The big Christmas Day

We love Christmas at Nana and Papa's house...they go all out and it's fun for everyone. Christmas Eve the kids make cookies for Santa with Nana, watch a Christmas movie and then Papa read them, "The Night Before Christmas." They were so excited to get to sleep that I hardly had to tell them to go to bed and they were up the stairs. After the kids were fast asleep, the work began....We stuffed all the stockings and got all the Santa gifts out and ready for the morning. Then we ate the Santa cookies and drank the milk while we were waiting on Jess and Cliff to drive down from their Christmas with Cliff's family in Kennett, MO. They pulled in around midnight and we helped Jess wrap all of her loot for the kids and just all sat around and played until 2:30...it was great. Oh and we had to hide our newest Christmas tradition, "Elf on a Shelf" because in the story, he flies back to Santa on Christmas Eve!!

The kids got up nice and early (of course) on Christmas morning and all of us adults were still wanting to sleep....at least the kids slept until 9 and that is pretty late for my kids! They ran down and were so excited to see that Santa brought the girls new dolls and Parker a music set with a drum and lots of other loud instruments. Grace had wanted an American Girl Doll
for Christmas but we were not ready to drop over $100 for a doll that she may or may not play with after all of the other gifts have been opened. So, we went shopping at Toys R'us a few weeks before Christmas and she found found this Madame Alexander 18" doll with red hair....and it was on sale for $24.99.....and she fell in love with this new one and totally forgot about the expensive American Girl doll. Not that we wouldn't have bought her the American Girl doll, but you know little kids and if they are like my kids, they really want something and then when they do get it somehow it gets played with for about 2 days and then it gets thrown in the doll ben. Now Grace and Sus have 2 beautiful dolls that they love and they got a few more gifts, too!!

Aunt Jess gets the prize for giving the coolest gifts this year...the kids all got these cool new Crocs and Grace also got some UGG slippers that one of the shoe buyers at work gave to Jess. She also found 2 collie Webkinz for the girls that I have looked everywhere for Christmas gifts and could not find in our part of Texas! So the girls came out like bandits in the webkinz game...I don't know how they came up with names for them all, but they did!

Hope that ya'll had a great Christmas with all of your families. I know that we are having a blast around here playing all of the kids boardgames and of course, Aaron's Christmas gift, Guitar Hero 3!! We are now all rock stars!! I'll post some pictures later, for now, I'm off to play some Operation with my girls and sweet hubby and to enjoy some Barbs's bar-b-que!!!