parts.

Anyways, thank you so much to everyone for our wonderful gifts, we hope you all had a Merry Christmas and we want to wish you all a Happy New Year too (just in case I don’t make it back to the computer before then)!

Click here for photos,  I will recap later this afternoon.

Have a wonderful day!

Love,

The Sidlingers

Click on any image to enlarge.

More pictures to come when the sun comes up.  Merry Christmas!

The excitement level is pretty high here at our house.  We’ve wrapped our last few presents, baked cookies for Santa and finished up homemade gifts (some of us have at least).

I’ll be updating with pictures tonight when we get home from dinner and of course again in the morning.

Here’s our tree, with presents stretching from one side of the room to the other, I think we might have over done it again this year.

The excitement level is pretty high here at our house.  We’ve wrapped our last few presents, baked cookies for Santa and finished up homemade gifts (some of us have at least).

I’ll be updating with pictures tonight when we get home from dinner and of course again in the morning.

Here’s our tree, with presents stretching from one side of the room to the other, I think we might have over done it again this year.

We had a wonderful visit with Grandad, especially Daniel.  He’s also looking forward to seeing Yia-Yia and Aunt Ashley next week (maybe we’ll have to make some New Year’s cookies!).

The Christmas excitement is building up and I’m hoping to make it through the next few days with as few meltdowns as possible.  Luckily, we have some things to do to keep us busy tomorrow and Friday David has the day off so we can take turns distracting Daniel from the fact that Santa is only one night away.  Saturday during the day we plan on watching Christmas movies and finishing up homemade gifts.  We’ll see how that plan goes though.

Good luck to everyone finishing up last minute shopping (David) and check back soon for more pictures and Christmas countdown updates!

Before:

After:

All the presents (that are here so far) are now wrapped and under the tree!

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A conversation with Daniel…

Daniel is upstairs using the restroom and I am downstairs, this is what is yelled back and forth-

Daniel: Hey Mama?! (most good conversations start off this way)

Me: Yeah?

Daniel:  I just went to the bathroom and accidently used too much toilet paper and now it won’t flush.

Me: How much paper did you use?

Daniel: As long as Santa’s naughty and nice list.

He got all his lines right and sang beautifully at the Christmas program at school.  We have video, but haven’t had a chance to get it on the computer yet, maybe later today.

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The same day, later that afternoon…

Daniel had another karate graduation.  He’s now a junior orange belt!  That means that he gets to move to the bigger dojo (and Mama gets a chair, rather than a bench to sit on during class!) and have new instructors.  He has also become part of the Black Belt Club, which means he has committed to continue his classes until he reaches black belt level (about 3 years from now).

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Christmas is just one week away and I’m done with my shopping except for David.  Of course, I still have to wrap everything and mail a few packages.  We’re also waiting on a few things that are shipping too, let’s hope UPS, Fed Ex, DHL, and the USPS have holiday spirit and realize that some boxes need to be handled discreetly (keep your fingers crossed for us)!

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Yesterday was a dream day for Daniel.  His friend had a birthday party at the zoo in the morning.  We had a conference with one of his karate instructors and he got to hear three adults say what a great kid his was.  He had a quesdilla from Chile Burrito (one of his favorites) for lunch.  Got to go to Target, where we ran into Madelyn for the second time that day (she was at the party earlier too).  Got to have ravioli for dinner even though I originally said no pasta or pizza (have you ever gone to the grocery store and all the meat looks like they’ve been filming one of those exposes on how grocery stores keep meat longer than they should?).  Then we had chocolate cake for dessert and watched Frosty the Snowman on TV before bed.

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To be continued…

The Mad Scientist of Mad Science of Nashville will be performing fun science experiments with the kids AND each child will get to make something to take home with them!