Christmas Fun in Plano

Several years ago, we decided on Dave's side of the family that we would stop exchanging gifts at Christmas. It took several years of "kind of" talking about it to finally come to the place where we were all in agreement that we wanted to try something different for our family Christmas time together. It had gotten more and more difficult to really know what would please each other when we were buying gifts. My inlaws have eight grandkids, and the age range is currently from 8-21. We have a lot of fun when we are together but we really don't get to see each other as much as we'd like to. Our true motivation for deciding to no longer exchange gifts was based on the fact that the desires of our hearts are that when we - the grandparents and moms and dads - are gone, we want our kids to know each other, to have great memories that draw them together in order to continue to have a relationship and love each other. So, we decided to be strategic about making memories now that will give them common experiences to draw on to continue their relationships. Dave has two siblings - a sister whose family lives in the same town as his Mom and Dad and a brother whose family is about an hour away from them. Our Christmas tradition has now become to plan a full day together, enjoying each other from start to finish. The favorite part of our day is to go to a local business called Whirlyball. Picture an indoor basketball court with ten bumper cars, five yellow and five red. Every player has a wicket like in lacrosse, and the goal of the game is to pass a ball with the wicket to teammates and trying to score by throwing the ball through a hole in the basketball backboard. Well, it is a BLAST! Here are some pictures of our fun time on Saturday.
This is us pretending to be a well-behaved group! This is the REAL us! :) It's hard to see in the picture, but there are "bunny ears" all around!