Christmas is always full of laughs and craziness in my family.
This year was a lot calmer and pretty quiet.
We started the morning showing Charlee and Tillie that Santa ate the cookies and drank the milk they left out for him.
Then we moved on to opening gifts. Charlee was more ready to go than Tillie was.
Tillie honestly just wanted to go back to sleep at first since we woke them up early so we could get to my mom’s house at a decent time.
The girls both ended up really enjoying all the things they got at our house.
I think they enjoyed their doctors office set the most. It is a neat toy, and the girls are into pretending to be doctors right now.
We then loaded up and off to my mom’s we went.
Upon arriving there, we realized I had forgotten to grab presents for everyone at my mom’s so Brayden loaded up and headed back to Chandler.
This is where Christmas started to feel a little more strange. There were 14 people in my mom’s house, and it was calm and quiet.
The most noise was coming from Charlee and Tillie, and they were not even being that loud due to being sleepy.
This Christmas is our first Christmas without my grandpa.
He was always loud and chaotic.
I did not realize it at first, but all my parents’ children are grown now too.
Summer is the youngest and she is turning 16 this year.
Missing my grandpa and all my siblings being grown resulted in our first calm and quiet Christmas.
No sibling arguments, no loud grandpa showing up late, none of the usual chaos.
Nobody really talks about the small things that change as a set of siblings grow up.
But, man, this small thing is actually kind of a big thing.
Christmas did not even quite feel like Christmas. I think next year I might toss Zeb a $20 bill just to give us a little bit of a sibling argument.
Overall, it was a great Christmas, and we are so thankful to have spent time with the family we did get to spend time with.
I hope all of you had a wonderful, Christmas too.