Merry Christmas!

Charlie, Katie & Kelly's wishes all came true for Christmas, however the Grinch is still controlling our internet connection, so we didn't call anyone yesterday because our internet phone doesn't work...we wish we could have called to find out how your day was and let the kids tell you about their visit from Santa.

Luckily our neighbors let us borrow their signal, which at least allows me to write this post!

We were very busy the days before practicing for the Nativity play at church, another American family recently had their third baby and they were gracious enough to let her be baby Jesus.  Kelly was the Angel Gabriel and was thrilled to have a big speaking part.  Katie played Mary and got to hold the baby (and get bossed around by the Angel Gabriel, just like in everyday life), and Charlie was a very sweet baby star.

When Katie sat down with the real baby, their was an audible gasp from the congregation, everyone was surprised she wasn't a doll!

The baby star in the middle is Charlie...If you want to get Kelly & Katie fired up, ask them about the lady who directed the play, she was very into costumes, acting, and putting on a quality production.  She was a former dance teacher so in her mind we had to go for the gold medal, rather than act out the gospel for the Children's Mass.  (which was how it was done at our old church in Massachusetts).  The only other thing was it was BLAZING HOT in church, no AC here or heat in church, even at 6 pm in the evening it was still roasting in there.  Greg especially enjoyed all of the singing, there had to be at least 20 songs...

As he predicted, Charlie has been very busy playing with all of his new toys from Santa, he got a ton of Ninja Turtles toys, his favorite is the van that they drive around in and also a cool toy that sticks to the wall and lets them zipline around.

The girls were happy with an ice cream maker and a "soda stream" both cool things for South Africa as the ice cream here is pretty awful (all has vegetable oil in it no Richardson's here).  They also don't really sell flavored seltzer (like Polar) here, anything with bubbles also has the sugar in it.  So we are looking forward to a lots of good ice cream and beverages that the girls whip up.

We spent our morning yesterday playing with everything and in the afternoon we were busy party hopping to two different Christmas open houses.  The nice thing about embassy life is everyone is far from home, so they are happy to get together on holidays.

We hope all of you had a very nice Christmas, and are getting some down time to relax and play with all of your new toys!