Wednesday, January 2, 2008

holiday hubbub

What a holiday. That about sums it up! We had a super busy holiday season. It started with an early Christmas celebration with the Van Dop family on December 16th and ended when we came back from Toronto yesterday. The best part was that Josh spent Christmas with all his cousins - 11 in total.

We celebrated Christmas early with the Van Dop's because me, Brian and Josh were leaving for Toronto the following week. I think it was the most hectic that we've had a Van Dop family Christmas! Granted, the family gets bigger every year too. It was crazy trying to organize opening kid's stocking, kid's gifts, adult stockings and getting in a kid's meal and adult meal as well! On top of that, the kid's are all on schedules and none of the schedules seemed to match up! But in the end, it all got done and it was nice to spend time with the whole Van Dop family. It was especially nice for us to get to see Josh interact with all his Van Dop cousins.

It was tough, but we tried to get a photo of the Van Dop cousins and this is how it turned out:

from left: C, Josh, B, J, L, C

Then, just as we thought a family Christmas couldn't get any more hectic, we went to Toronto to have a Liem family Christmas. My parent's had a full house with 4 out of us 5 siblings staying there with our families. There were 15 people living under one roof for a week. Christmas day was the craziest time - trying to get all 19 of us together in the house and awake long enough to open presents proved to be a challenging feat! I think it was after 4pm when we finally got around to opening presents!

As busy and NOT relaxing as it was, I always enjoy going home and spending time with my family. Since we are scattered around Canada and the US, it is a rare time for all of us to get together and I try to make the most of every minute of it. Here is the product of the Liem cousin's photo (Grammy and Kong made it into the photo too!):
from left: C, N, Little H, Kong, Big H, Grammy, Josh, L, DB

We feel very blessed to have such a lovingly large family. Though the holidays get crazy and stressful, we love nothing more than spending it with family. We hope that all of you had the opportunity to spend the holidays with your family too.

No comments: