Surprise Christmas celebration

Last night at dinner, someone mentioned celebrating Christmas early. The kids were positively giddy with the thought. One thing led to another and we ended up opening all the Christmas presents! We'll still do stockings on Christmas morning, but everything else is opened.
Here is Meagan with her doll bed. She loved it. She ran immediately to get her Elizabeth doll and tucked her right in. A big hit.
Here is Caleb with his new Medieval Battle Axe from Grandpa. His eyes truly sparkled when he saw it. I wish I had caught that look on camera.
This is how Abby spent most of the evening.
And this is me wearing my new bee-keeping gloves and holding my new smoker from Don. He also got me the boxes to keep them in. We'll be ready to get a hive going in the spring. I can't wait!

Some other big gifts were:
-I got Don a wood burning stove to put in the garage
-Don and I got a $200 gift certificate to the Farm & Feed store in town from his folks
-We got a coupon good for one milk cow from my dad
-Caleb & Meagan got money from my dad to buy farm animals...Meagan wants rabbits and Caleb wants pigs. We'll be looking for those soon.

There were lots of other things and we feel so completely blessed. It was fun. We ate our Christmas cookies while we opened presents and I gave permission to the kids to eat until they puked. Luckily, none of that went on. But, they enjoyed trying!

Today, everyone is working on unloading Don's parents household goods into our barn. We'll store it there for them until they get back from Ukraine for good and build their house on our property. It is currently 20 degrees outside and flurries are coming down. I'm glad I "have" to stay inside and care for Abby. Since the garage is at a standstill until the snow lets up, we've also been working on the kitchen. We tore out one wall's worth of cabinets and stripped off the ugly wall board that was there. We put up new paintable wall board. We decided that it would be much easier to work with than dry wall, given the way we are needing to do this remodel. I put on 2 coats of a beautiful chocolate brown paint and now, I'm just waiting for them to get too cold to work outside and decide to come install that wall of cabinets. I forgot to take before pictures, but I'll definitely post after ones.

Tomorrow we will do some traveling around to visit the relatives for Christmas. That is, unless the roads are too bad. It is difficult to get used to planning around the weather again...when we lived in Arizona, weather wasn't a concern. Well, unless you count staying inside all summer long because it is 115 degrees outside.