Here are a few shots from Christmas morning. Look at the little elf that came to visit us!

Despite the irony of biting into the big guy on Christmas Eve, the kids convinced themselves that eating this guy would not put their late-night present delivery at risk:

These little fun guys were a present from the neighbors, and the kids are loving making them:

The Donnelly Kids put on a nearly-world famous puppet show tonight:

We went to Behringer-Crawford Museum in Devou Park in Covington. I had never heard of it before, but it had some really great displays, include a bunch of fun holiday train displays. And, to our surprise, even the big guy showed up!

We went with Monkey Grandma to the Krohn Conservatory’s holiday display. The kids really enjoyed all the plants and the live manger. We also learned about the tradition of the Christmas pickle, where you hide a pickle ornament deep in the Christmas tree somewhere and whoever gets finds it on Christmas morning gets a special treat.

Christmas is definitely the theme of the week! We drove to Cincinnati today to see family, and had a great time as always. The kids won the 1st Annual Donnelly Family Trivia Contest (beating out the Joe/Mike and Kevin/Aimee/Kelly/Ryan/Alex teams). And, of course, there were more presents…

The kids talked me into letting them open some Christmas presents tonight. It wasn’t too hard to convince me, actually. And, of course, they were dying to give their presents to me, too. We had a good time, but made a mess:

The 5th grade program was a lot of fun to watch. Lauren had a star role as the lead of the “spanish” dancers (though they all wore Mexican attire). She did an awesome job, and the whole night was a success.

Jake and Beth got to sit in the “kids only” section.

Beth had her first ever piano recital tonight. I made a very poor-quality recording of her awesome playing. It’s less than a minute in length. It was really amazing considering she’s been doing this for less than a year, and she was one of the only kids (most of whom had been doing this a lot longer) not to mess up her song. Yeah Beth!! click below to hear her.

Beth Playing

And here are a couple pictures:

Silly Daddy thought that the outlet mall at Opry Mills might actually be open by now. It wasn’t, but we did have a good time wandering around the Opryland Hotel, where we also had a really nice lunch: