St Nick's 2010

You'll have to forgive the latest Slapinions hiatus, as my Internet service was down for a few weeks. I can update my Facebook page from my phone, but it's a wee bit harder to orchestrate a blog post via that method :)

This Sunday night/Monday morning was the celebration of St. Nick's, a warm-up to Christmas which is widespread here but which is apparently limited to the German-influenced cities of the Midwest. Let me know if the tradition extends to your neck of the woods, as it certainly is a practice that deserves a wider audience.

We slowly chipped away at the stockings over the last few weeks. Each kid got a minimum of some Silly Bandz, a holiday themed Coca-Cola bottle, a small amount of candy, and some socks. Sunday evening, with severe cold on the way for the AM, we picked up a pair of gloves for each child and added them to the mix.

Smiley and Ginger each got a character-themed bath set (Spongebob and Dora, respectively) and YaYa got a 3 DVD set of funny animal videos I bought on super clearance. We also picked up a copy of Taylor Swift's Christmas CD for her, as YaYa is a HUGE Swift fan.

LuLu got a sticker album for the movie Tangled that I found at the Dollar Tree, and a panda bear Lisa found at a rummage sale (Panda's are her favorite animal).

As she's always complaining about not having as many CD's as her sister, we picked up a copy of Selena Gomez's latest for her. She also got a great big can of black olives to enjoy!

Lisa bought me a Farmville gift card (yippee!) and I got her a copy of Ke$ha's newest CD.

All in all, a very nice, very happy, surprisingly robust looking St. Nick's 2010. Good planning Mom and Dad!

St Nick's 2008

That weekend of the Breakfast with Santa was a busy one. The morning prior was St. Nick's, and as is often the case our friend Chris stayed over with her kids.



As usual my parent's supplemented our goodies with scads of trinkets they bought for the kids. Unlike some other grandparent's I know they never seek credit for such things, preferring the kids to retain the illusion of the Easter Bunny or Santa or whoever. I think that's cool.

We'd also been surprised - genuinely so - by a huge stocking of goodies left on our door by 'St. Nick' aka a family from school we count as friends.



Lisa tried to have the kids go to bed in matching pajama's, or pajama's at all, because she knew I'd be snapping pictures and was 'tired of seeing half-naked babies on your blog'.

Oops.





Listen, those kids went to bed super-late because of the sleepover and then got up at the [bleep] of dawn. They look like rough? Tough Judgemental Future YaYa and LuLu - you should have let us sleep in and purty ya up.

On to the show:



















Sorry about the red-eye on these next few. I don't know why Photobucket doesn't seem to accept and save edits. Sigh.





A very nice morning, and very relaxing.

St. Nick's 2006

December 6th brought St. Nick to our house again. Bear in mind these pics were taken at around 7 in the morning, and we all look horrible. [Check out the family portrait on the wall btw - it's a beaut]

Both my parents and Lisa's Dad contributed material to the stockings, including these jump ropes. We got them the electric toothbrushes of their favorite characters; the character bandages from their Grandpa were a great hit, although they quickly became attached to everything in the house.

The girls also received the Belle and Little Mermaid ornaments they wanted in Disney World. Ain't it grand how St. Nick is so psychic?

Here's Parker Bear with his gifts

And dang that di-di in Lu's mouth - but we crunched that soon enough . . .