December 24, 2018: A Nancy Drew Christmas Eve

Today is a Monday and some of our customers are open for a half day today, which makes absolutely no sense to me. Why make people come into work for a few hours on a Monday morning after everyone left early on Friday, took the weekend, and is definitely off tomorrow and nearly everyone is off for the entire week? Crazy. NTG let all of the staff go today and I am manning the shop alone knowing that it will almost certainly be incredibly slow.

The middle of the day, the middles and I all played Nancy Drew: Ghost of Thornton Hall. The game ended up taking a total of thirteen hours to complete with about half of that time being played yesterday and half of it today. By the end, everyone was really happy with it and learned a lot of stuff and are super excited to be going on to the next one. This was a major hit and the key theme of this Christmas holiday. What a great find. I would never have guessed how much everyone would love doing Nancy Drew games all together. Liesl and Luciana have played them in the past and love them, but had gone a bit cold on them as they didn’t like the last one that we had played all that much. Hopefully this will reinvigorate them. Clara doesn’t seem nearly as into it as the other three, but still seems to like it.

We completed the mystery just in time for everyone to get ready for dinner. Dinner was the traditional Christmas spread with perogi casserole this time (so good, Francesca sauteed veggie sausage in onions to go in it and it is one of my favourite foods now), BBQ tofu, fried fish from Papas, calamari, etc. Very delicious meal and I ate way too much.

Right after dinner it was time for the pajama elf to deliver the Christmas Eve pajamas. Paul got to be the pajama elf’s helper this year playing ding dong ditch at the front door. Clara did the reading of the pajama elf book. And the kids all got dressed up in their pajamas and ready for bed and their cousins picture.

Cousins Christmas Pajamas

Luciana got a pair of sheep pajamas (lambie pajamies?) She was super excited and loved them (but was unhappy for some unrelated reason by the time that the group picture was taken). She kept talking about how she was now a member of her “lamb fam”, which is what she calls her collection of sheep stuffed animals and has for years. Lambie has always been her main stuffed animal to sleep with since she was a baby. And the family of stuffed sheep has just grown over the years and she talks about them constantly and makes me do things like sleep with them in my bed to keep them company when she is away.

Liesl got a giant cat face pair of pajamas, which she also liked. Because she loves to be a cat.

After dinner, pajamas, and after everyone went home, when it was time for the kids to start being quiet so that the adults could begin to get everything ready for tomorrow, I took the middles upstairs and set up Nancy Drew: Alibi in Ashes and we started playing that for a while. This one is not scary and didn’t go over nearly as well as the last one, and the controls proved to be a little more complicated making everyone unsure what to do in part of the game. I think that it would have improved a lot had we had more time in which to play it. But we only got about an hour before Madeline and Emily took all of the kids off to bed.

We had a work emergency tonight that I had to deal with for an hour or so. Just what we needed on Christmas Eve. Argh.

After the kids went to bed, Paul really got a chance to see the insanity of the Christmas traditions. He had some insight from the whole evening, but as we were all up until one in the morning he really got a feel from just how over the top it all is.