With Charlie emerging from the haze of the newborn to the wide-eyed curiousity of a new world, Katie and Maddy have found the fun in playing with their baby brother.

The only thing better than visitting family for Christmas (Denise's parents, brother's family, sister's family, and Mark's parents) is surviving the journey to get there.  With three kids now, it could have been a lot worse had missed flights or weather delays common to the holidays had been added to the everyone getting sick and the week to recover from jetlag, but luckily we only had the strep throats and sleeplessness to contend with.

While I'm sure the world would be fascinated by our insistent holiday sales shopping (Denise is now a Belk's addict), but we did actually get quite a few other things done like - gingerbread house construction with Uncle John, getting serenaded on a 200 year old cello by cousin Kyle (well done), toured the Heifer Foundation's training farm with various animals and how impoverished people in different regions live (think Latin American, African, Asian, and urban hut/shacks that school kids sometimes overnight in), went to Hot Springs National Park ... had lunch and ... left, finished the Christmas letter just in time, found out Denise did pretty good at work this year, let the kids do some improvised sledding on icy streets, got Charlie baptized, ravaged Sandra's beading stores (okay, that was Denise), gotten beaten by Sam in a boardgame (that would be Mark), fell in love with Wii bowling (Katie), and generally had a good time.

But I will let the photos do the talking which I put into an online album, because there were just too many to put in an article.  Here in the Chai-Mulkerin's Christmas 2008 in Little Rock photo album.