::christmas report pt 2::

I don't ever want these Christmas reports to turn into a big list of gifts received, but sometimes it's hard. We appreciate the gifts that the family sends so much, and I like to express that here! So you'll get to see at least a few of them.
Max loved his suitcase and Star Wars sleeping bag. What a great present Grandma & Grandpa!!

He's slept in it every night since on his bed. I don't know if we'll ever be able to talk him out of it.

We also got some fun pictures that we love from them and a photo book and a family recipe book. Loved them!!


Kari's family sent Max some pieces for his hexbug habitat. This was awesome because he got some other pieces from some other people and so now he has one big enormous fabulous habitat complete with bridge battle. It's very fun.


The bugs are really fun to watch. Lots of times it seems like they really must have minds of their own.
And Cammon & Lorri, omnisciently sent Max big packs of batteries. He was in heaven. One of his hexbugs immediately ran out of batteries, and we were able to start him up again. It was amazing. Nice work guys!!


Gram & Grandpa sent an awesome rainbow tent--you probably saw the youtube video below. It has a tunnel which just takes it over the top for coolness.

My mom has also been working her little bottom off making all her old analog photo books digital. It's billions of hours of work and when she gets done they look amazing. I look forward to getting the next installment of the family photo albums every Christmas, and she did not disappoint. Thanks so much for all the hard work mom!!

Lechelle made us the cutest ties for the boys. Max wore his to church the day after Christmas and it looked amazing!

It's the perfect size! Sandy's is perfect too, see?

I can't wait get him a little button up for church. Then he and Max can match adorably. And best part? I can match too!!

Love it!

We spend the rest of the day playing with presents and each other and eating yummy things like tomato soup and 3 cheese grilled sandwiches, and german pancakes. Mmmmmm.


(No we don't just leave the baby on the table, we were keeping a close eye on him. But he was loving watching Max play with his trucks.)
We were all exhausted by the end of the day, but a good tired. Everybody behaved themselves well and it was a great day. Well, except for little Sandy's hour long screaming fit at the end of the day, but that's to be expected when the day is way too exciting for good naps.
It was a great day, thanks to all the friends and family that contributed to it. We missed you all. We love you, MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

::christmas report pt 1::

The best thing I ever did was make Max use an alarm clock a few Christmasses ago. Not so much to wake him up, but to show him when he was allowed to leave his room and come get us. It's worked awesomely for us each year since and we've never been waked up at 4AM (yet anyway). I told Max this year that 7:30 was his time. When the baby got me up at 7, or was it 6:30? He was still out. I fed the baby and showered. I went into his room and checked on him at 7:25 and he was SO asleep. 5 minutes later we heard the alarm go off and seriously 30 seconds later he was in our room, wide awake. It was hilarious. And just proved that all those school mornings where we have to drag him out of bed by his toenails are preposterous!

Boys in the morning, all stripey and sleepy. I can't tell if Sandy's begging me to save him from his big brother with his eyes or not. He actually loves Max and I think it's only going to get better as he gets bigger.

We headed into the living room to see the goodies. It was nice to hear Max's extremely delighted noises as he saw the half size electric guitar we got him and the fun bits of things that Santa left. He was very satisfyingly excited about it all.

I realized the other day that it is just SO darn light here compared to other places we've lived. Even in the winter the sun comes up before 7AM. I was surprised that it wasn't dark when we went out to the living room. It may be the first Christmas I remember where we didn't see the tree lights glowing because of the sun!


Here's Max with his awesome guitar. The half-sizedness of it is very cute, and seeing Max play it is even cuter.

I'm sure I'll have to post more pictures/video of him playing it soon enough.
Here are Kris and Max with matching bracelets made out of bike chains. Max had purchased the bracelet for himself a few weeks ago, and he was dead set on getting Kris one for Christmas. Luckily there were still some left when we made it to the bike store. It is a lucky bracelet after all--or at least so says Max.

Sandy got worn out very quickly and was ready for his first nap. We brought his bed out into the living room so he could still be with us. I don't think he got very good quality sleep, but at least he slept a bit and it wasn't in my lap the whole time.

Plus, he's adorable. I love seeing little ones sleeping with their hands above their heads like that.

And Sultan? Well of course he had to be in on the action. He came right into the middle of the little space on the rug we'd cleared and he lay down. He got himself all comfy on Max's new sleeping bad and fell asleep. It wasn't very convenient for us, but cute anyway.


That's all for now--more tomorrow. I'm regathering my energy after the weekend. Max wished on a star tonight that it would be Christmas every day. I remember wishing that myself when I was little. I don't wish it now though. Once is enough even though I'm always sad it's over.

::some christmas::

We had a great Christmas. It was very quiet--just the three of us--and very fun. We were more than spoiled by our families.
Here's Max on Christmas eve. He's wearing his new sock monkey PJs and putting out the santa cookies. We all got new PJs which is so fun. When my mom was in town she bought me some and wrapped them up. It was perfect.




