I was thinking about staying home, and just delaying things until New Years...

Christmas eve day we headed down to Cedar Rapids, the drive was relatively easy, and the roads weren't too packed with travelers. We arrived at the Matta's around 2. We settled ourselves into the guest room, and hung out with the Matta's for a while.

Shortly after Jenny's mom and uncle (I think) arrived, we headed over to Shannon's Parents for Christmas Eve. We arrived first, even beating Shannon's dad from work. Shortly after we got there, Kim's family (Shannon's Sister) arrived, and just right on their tails, Shannon's Dad.

We went for the stockings first, getting a small amount of things from that. Sean and Sheileigh (is it bad that I have no clue if that is spelled right?) seemed very excited to start off the season. We then sat down fro some homemade chicken noodle soup. It was good. Then the kids passed out each round of gifts. This helped slow the pace of the torrent of presents down.

It's fun watching kids open presents. Chatting, some game playing (princess checkers with Mike vs Sheileigh & Grandpa). After the time grew late, the Kim & Mike packed up the loot and the kids and headed home. I started to do the same, and had the car warming up.

I came back in and we chatted. After quite a while, I went back out, turned off my car, and then came back in to chat some more. We spent a lot of time chatting with Shannon's parents. History, the story behind the story, thoughts, opinions. One of the things we were worried about, when Shannon moved in (unmarried, mind you) was Bob's reaction to the whole situation. But he told us his experiences and his personal opinions on things. I actually thought he was far more conservative in his beliefs. Around 11:20, I made some nudges and we headed back to the Matta's. We helped as much as we could with setting up Christmas morning with Taylor and Cali and then headed to bed.

This is where the pain started for me. I think I woke up 4 or 5 times in the space of 6 hours. It was either struggling to breath, because my CPAP machine was having trouble getting through the nasal air passage (which was blocked). So I got up to blow my nose, several times. Laying back down, getting comfortable, and hoping sleep would come...I would often read a bit again, before I could fall back asleep. Around 7:am, I figured the girls would be up, they weren't, but decided to just stay up and read anyways. Around 7:30 Jenny's mom came in, which caused some barking from Diego (black dog), which I think, in turn woke up the girls.

Christmas morning at the Mattas was fun as usual. Jenny and Nathan got the girls a kitten for Christmas (so that's 3 cats, 2 dogs, and a few fish in the house) and that seemed to be popular. However, I think the girls are used to the older, lazier kitties. With the new kitten, which was ended up being named Santa Claws by the little girls.

We had a good breakfast of roasted pears, egg casserole, and hot chocolate to fill up our belly. Before Shannon headed upstairs to get ready for the day. I stayed down and watched the girls open up the presents under the tree, before I joined Shannon and got cleaned up too.

We headed back downstairs and opened up the last of the presents (what we gave to them and what they gave to us). Shortly afterward, we packed up the car and headed over to my Parents. We got there a bit before noon.

By this time I was starting to feel more and more like a little bit of leftover death. Lack of sleep on top of a super-cold, left me feeling grumptacular. We did the short present exchange (I gave my parents a new version of one of the first games they had gotten when they were married, and Joseph a good chef's knife).

We chatted with family a bit before lunch was served and we feasted on roast beast (beef) with quite a set of trimmings. After dinner I checked on the weather, saw that possible freezing rain was coming, so we quickly packed up and headed back home.

Last night we snuggled in, and camped out and vegged out. We had some chocolate, I drank a lot of water and then we headed for bed.

We slept in separate rooms, since I'm still snoring like a wildebeast, even with my machine. I only woke up once last night, so I think I'm on the way to recovery. I had a nice day of today, heading into the weekend here. Shannon had to work today, for the first time in a week...so she had a nice time to just not think about work.