christmas recap - the 25th

Christmas morning started with gifts from Santa.

We were quite surprised at their reactions. Taylor went straight to the tool bench, and Mason went straight for the princess bike.

But we set them straight and they were excited!

All 5 of us (the dog too) enjoyed all the goodies in our stockings!

The kids really didn't even notice there were lots of other presents to be opened under the tree. So we had a nice enjoyable breakfast with no mention of presents. I'm sure this won't last many more years if any at all! It was so nice having my parents there on Christmas morning with us.

Our breakfast tradition started as an accident. My post from last year explains it well. Long story short - we were all sick before Christmas last year. So nothing got prepared as planned. We wanted to do a birthday party for Jesus each Christmas morning but I had not made the cake or cupcakes I had intended to make. So at the last minute we made pancakes and used a stack of them as a "cake" that we could put a candle in. We had no syrup and no regular candles. But it worked.

And honestly, even though the pancakes were a last minute decision and I didn't really like it at the time, the idea stuck! I decided pancakes stacked up for a cake was such an easy and great way - and made more sense for breakfast. So we had strawberries and whipped cream and this time we had syrup. And toilet paper in the house.

We enjoyed breakfast casserole and pancakes and Dave read the Christmas story while we ate.

Happy Birthday Jesus!

After breakfast we opened presents.

Dave passed them all out just like my grandpa used to do.

Then we opened one at a time.

Mason opened his Cars suticase first and then had a meltdown because he didn't want to open anymore. He just wanted to pull his suitcase around. I would say he definitely got an obsessive amount of Cars/Lightning McQueen things - but it was just so cute to see how much he liked it and hear the number of times he kept saying "CAR!"

Our kids were quite spoiled by their grandparents and aunts and uncles! Thanks to everyone!

This was the best Christmas I've had in a LONG time. We were all healthy, we didn't have to travel (thanks Mom and Dad!), it was a WHITE CHRISTMAS, and we got to spend lots of time with all those we love the most!

2010 - WE'RE READY FOR YOU!!

Happy New Year!