We're not in Michigan anymore!: Merry Christmas!

We were actually on vacation to Tasmania the week before Christmas and arrived home early evening on Christmas day. We had quite an eventful Christmas day. Our flight was delayed by 45 min. Partly due to maintenance issues and also because someone just decided they didn’t want to fly after all and the crew had to find this person’s luggage in the belly of the plane. Once we arrived back in Sydney, it was raining…and did I mention that we don’t travel lightly? We had quite a bit to haul in the rain and definitely put our girls to work! Once we made it to our car, Brian informed me that the battery was dead…I seriously thought he had the wrong holiday and this must be an April Fool’s joke! Nope, not the case. Thankfully the place that we parked had a battery available to jump our car. Brian got the car started, but the alarm started going off. This is still a pretty new car for us as well as being foreign and we had no idea how to turn it off! We tried finding a password for the navigation system in the paperwork but that didn’t help, so we turned the car off to try again. Battery died again. Jumped it again and alarm continued to go off. Did I mention that we were pretty tired and just wanted to get home and have a nice Christmas dinner and start our Christmas celebration?? FINALLY, I found in the manual that we needed to use the ignition key in the driver’s side door. So we turned the car off to do this and thankfully it worked AND the car started back up for us without the battery. So, by the time we got home it was quite a bit later than we had anticipated.

Here’s the tree before!

The girls’ gifts from Santa (Alaina commented on his sloppy handwriting-I said he was probably in a rush!)

The girls seeing the gifts for the first time

Seeing that Santa ate his cookies, the reindeer ate their carrots and the milk was all gone (Alaina was concerned that the milk would go bad while we were on vacation, so we left Santa a note to let him know that it was in the refrigerator. Thanks Alaina!

The girls opened their stockings and 1 present in between us prepping Christmas dinner

The super cool Australian chairs (from Grandma)

Koala, Platypus & Kangaroo-they love them!

At this point, we stopped to eat dinner and then went back to unwrapping. Hallie was so much more into it this year!

The girls love their cameras!

After a bit, Hallie was just way too tired, so she went to bed and got to finish unwrapping her things the next morning (Boxing Day). She found a nice little window seat and was so cute sitting their with her gifts!