Christmas 2009

We has another wonderful Christmas with The Brothers YZ. Our celebration began with the Christmas Pageant at our church. St. Francis Church in Holden puts on an amazing pageant complete with live animals from the Heifer Project. This year two McGurins performed in the pageant. Evan reprised his role as star singing and signing "Away in a Manger." If you compare this year's video to last year's, you'll see that his ability to sign the song has really improved. Greg debuted as the middle-aged Wise Man. His acting was so astounding (and the costume so dramatic) that I almost didn't recognize him when I bumped into him in the hall prior to the performance.



After church, we returned to the Pioneer House for Christmas Eve dinner with Barbara, Uncle Dave and Aunt Donna, and Nana and Grampa. I decided to go bold with the menu and tried out the Beef Wellington that I had made a few weeks earlier in my cooking class at Johnson & Wales. It was beautiful and tasty if I do say so myself. Once Evan realized that he wasn't going to convince us to open the presents from Grammy and Grampy on Christmas Eve, both boys calmed down and were charming throughout the evening. Once Evan saw the Santa had crossed the Atlantic on the Santa Tracker, he hightailed it up to bed at 9 PM and went to sleep immediately without any stories.

The boys slept until 7:45 AM on Christmas morning. Liam was the first one up, and he was a little dazed when he saw the gifts under the tree. When we asked him who had been here during the night, he replied, "Barbara." Evan had no trouble knowing who had visited in the night and got straight down to business. I should have used the sports action setting on my camera to capture gift opening, as all of those pictures are a bit blurry. Liam was so pleased with his first gift, a small car carrier from the Cars movie that he let Evan open the rest of his gifts. Evan was especially pleased with his Toymobil including several knight sets compete with swords, bows and arrows, and torture devices that he thought Santa disapproved of. (Apparently Santa and Mommy have different standards for toys.)

We enjoyed a special Christmas breakfast of small boxes of sugary cereals usually banned at the Pioneer House before heading out to Rutland for gifts and dinner with Nana and Grampa, Babci and Dziadek, the g-unit, and Uncle Jim and Carol. We were pleased to see that Evan's self-control around presents that aren't his has improved greatly. All of the cousins had fun playing with their new toys giving the parents some much needed time to rest a bit.

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