christmas morning

On Christmas Eve we went to a delicious dinner with James' family and exchanged presents with his mom. Jillian got a ukelele, which she keeps calling a "biolin" (violin). hah! We came home and she wrote her letter drew a picture for Santa. I realized we didn't have any cookies to leave for Santa, so we used a graham cracker instead. Almost the same, right? Jillian wanted to leave them in the tree for Santa. It was adorable. We may have just started a new tradition.

 

I'm not gonna lie, I'm kind of excited to get to the point where my kids wake ME up on Christmas because they just can't contain their excitement. 

We're not there yet. 

Jillian slept in until 9:30 and we almost had to wake HER up. I woke up and put her stocking in her crib. I didn't even know she woke up because when I peeked in around 9:30 she was quietly playing with the things she found in her stocking, like it was totally normal for a bag of toys to show up in her bed in the morning. Silly girl. 

She also isn't really a morning person (she gets this from both James and I), so it took her several minutes to get excited about opening presents. When she'd open one she'd just want to play with that one and not open another! I assume that will change with time also. 

 The rest of the day was filled with a yummy brunch, my brother Ryan and his family coming over as well as James' Dad for more present exchanges, and of course playing with all our new goodies and just hanging out. Jillian went from playing with new toy to new toy all day long. And because I was too caught up in everything going on, I took NO pictures on Christmas of ANYTHING! How LAME IS THAT?! Total mother fail. I did snap a couple over the next day or two of her playing with some of her new loot though:

One thing we got her was a little tin tea set. She LOVES it. I have no idea where she got this, but whenever we have a tea party she starts calling me "ma'am"- "Can I have some more tea ma'am?" "Oh, thank you ma'am." It's the cutest.

My favorite part of the whole day was talking to my sister who is on a mission for our church in Peru! She looks and sounds like she is doing so great there- she really loves it! She and James carried on in Spanish for a few  minutes and he said her pronunciation is great (somewhat of a surprise to us all). But I do miss her like crazy and will be ridiculously excited when she comes back in the fall. 

(My mom made us take this picture). 

One of my favorite gifts was from my parents. They took ALL of their VHS tapes of home videos of us over the years and put them on DVDs for us. There are 25 DVDs total! Dance recitals, plays and skits, movies we made up, church camps, dumb stunts, random bored moments and awkward conversations caught on tape- pure gold. Though, it's one thing to tell your husband about your childhood, it's another thing to have him actually WATCH it. There's a reason we didn't meet until college, ya know? ;-)

And now the hustle and bustle of it all is done. I hate this part of Christmas the most because all of the fun is over and it's still cold for like 4 more months. Blegh. 

Hope your Christmas was very merry!