Christmas Morning!!!

We always travel for Christmas and this year was no exception! However, we were home for Christmas Eve and Christmas morning and it was great! I would be lying if I said that I didn't want to be home every year for Christmas but it's also great to be with our extended families so I guess we will just roll with the punches every year trying to hold fast to our family traditions no matter where we are! We have a few traditions that we should be able to stick to. The first one is that the night we put our tree up, we eat pizza! Another one is that we read the Night Before Christmas on Christmas Eve AND we make cookies for Santa. Another thing is that we always have to watch Elf in the month of December (Jack isn't a part of this one yet). So, nothing too dependent on being at our house. But, it sure was fun to be at our house this year!

Wednesday I worked in the morning. Then, that night we didn't really feel like cooking so we gave ourselves a break and went out for a very traditional holiday meal, Mexican food! Ha! Then, we came home and baked cookies for Santa and put the little one to bed after reading our Christmas books and eating a few of "Santa's cookies." Believe it or not, Jack really did get a kick out of Santa's plate being empty on Thursday morning with lots of crumbs.

After Jack went to bed we had lots of fun putting together his Santa gift!
Thursday morning when Jack woke up, we went straight into the kitchen to eat breakfast (yummy strawberry muffins) before he could see his gift because we knew that once he saw his train table and trains.....it would be all over for the rest of the morning! And, we were right.

When Jack walked into the living room, he went straight to work playing with the trains. He was so intense that it was very funny to us.We somehow managed to get him to look at a few things in his stocking.He was especially glad that he looked in his stocking some since that is where the lights and sound Percy was hiding.After about an hour of playing with the table, he finally agreed to open up his other gifts from us. The train table was a pretty good babysitter while Chris and I got everything packed and loaded into the car to leave for our trip. Jack wouldn't even leave the table to go upstairs to get dressed. So, I had to bring his clothes down to him. Here is the happiest little boy in the world!He was pretty crushed when he found out he was going to have to leave his new train table but elected to take some of his friends with him. Here is Jack's cheesy grin as he shows off his hand-painted shirt that Aunt Kymmie made him, 1 train in each hand!We got in the car to leave about 10:00 and Jack immediately said, "Go home, play train table!" I think he liked his gift!

More about our trip to come!