christmas mid-day

the beauty of living so close to both of our families is we get to see both on holidays!  sometimes it's not easy, but we always try and work it out.  so after enjoying the morning with the bakers, we headed off to the porter/orlando home.  here grandma enjoys her brighton gift...

...mike starts it out being very festive.

after all the gift opening, ian crashed...

...derek dove right into his deep-space doctrine.

unlike most years in the past, we did not venture out to benihana on christmas day, as we wanted to make sure and have owie and kim with us.  so we went a few days later!  it was crazy busy for a monday night!  here grandma and the girls await their table.

chloe found a new friend in owie's girlfriend, kim.  derek and i intermatched stripes this year.  he and stephen did it a few years ago at our benihana outing, and this year we accidently did it again.  what?  we like stripes!

dad and his cute girlfriend, delores.  aren't they a cute couple?  so glad she got to come!

apparently kim has these super-powers that allow her to break a wine glass in her bare hand without shedding blood.  amazing!  all the guys were marveling over how "bendy" the wine glasses were.  so kim thought she'd check it out, but her brute strength proved too much for the poor glass.  glass flew everywhere, luckily no one was hurt!

here's table number one.  the rest of us (derek, me, stephen, chloe, kim and owie) were at the other table.

our chef did an amazing job with the food.  cooked SO well!  everything tasted perfect!  i wish i could just order that chicken fried rice to be delivered to my house at my convenience.  life would then be perfect...(sigh).

this year sienna also took up using her chopsticks!  they (not sure who "they" are, by the way) rigged her chopsticks with some folded up paper and a rubberband.  genius!  she ate with them the whole night. 

we had a great christmas this year and our love has increased greatly for our families, for who they are and what they do.