The Hough's 700th Episode: A Super-Busy Holiday Sunday

Good evening, readers.

I could write a frickin' book about this shit.  Seriously.

Today was absolutely insane.  Not a huge fan of days where from sun-up to sun-down there's a ridiculous amount of crap to do, but I suppose the closer we draw to the Holidays the more and more we're liable to see this play out on a daily basis. 

This morning, bright and early, Kris had to get Alayna and Abby around for church, and she had to go to the early service because the girls had to rehearse for their Christmas Program in the evening (I'll come back to that in a bit.)  Yours Truly stayed back to work on schoolwork and lesson planning, as the handful of hours in the morning was literally all I had before the beginning of the work week.  By the time Kris and the girls got back home from church, it was around 11am, and we loaded everybody up and headed out to the mall for some odds and ends Christmas shopping (for teachers, for Secret Santas, etc.)

Cousin hangout time. . .

Around 1pm, we headed over to my brother Chris' house.  My step-brother Bryan was in town for the Holidays from Vegas, and we were all convening over at Chris' to celebrate our Dad's birthday.  Folks were showing up around 2pm, but we went over a little early to visit with the twins and otherwise shoot the shit with Chris and Nicole before the house filled up with screaming kids.

Here's how that looked. . .

Cindy and Bryan - who brought along Buccilli's (more commonly known as The Greatest Pizza on Earth) showed up around the time Jeff and his family did.  They also brought up a cake for Dad's 65th birthday (his flight in would end up being delayed about an hour, so we had about an extra hour of hang-out-and-drink-beer time before we got to the cake.)

Kris scoops up a twin.

This 'push the chair around the kitchen island' thing was a huge kid with the youngest cousins (the twins and Jeff's youngest, Levi.)

Nana, Scarlett, and - briefly - Tucker.

There was a Lions game on in the background to boot, which was cool. . . at first.  Alas, being the Lions and everything, they blew it at the end and lost to the frickin' Buffalo Bills by a single, Goddamn point.

Dad finally arrives, and it's time for cake. (No idea why Kris is making that face in the background.)

Throwing around snowballs in the living room (check out Chris' Thunderdome he setup to cage his kids.)

Dad and Louis.

Abby attempted to read the boys a story.  It didn't go as planned.

Dad and Samwise.

We ended up leaving Chris and Nicole's around 5pm, because we had some additional Christmas shopping to do before we had to be back at the church at 6pm.  We headed into Target, shopped around for a bit, then cut across town just in time to send our kids off to assemble for the Christmas Program.  The girls had to dress up in pajamas for this (I forget why.)

(I apologize for the quality of this video - I had to drop it down to 480p so it would upload to this site.  Stupid Blogger needs to seriously up its 100mb video limit.)

I tried to figure out how the bell cues were working, but I never did.  Oh well.

So, after they performed this song, there was a brief service and a few more carols to sing, then we came home.  By that point, it was around 7pm, and we had to start the wind-down-for-bed, shower/teeth, reading routine.  You can probably imagine how awesome tonight's cocktail-and-Netflix session was.

- Brian