Twas the night before Christmas...

Well, it's been an exciting couple of days at the Kint household. It all started on Friday when Mommy and Daddy thought it would be a good idea to get formal Christmas pictures taken of the kids. We told them that if they could sit still for the pictures, they could have a special snack (jellybeans). So we got the kids all dressed up in their matching Christmas outfits, got all the pictures we wanted, and then told the kids to get undressed so that they didn't get their snack all over their good clothes. Gavin was struggling to get his sweater off, so mommy reached over and helped him. She heard a scraping noise, which she thought was the tag scraping his neck. Gavin really cried, so she kept looking for the scratch on his neck. That's when she noticed that his shoulder was turning purple and swelling. So we dropped Malin off at Mee-Maw's, and headed to the ER with Gavin. After 4 hours at the hospital (which counted an hour of being investigated by Child & Youth services for child abuse), we headed back home exhausted. Diagnosis: Broken collarbone. Later that night Pappy came over with a Moravian Star that he had gotten for us that he wanted the kids help putting together. Here is a picture of Malin being silly with the star, and Gavin helping out. If you look closely at his left shoulder you should be able to see how swelled it still is.
We have been giving him plenty of Tylenol, and he seems to be doing okay. He won't stay in the "slingshot" (as Gavin calls it) they gave us for it, but they said that strapping him in to a sling and having him trying to get out of it would be worse for it than to just let him do whatever. There are times when we can see he's obviously favoring it, but it hasn't slowed him down at all!
That really threw our schedule off, but we still managed to make it to the Rodes' for a Christmas get-together, and [mostly] finished up our Christmas shopping Saturday. Today we had two church services and as usual, Santa's elves had left packages on the porch for the kids when they got home from the evening service. If anyone remembers last year, there was an issue, but Malin was SO excited to finally get footie jammies from the elves this year. Here she is wearing hers and proudly displaying Gavins.
We did our normal routine of writing a letter to Santa and putting out 'magic' reindeer oats (right)
Here are the letters that they wrote, and a picture of the milk & cookies they left for Santa:
Dear Santa: I hope you are going to have a great time delivering presents. It is very nice of the elves to bring us jammies. Me and Gavin were so happy that we cheered and cheered for our new jammies. We are going to leave you cookies, carrots, and reindeer food for the reindeer. Thank the elves for us for delivering jammies. Make sure you get Gavin a lot of toothbrushes for Christmas. Make sure to bring me Heelies. Me and Gavin have been so good this year. Love, Malin.
	Dear Santa: Enjoy your cookies and milk. Love, Gavin
Well, Mommy and Daddy need to get to bed. Here's wishing everyone out there the happiest of holidays