Merry Christmas!

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas yesterday. The Olsons did. Long days, but great days. Ethan is at a fun age where he gets super excited about Christmas. He opened gifts with great gusto and promptly tossed them aside to tackle the next gift. He also liked to help others tackle their gifts and spent most of his time running from one person to the next. Pibs was Pibs, didn't really seem too interested in the gifts but the ribbons and bows were fascinating to her. She actually wore a Santa hat most of the morning at Gramps and Gummies house!

The Louwsma side ended up having an impromptu Christmas last night as a preemptive strike in case Jake had to go plow today, which was supposed to be our Christmas Day. Wasn't needed, as you can see by looking outside, but a good idea nonetheless. We went back to the Louwsma's (aka The Black Hole, aka Bravo Hotel) this morning for the rest of the Christmas festivities. It is chaos with these three little kids running around. Only going to get crazier!

We got backed into by a semi today. It was weird. We were waiting to turn left off an exit ramp on 169. The (huge) semi decided it needed to turn right and proceeded to back up--right into us. We were (we thought) a safe distance and watched it all happening. I panicked and threw the car into park instead of reverse. Awesome. He hit us decently hard--it was a semi, after all. The kids started freaking out and I was pretty freaked out too. Thankfully there isn't much damage to the car (the Element is bullet proof, I swear). The trooper showed up to file a report--since it looked like we hit him we wanted to make sure there was proof that we didn't. Jay and I are both feeling pretty sore in our necks but hopefully that will get better tomorrow. When the truck driver got out, he asked us how far back we were. Yeah, that matters why? You don't back up on the road! Especially not in a semi, on an exit ramp where people are coming about 50 mph. It's probably best I didn't try to back up. It could've been much worse. So this is the third car accident Ethan has been involved in. The other two were us getting rear ended. This is a first for both of us. My Element has now been in three accidents, none of which were my fault thankfully. I'm glad it doesn't crumple (it's like a tank) but I think that might actually cause more bodily pain than cars that do crumple.

Anyway, I hope you all had great days. I've got my husband home now for 9 more days and am very much looking forward to hanging out with him, getting things done around the house and doing some fun stuff with the kids. On that subject, anyone have ideas of fun things to do with kids that don't cost too much? Peace out!