Dear Santa,

Have you ever wished that for ONE more day you could go back to when YOU were the kid again? No worries. No Responsibilities. You could enjoy a TRUE surprise and the feeling of excitement for Christmas day. The magical experience when Santa sneaks around your house leaving gifts JUST FOR YOU, without a trace.

It has happened for the Cranneys.

Last night we spur-of-the-moment got together with the Birds and Halls for a fun night of games. We put our kiddies to sleep and transported them to the Birds and we partied like we were single again. ("single" is the new lingo meaning "without children".) We enjoyed free Papa John's, courtesy of Mike Cranney's place of employment, we played games and then Rock Band. Which was so much fun. We chit chatted and laughed and were silly until 2 o'clock in the morning!!! It was so nice not to have to be like "kids, why are you fighting?" "who hit who?" "stop crying!" But, like all great things, the party has to end sometime, so, Mike and I head home, get back into parent mode "you get Porter, I'll get Andrew" we walk into the living room, turn around, do a triple take at our tree......"uh. what?!" it was a pretty jaw dropping moment. "PRESENTS?!?!" "What?!"

There was a card in the tree "please open now" it says.

"UHHH...YEAH!"

"Cranney Family-

Santa decided to bring your gifts early this year with a little extra cash to help buy the rest of your Christmas..(instructions)...love-Santa"

Jen-"How the heck"

Mike-"Call Heidi"

The gifts are gifts that only Heidi and Chalyse know about. I haven't talked to anyone else about what we're doing for Christmas, and those two are also the only ones that knew we were gone for the evening, except for Liz. So...we call Heidi

Jen-"how'd you do that?"

Heidi-"how'd I do what?"

Anyway, this convo went on for about half an hour, "santa's magical" I think is how Chalyse explained it. Either way, however this went down, WHOEVER DID IT, however they did it, we can't say enough how big of a help and weight off our shoulders this is. This was well planned out. Obviously time, money, thought and love was put into our family and I can't believe that we are the lucky recipients! Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

I have to add that it's a little creepy that folks were walking around our house while we were gone, but at least the living room was clean and all of our millions of dollars of electronics and other fancy things are still here, and then some :).

I was on such a high from this whole thing that I asked if Heidi and Chalyse wanted to go to Walmart with me to get the LAST spiderman transformer that they had. "hey, when will we get to do that again?" So...off we went. Did some Christmas shopping at 3am. Got home and crawled into bed at 4am and up at 9am. I didn't care. I am footloose and fancy free today.

Porter woke up and started organizing and counting the presents for each of us. (he's an organizin' foo, just like his mom) We all can't wait to open our presents and it really is being like a little kid again. We have to wait 33 more days to find out what Santa brought. How frustrating to be a kid! :) I love it, I won't EVER forget this feeling and can't wait until I get to play Mrs. Clause myself someday! Thanks for the great ideas!

Love,

The Cranneys