Slacker parents...

... didn't get too many shots from Christmas this year. Not because we don't place recording memories for our children high on our priority list. We do. But don't check my baby books for evidence of that just quite yet.

There are hardly any pictures because we most likely had a child in our lap, or a gift in our lap, or a child opening a gift in our lap.

Or maybe we were chasing after small children, making sure they weren't in harm's way. You know, in direct shot of the 50 brand new Nerf bullets simultaneously flying across the room from all directions.

We might have been scurrying to pick up chocolate candies spilled out of stockings, before a certain one-year-old had them all crammed in her mouth, with chocolate dripping down onto her shirt. And probably somewhere else that I haven't found. Yet.

Not that that happened or anything.

(Check out my two cute sisters in the background... aren't they adorable?!)

There's a good chance we were fetching batteries. Or explaining why we didn't have the right size batteries. Or untwisting thousands of silver twisties from the backs of toy packages.

Ok, not thousands. But it had to be darn near close to that, didn't it? It could have been that we were looking for small parts to toys that were opened just 2 minutes prior. It's a tricky thing keeping track of miniature action figure guns, tiny Lego pieces, and baby doll pacifiers in the never ending sea of wrapping paper.

Anybody knows that. (Tip: check first in the one-year-old's mouth.)

There's the gift admiring to do. And that takes time. And attention. And conversation.

Times four.

But most of all, there are hugs to be given, excitement to be shared.

Smiles and eye contact and interest poured out to every one of our four precious gifts.

Sometimes, you have to put the camera away, and just take it all in...