christmas at mom's

last night we did Christmas at Mom and Stepdad's house. they'd just gone through an 11-day stretch with no power (lovely midwest ice storms), so dinner was scaled back to hors d'oevures and we all pitched in. their refrigerator had gone out, too, so they are now the proud new owners of this awesome and totally enviable side-by-side refrigerator with the freezer on the bottom as a pull-out drawer. drool.

you know you're a grown-up when you start coveting other people's kitchen appliances.

Princess got tons of stuff and we did the requisite stockings and dirty santa exchange, from which we emerged with an XXL OU t-shirt and a tabletop fire pit and duraflame starter logs (presumably to torch the OU shirt with - my sister and her husband and I are the ONLY OU fans in the house), a really really obnoxious singing Santa/MP3 player that we conveniently forgot at Mom and Stepdad's, and a Cooties game and a Barrel of Monkeys that J gave to my stepsister for my niece. and that was just the Dirty Santa exchange.

Stepdad brought back pearls and pashminas from Milan for all the girls, and Princess made out like a bandit with lots of great books and toys from Mom and Stepdad, including a baby doll that she has not put down all weekend. she's named it "Michelle" and it goes everywhere with her.

Mom and Stepdad had a photographer come out and take a family picture of all of us. I'll post it when the photographer puts it up on her site. for now, here is a picture taken by my sister, who could not figure out that you have to actually put your face up to my SLR and look through it the old-fashioned way, instead of viewing the image on an LCD.

my stylist went overboard with the layers and I have a semi-mullet right now, so forgive the frizz. I'm working on it.