Merry Christmas!!

Here are the girls right before we let them go downstairs to open their Christmas presents on Tuesday morning (December 22). Do they look excited?? Santa always visits our house a little early because he knows we go to Iowa for Christmas.


Here's Madeline with the "Splashy the Whale" game that she received. She was really excited. The game is kind of like "Operation." You have to retrieve objects from Splashy's mouth using a fishing pole. However, if you touch his tongue, he sprays you with water - a lot of water.






Madeline decided that she wanted to give presents to her family members this year. She found things around the house and then wrapped them up. She gave Mallory her (my) Malibu Barbie. Apparently, Mallory always wanted to play with that Barbie, but Madeline never let her. Madeline gave Scott and I an assortment of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters that she took from Scott's change drawer. I think Scott got around $0.78 and I got just over $1.30.

Brianna received Dora underpants for Christmas. She was so excited! She insisted on putting them on...and using the toilet! And so began Brianna's potty-training..

The potty training is going really, really well. It is, by far, the most pleasant potty training experience we have had in this house. By the time we returned home from Iowa, Brianna was almost completely trained! Had I known that receiving Dora underpants was the key, we would have celebrated Christmas in July!

Perhaps as a nod to the fact that she started potty training over Christmas, Brianna calls toilet paper "wrapping paper"! = )

Here's Scott displaying the girls' Zhu Zhu pets. They were apparently this year's hot toy. Scott found out that they were going to be available at Wal-Mart at 7am on Monday morning, so he went out around 6:30. He ended up going to three Wal-Marts to get them because each store had a purchase limit of one. He came home a very proud dad.