Christmas Day

Santa came to our house!

 We got the traditional picture on the stairs.

 We tried to start a kids only picture tradition on stairs, but this is how it turned out.

 Brother was not interested in another picture!

 Santa brought Adalyn a new doll and new fairy wings. He brought Cayden a fishing game and a remote control car.

 Their big gift from Santa was a table and chairs. They were both excited about it!Cayden thinks he's big stuff sitting at the table.

 Sweet boy!

We opened stockings next. (Of course even though Cayden and Adalyn got almost the same items in their stockings, he still wanted hers! Santa knew that we're at the stage that we have to have two of everything the same.) After stockings we took a break for some homemade sticky buns. After breakfast we opened presents. I didn't get my camera out because we video taped the whole thing and I just wanted to be present and enjoy and not worry about messing with my camera. We took our time opening gifts and each person took a turn and we actually opened things so kids could play before moving on to the next present. It was so nice and relaxing and felt non-commercialized. We didn't do lots of presents but it took us a good 3 hours to open presents just because we were so slow! Kids don't know that other kids tear through presents like tornadoes so we feel like we can set a different precedence in our house so that our kids can appreciate each item and not be all "gimme gimme". That's just not what Christmas is all about.

After we finished opening presents Adalyn asked if it was time to go to Nana's and Papa's house. We were planning on heading there the next day and told her we would go after bedtime. But she begged that she would take her nap in the car and really wanted to go to their house. So since we had absolutely nothing else planned for the day other than playing with toys, we obliged her. You would have thought she won the lottery she was so excited. I think she might have been more excited than opening her presents. We packed all up and the kids napped in the car and watched their new Monsters University and Despicable Me 2 movies and about an hour away we called and surprised my parents and told them we were headed their way. They didn't have any kids/grandkids in town on Christmas so they were excited that we were surprising them! We got there close to bedtime so the kids went down to bed soon after we got there but we were able to all wake up the next morning and have another Christmas morning with Nana and Papa.