Some Happy and Excited Grandchildren

Yesterday was our family Christmas celebration.  It was delayed due to some COVID-19 quarantining but we managed to get together yesterday for a nice belated celebration.  Although the kids needed to wait a couple of weeks for their Christmas gifts, we had a house full of laughing, happy and excited grandchildren yesterday.

Sheila went over to her parents' house earlier in the morning to help her mom get ready for the day then Sheila drove her mom to our house to start the day.  Sheila is showing Sue some photos of the grandchildren in this photo...

We have about eight sets of eyeglasses that turn bright Christmas lights into stars, Santas, Christmas trees, snowflakes, etc.  Ellie enjoyed viewing through all of these glasses over and over throughout the day...

The older grandkids are now patiently waiting (mostly) for gift-time...

Liza opened Ace's gifts while he was on her lap and he seemed to like playing with each gift.  He cried whenever the previous gift was taken away so he could open another gift so that seems like a solid sign he liked the gifts...

Lukey was very excited to see a Lionel Polar Express train set when he peeled away the wrapping off this big box...

We presented Kenzie's biggest gift in an unusual way and, honestly, she was not as amused as we were with this idea!  Although it was amusing for the rest of us!  

I wrote a short poem related to her gift.  This poem closed with an encrypted hint which, when decrypted, would hopefully lead her toward where to find the next hint.  Each hint would lead her closer to her gift.  (We play this game occasionally so it was not something completely new to her.)  What was exceptionally frustrating for Kenzie was that these hints were encrypted and it takes a little bit of time to decrypt.  Each hint needed to be decrypted and then the hint needed to be figured out to get her to the next hint or to her gift.  

This next photo was a funny contrast of moods...  Ellie was joyous, bouncing and dancing around while Kenzie was close to pulling her own hair out of her head over trying to figure out the encrypted hints.  She kept looking up with a bit of a disgusted look on her face to ask if this was going to be worth the effort.  For awhile, I think she may have been thinking we were pranking her sending her on a wild goose chase for only a prank gift...

Kenzie is getting closer...  she is decrypting the last hint with the help of Gee...  

Ace with great-grandfather, Pop...

Fortunately for Kenzie, there really were only two hints to figure out and to decrypt in order to get to her big Christmas gift...  

The first encrypted message read "A NEW TEXT" when decrypted...  as she decrypted this short message using our Thomas Jefferson Decoder, a new text message buzzed and popped up on Gee's Galaxy Watch....  

The second hint, when decrypted, read, "JINGLE BELLS HOLD THE KEY".  We have sleigh bells hanging on our back door so Kenzie made her way back to the back door and found a key hanging off the sleigh bells...  there was only one room in the house that was locked and that was the train room (named as such due to all the trains lining all the shelves in the room, a room which also triples as the telescope room and Sheila's office when she is confined to home due to the pandemic)...  Kenzie unlocked the train room door and slowly crept into the room...

Kenzie was definitely happy about this gift...  Papa spent a few weeks designing and building a Bake Shoppe that goes perfectly with her Georgetown townhouse dollhouse.   (See this blog entry about building this bake shoppe and this blog entry about her Georgetown townhouse.)  She was so excited that she went running toward the living room screaming out for her mom to come see...

After we moved the dollhouse and new bake shoppe to the living room so Kenzie could play with her new gift, we set up the train room with Lukey's new Polar Express train set.  As expected, he spent most of the rest of the day in the train room...

While Lukey ran his Polar Express train set in the train room, all the girls congregated around the dollhouses in the living room...

Ace spent a little time watching the Polar Express run around the track...

Lukey and Kenzie wanted to check out the playhouse in the snow and decorated for Christmas (I still really love that homemade skylight in the playhouse)...

All in all, it was a really nice Christmas celebration for Gee and Papa and I believe Nan and Pop, the girls and the grandchildren all enjoyed it just as much!