December 7 (just under the wire)

Family Christmas Carol Sing

So, technically, Erica did not meet her goal seven-day blogging streak, because she has been up in bed since 5:00. Little Lady has apparently passed on her fever, which for Erica always comes with puking and headache, so she is pretty miserable up there. I'm avoiding going to bed, and may elect to sleep on the yogibo in the living room tonight rather than snuggle up too close to all those germs and nastiness. But I figured since I'm channeling Erica already by staying up way too late and eating way too many cookies, I might as well blog and keep the momentum going.

First things first. I fixed the elfyourself technical difficulties of December 3, and here's the link. Knock yourself out. Little Man begs at least three times an hour to watch "the lips one":
http://www.elfyourself.com/?mId=62315657.3
(and, for your additional viewing pleasure, each of the other kids' favorite variations:
http://www.elfyourself.com/?mId=62315045.3
http://www.elfyourself.com/?mId=62315732.3
http://www.elfyourself.com/?mId=62315760.3)

On to today's activity: singing Christmas carols after dinner. It was pretty disappointing to be missing Erica for this activity, since she is the only one in the family who is even a half-way decent singer (I am NOT exaggerating here - come over for karaoke sometime!) But since we had no audience, we could be as terrible as we pleased, so we forged ahead. Collin cooked us up some hot cocoa, we each choose a few cookies, and, since we don't know most of the words and can't carry a tune, we pulled up youtube videos of all our favorite carols to sing along to.

We spent a delightful 45 minutes making the neighbor dogs howl and getting in the Christmas spirit. Then I put the littles to bed as quickly as I could (conveniently neither of them had left the house all day and were still in their PJs, so no pesky changing of clothes was required), left the bigs in front of their Disney sitcoms with instructions to put themselves to bed, and rushed out to make it to my hockey game! A lovely evening was had by all. Erica even claimed to have enjoyed it from bed. Which, if true, is a statement to how very much she loves us.