We took the first few days of this week trying to pull out of the illness in our home. On Tuesday I took the boys to Urgent Care because Zack's ears were infected and Tyler hadn't improved at all with all of the meds he had been on since being in the ER. They confirmed that Tyler still didn't have pneumonia and all we could do was keep doing what we were doing. Zack got a few prescriptions, and we headed home for more rest. The boys kept their fevers nice and high until Thursday when they finally broke. I have never been more happy to see such sweaty children. I still wasn't getting more than three or four hours of sleep a night with everyone up and down all the time, but we were finally making progress. I wish sleep came as easily for me as it does for these guys.
On Christmas Eve, Tansy woke up wet, so I put her in the bathtub then left her in her room to get dressed while I went downstairs to take care of some things. After a while, I realized she hadn't come down so I went to check on her. She was asleep on the floor wearing only her underwear. I woke her up and got her dressed, but shortly after she came downstairs, she fell asleep again for three hours. I knew something bad was coming.

We got our first real snow on Christmas Eve. The kids were so excited. Ben took them out to play. I even let Tansy go out when she woke up, despite the fact that I was waiting to see what illness she was coming down with.

Sydney loves snowball fights.

Zack just loves being outside.

They decided to build a snowman.

Sydney also added a scarf and hat, but I had other cold, crying children I was taking care of and didn't make it back out to get a shot of the finished product.

Later that afternoon, we had our friends the Fosters over for turkey dinner. The food turned out much better than at Thanksgiving. Tansy started complaining about snot in her throat. It turns out that she has the same repiratory infection all of us had. Everything was draining down her throat, and she threw up from all of the mucus. Lovely. We had a good dinner anyway and played Killer Bunnies afterwards. I gave Tansy a dose of Albuterol before bed hoping it would help with her coughing.

Ben and I had taken care of final preparations the night before, so things were pretty easy to take care of once the kids were asleep. We had gotten a bop bag for Zack, and the instructions said you could put water or sand in the base to weigh it down. I figured water would be easiest, but when I tried it out, it didn't work very well. We decided to try to put more water in it and ended up getting water everywhere when Ben opened it. We were laughing so hard. It was so much fun to set everything up for the kids.

At 1:30, Tansy started coughing hard again. We ended up coming downstairs, as I distracted her from looking anywhere near the tree, and had a Blue's Clues marathon for about three hours (thank you, Netflix). She managed to fall asleep again for a little while. Everyone else slept until nearly 7:00. The bowl is just in case she throws up. My kids can often (unfortunately, no always) throw up in a bowl, which makes clean up so much easier.

Santa did find us despite the creatures stirring.

The properly filled bag was a big hit. . .literally!

And Sydney got a pillow pet from my mom. That's what she asked Santa for.You might have noticed in the last picture that Tansy's shirt has changed. As we were finishing looking at Santa stuff, Tansy threw up on the floor because her bowl was still on the couch. We had to change her shirt and clean the rug before we could start opening presents.

Everyone got what they wanted and then some. We then had snowman shaped pancakes and bacon for breakfast.

We had our seafood fest last night. We enjoyed maple teriyaki salmon, homemade clam chowder, cheddar garlic biscuits (since the french bread I bought a few days earlier already had mold), and steamed broccoli. We were going to have a shrimp ring as we watched movie last night after the kids went to bed, but we were still so stuffed, we had it for lunch today. We fell asleep during the movie anyway as the past few days caught up with us.

It was a really fun family day here yesterday. No one thought about getting dressed. We just played and had fun all day. I love knowing that I will be together with my family forever because of Jesus Christ. What a wonderful way to celebrate his birth.