I like YOUR present!

Our Christmas morning started long before the kids woke up, as our heater decided not to work. Haven’t been in this brand new house more than 2 years and the heat breaks down! Luckily, we had lots of blankets, a fireplace to turn on, and someone who was actually willing to come out Christmas morning to fix it.

Cameron tried to wake up at 5:30 AM, but we promptly put him in our bed and told him to go back to sleep. He would lie there for a few minutes and then ask, “Can I open presents now?” To which we’d mumble “No.” Then a few minutes later he’d say, “This is taking too long. Can I open them now?” Same response from us. A few minutes later he decided to try a different strategy. “Well, can you open your presents now?” Except for a few chuckles, our response didn’t change. Eventually he went back to sleep.

Once everyone did get up, the present opening began. Cameron jumped right in and wanted to play with everything as soon as he opened it. It was fun to see him jump up and down and proclaim, “I’ve ALWAYS wanted this!” with several of his gifts.

At first, Max had very little interest in opening his own gifts. He liked giving Ella hers, mainly because he wanted to play with all the food and kitchen utensils. And Ella was actually more interested in Max’s Dora and Diego toys than her own. At one point, they were actually fighting over the small basket of food I got from the dollar section of Target! I knew when purchasing their gifts that they would be “shared.”….now if only they actually understood this concept.
The rest of the day I cooked while Melvin did a lot of sleeping. He was up almost all night creating my gift and dealing with the non-heat issue. It was a low key day in that we didn’t have any visitors, and we all spent the entire day and evening in our PJs. Sometimes the kids played beautifully. And other times…many other times…it seemed like there really was a war occurring in our house.

Melvin and I went the sentimental route this year with gifts. I bought him an iPod that he had expressed an interest in several months ago. Then I programmed it with songs we listened to back when we met as camp counselors in 1993 and then several other songs that had some sort of meaning to us throughout the year. He said it was the best Christmas gift I had ever given him.

And what was he doing all night for my gift? I opened the box to find two albums filled with all of my blog entries. He purchased a color printer and spent the entire night printing out a year and half of my posts and placed them in plastic covers. It was so sweet, and I had a lot of fun looking through all of the different entries and pictures (but cringing at all of my mistakes!).

It was a nice Christmas, but now I must go figure out where I’m going to put all of these toys!!!