This morning Scott got up at 5:50 AM to drive Jeff & Lindsey to the airport... but when he got to their house they were all sleeping! I guess their flight got delayed due to weather, and they had called and left a message that we never received. So he came home and went back to sleep for a little bit before we had to get all ready for the Piano Recital.

The Recital was great and the kids played wonderfully. Jesse decided to jump off the stage after he was done instead of walking down the steps. Brett played pretty well, but did miss a few notes, and has played it much better dozens of times at home. I'm not sure if it was a case of stage fright, or (more likely) just playing it so much that he just got lazy. Samantha and I played well, and I actually had fun doing the duet with her (and wasn't nervous, surprisingly). Clara was an angel, and sat quietly in her car seat for the whole concert (wide awake too).

Basically the only downside was... Nathan. During Miss Lillie's opening remarks he started running up on the stage. Jesse ran up to get him and ended up tackling him down and then Scott went up and carried him back to our seats. Back into the stroller he went, and he was not happy about it. So Scott had to spend the rest of the concert in the hall with Nathan screaming to get out of his stroller.

Anyway, another neat thing was that our old neighbour, Leslie was there to watch her niece, Julianna, who is also a student of Lillie's. Her parents were there too. It was great to see them all.

After the recital, Samantha went to her friend Sam's house (who was also at the concert, as her little sister is in Jesse's piano class). The rest of us went to the airport to pick up Jeff & Lindsey's car which they parked there since Scott didn't end up driving them. Later on Scott picked up the two Samantha's and they played here for the rest of the afternoon until after supper.

Tonight I went out with Kate & Tasha to deliver Christmas packages to our Primary workers. We delivered 12 out of 19 but quite a few people live out of town, so we'll deliver the rest at church tomorrow.

The kids had fun watching Hockey Night in Canada with Scott while I was gone. That's becoming a tradition around here and it's getting more fun now that the kids are old enough to actually watch the game and cheer for their favourite teams and sing along with the theme song, etc.

I'm so excited for Christmas! The music, the season, the lights, the snow, the kids counting down - it's just been so much fun this year.

Every year I vow to take it easy on the gifts, but somehow we end up with tons of stuff. Scott's definitely taking his share of the blame this year, as he has been shopping a lot too. Just for the older kids really, as Clara has no clue and doesn't need anything. Nathan doesn't need anything either, and he'll just play with the first thing he opens anyway, so why bother making him open more.

We always use all our points up (Visa, Air Miles, etc) at Christmas time, but we still buy stuff anyways. (This year Scott ordered a Wii with our Scotia Gold Visa points. I'm a little nervous about this, as up until now we've been avoiding any type of gaming systems in our house. But it's weird how easy it was to justify getting one when you don't have to pay anything for it.

But, I will say that with all our spending, we have never gone into debt over the holidays. We always pay cash (well, debit, or else credit card but we pay it off within 48 hours). So we never have bills to pay off come January. Also, we almost never buy our kids anything during the rest of the year, even on their birthdays (usually their birthday gift is a party or something small like a book, etc).

Okay, I really need to get to bed before midnight because I totally forgot until about an hour ago that Jesse's supposed to give a talk in Primary tomorrow so I need to wake up and do that before church, and I also need to finish a few Primary things that I didn't get done today. Good thing Scott doesn't have Bishopric meetings tomorrow morning!