I could hardly sleep all night. I had a cold and my nose was all stuffed so I could hardly breathe. I felt like a little kid though, waking up every half hour, looking at the clock and just wishing it was time to get up!
We told Max that he couldn't leave his room until 7AM. We gave him a little travel alarm clock so he'd know exactly what time it was. When I got up at 6:30 to shower (after lying in bed awake since at least 5:30) he was totally conked out in bed. As I was drying my hair at the stroke of 7 he popped into the bathroom "It's SEVEN!!" and proved it when I asked him to show me on his clock. It was pretty funny.

Santa brought something pretty cool. A Buzz Lightyear telescoping robot arm. At least it doesn't make noise.



He was really excited even though what he really wanted from santa was an EVE robot from the WallE movie. Unfortunately Santa couldn't find her anywhere. But come on, like a robot arm isn't cooler?

We had a great morning, taking a break from the gift giving fun for some german pancakes. Mmmmm.

This picture sure does make them look delectable. And they are, by the way.

Max helped Kris wrap the presents that were for me--and he labeled them all. They turned out very very cute, naturally, and he only ruined one shirt in the process (as a result of using a permanent marker). I had to take a picture of all of them of course. But I won't post them all here.

I think this held my favorite present from him.
Sock monkey slippers. I love them.

Cute AND warm. And so Max.


We got to have several video chats with both of our families which was definitely fun. It's hard to feel too far away when you can see everybody's faces and talk to them.
We also got to do a big computer conference call with Murphy on his mission in Argentina. That was really fun, and so amazing that it actually worked. It was really fun to hear his voice. He seems to be doing great and we're so proud of him.


I didn't get pictures of all the presents of course (I missed some of the more big exciting presents), and don't want to make a big list of all of them here, but just want to say thanks to our families for all the love. Here are a few additional fun pictures of the day.














And now we've put away all the christmas stuff for next year. And we look forward to it. Especially Max who's been trying hard to understand how long a year actually is. He was confused enough when he woke up on Dec 26th, came in and asked us permission to go into the living room and see what Santa had brought. Wishful thinking. It would be fun though.

-> The Day itself <-

It's taken me so long to post about Christmas because I have a whole bunch of fun pictures of Christmas morning, and I was trying to figure out a way I could share a lot of them with you without the post ending up about 12 feet long. I think I've got it figured out, you'll have to tell me what you think once you get to them.
Now to the story:
We expected that Max would wake up pretty early Christmas morning, as he usually does every single other morning. However he slept in. At least an hour past when he usually gets up. It was really nice. But then we couldn't get him out of bed. He's funny because a lot of the time he calls to us to ask permission to get out of bed. He didn't used to do that, but now he does. It's funny. So anyway, he called out and said "Is it sunny?" Which is Max-speak for is it time to get up. We said yes and he should get out of bed and see if Santa came. He didn't get out of bed. Kris went into his room and said "Do you think that Santa came?" Max said no. He didn't think so. We were both like, "huh?" So weird. So anyway, once we finally got him out of bed and into the living room he was excited to see that Santa had eaten all his cookies and left him a note. He enjoyed his stocking too. Among other things he got a ball that's supposed to be easy to catch, and an orange. They both turned into Katamari balls almost immediately. Good job Santa!

Then we moved into the kitchen to eat what I'm told is the traditional Hendricks family Christmas breakfast. Captain Crunch with crunchberries. Or "Christmas cereal" as Max likes to call it.



Then, energized by all the vitamins and minerals in our breakfast we went back to tackle the presents.
I'm going to do my best to keep this post from turning into a list of the fabulous presents we received. Suffice it to say, our dear far away families took very good care of us, and we felt very well loved.
One of the things I really love about gift giving on Christmas is the opportunity to really think about the people we buy gifts for, and an excuse to spend money on them. It's usually really fun for me. I had a good time finding gifts for everybody this year, and it was obvious that others had done a lot of thinking about us. So fun!
So we went ahead and opened many fun presents, while taking numerous breaks for Max to play with his cool new toys.
Click on the pictures below to see them bigger if you want to.
Kelly and Lechelle came by right after lunch and we got to hang out for a while and swap gifts. It's fun to have them close, we always enjoy getting to be with them on special occasions. They gave Max a harmonica. It's almost driven me insane already, but not quite. He loves it and calls it a "furmonica."

After they left we turned on the video chat and got to watch everybody in my family open up the gifts we had gotten for them. It was fun to get to see that, it made us feel lots closer than we actually are, that's for sure.


After the chat we finished up our gifts so that we could get ready to go to our friends' house to have dinner. It was really really hard to tear Max away from his new loves.
My favorite thing that I got from Kris was an awesome ring that he made for me himself. It is so cool! I can't believe I get to wear something that 's so pretty that he made himself. I'm trying to encourage him to put up a post about how he made it sometime soon. We'll see.
It turns out this was a good Christmas for me as far as jewelry was concerned, check it out. The ring is in the lower left corner:

Between Kris my mom and Char I want for nothing!

We had a great time at dinner with our friends, and then headed home to go to bed. We were all pretty exhausted.
Thanks to all our family for all the hard work they did making us feel special and cared for. We really felt it. We missed all of you but we knew you were thinking of us!
I'll leave you with my favorite shot of the day. It's Max reading the directions to his new marble set very carefully and seriously. He "read" them like that for probably about ten minutes.

And to all a good night!