Manners

Sometimes I feel like I live with a bunch of Neanderthals. Especially in public. You know, I teach the kids the basic manners like please, thank you, asking instead of demanding...but when I take them out into the real world it's like they've lived in a cave their whole lives. It's so embarrassing to go to someones house to play, and come time to go, I tell them to clean up the toys and all I get is blank stares or just a flat out "NO." Or going to Grandma's house and instead of asking for something, it's "give me that!" And my favorite, standing in line at Target behind a...larger woman and Tate says loudly "Mom, her bum is soooo big!!"
People told me being a parent was hard, but I didn't know it would make me want to crawl under a table and die of embarrassment too.

Long Christmas Post

Christmas was really fun, the kids understand it more and more every year. So they really got into Santa, and our elf Buddy that comes to keep an eye on us during December...sometimes I wish Buddy was around all year, he's a great discipline tool:)
Anyway, we spent Christmas Eve with the Wakefields and it was chaos like usual! With 12 grandkids it gets pretty noisy and wild, but the kids love it. Marley just loves her cousin Jake and always wants to sit with him.

Before going home to bed we stopped at the Love's to get our traditional jammies, here's all the guys in theirs pretending to be Utes cheerleaders.
Christmas morning we woke up and did presents with our little family. Santa brought the kids a new kitchen, table and chairs and a bunch of other awesome toys! But don't worry, the favorite toys were the little dinky things Santa put in their stockings, go figure:

Marley playing in the new kitchen
Tate displaying some new airplanes he got
Jord with all his new xbox crap....why I keep getting him that stuff I don't knowAfter lunch we went to the Love's and Wakefield's for more presents!
Grandma Love gave Tate a motor scooter....he was so excited all he would do for a picture was this atrocious face
Marley playing in the scooter box of courseAnd last but not least, Spiderman is in the house! Tate's really into dressing up these days, so he wore this the rest of the day....and the next couple days after:)