Merry Pope-mas

Andrew works at a restaurant that is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

People need their waffles at 3 am and, by golly, he's going to make sure they get them.

We don't mind the odd hours.  The late night calls are hugely entertaining and inventive sick calls are actually pretty impressive at times.  When we didn't have TV at the house, those calls were just as good as any sitcom out there.  Andrew loves having a billion things going at one time, so the job suits him well.

The only bummer about his job is that he works every holiday.

The first few years he was at Waffle House, I worked with him.  It was fun.  But then we had Josie and added in Gabe and I gave up my greeter job in exchange for being home with my kids.

So we celebrate Christmas on Andrew's last day off before Christmas.

We call it Pope-mas and we love it.

Last year was the first year we did the whole putting presents out late at night and doing Christmas in the morning.  The years before we had an After Nap Christmas.  Doing it the normal, well kinda normal, way was so much fun we decided to give it a go again this year.

This year we added another surprise.  We didn't tell the kids what day would be Christmas Day so they were totally shocked when they woke up.

Christmas is hard for me and this one brought with it buckets of rain and other not so Christmassy stuff.

I fought feelings of homesickness and a mood that matched the weather all morning.  Lucky for me, the perfect medicine for a heavy heart is curly headed children shrieking over finally getting a La-La Loopsy doll (or a Spiderman toothbrush in Gabe's case).  Josie thanked us at least 50 billion times and by 10 am her gratefulness rubbed off on me and I started feeling my own heart singing songs of thanks.

Life isn't always smooth, but it is always good.

Always.

*Christmas picture overload as required in the Blogger Handbook

Merry Pope-mas to you and yours.