On the first day of vacation

So, I'm going to ATTEMPT to blog a little every day of the kids vacation so that the grandparents can read along and maybe miss the kids a little less this Christmas.

We've established a Christmas routine where we visit Michigan every other year to spend the holidays with our midwest families. This is the year we stay home. This is also our first Christmas in the house. We've been looking forward to this year since we bought the house. We had grand plans to light up the outside but didn't really get around to it. We did enjoy decorating our first fireplace mantle though:
This morning I woke up at 10:00 when Hazel came into our room to ask if she could watch some TV. These last few weeks have been a challenge in the mornings. Both kids need more sleep than they have been getting. August goes to bed a 9 and reads for a half hour and Hazel goes to bed a 8 and looks at books for a half hour. When I go in to wake them up at 8 the next morning it's like pulling teeth. I try to come up with every trick I can think of to get them out of bed and excited for the day. With Hazel this usually means I tell her that she can pick out her own clothes. August is a bit tricky. He could care less about clothes. I think if I let him he'd wear the same clothes everyday, and I'm not talking about wearing the same Kind of clothes like Dave Bazan does...no...August would simply take his clothes off, put them on the floor, wake up the next day and put them on again...all week. The crusty bits and toothpaste spots wouldn't bother him at all. With August- the only thing that works is counting down the days till the weekend...when he can FINALLY play his video games.
And now he's faced with 2 WHOLE WEEKS of vacation. You will find my boy slumped on the couch playing his DS or jumping around in front of the TV playing tennis on the Wii system.
Ahhh, vacation.