Merry Little Christmas 2011

Daddy and I strongly considered just getting away for the holidays. We have so much family that we'd love to spend time with that it seemed like it would be impossible to have our own "little Christmas" with just the girls. However, we never actually made any plans.

And it was perfect.

Though we did exchange presents with some family last week, and again on Christmas Eve, we had Christmas day all to ourselves. It was exactly what I wanted to do for Christmas.

We had told Ellie that even though it was Christmas, she still needed to wait until 7:00 to wake up. So at exactly 7:00, we heard her door quietly open. She went into Addie's room and we heard her whisper loudly "At-a-line, do you want to get up? It's Christmas! Let's wake Mommy and Daddy!" Then we heard pitter-pattering feet scurry into our rooms.

Ellie was literally jumping with excitement. "It's Christmas! It's Christmas!" It looked like she was going to explode with excitement. Addie just smiled, but she knew something was special about today and she looked excited to find out what. Ellie didn't want to wait for us to wake up. Instead, she pulled Daddy's hand until he fell out of bed.

In all honesty, that's probably the best part of the day and certainly the thing that lends itself most to a blog post. We went downstairs and started first with the stockings that Daddy stuffed. We learned that Mommy needs to be in charge of Daddy's stocking, which was not something she was told this year. Whoops.

I loved that Daddy put so much thought into the stocking gifts. It showed me that this is a tradition I'm sure to enjoy every year. There were subtle, yet really thoughtful gifts like the "How to Train Your Dragon" movie because Addie is our little dragon (she always insists on putting her coat on her head instead of wearing it "I be a dragon!").

What I loved about that moment, though, was that as excited that Ellie was about Christmas, she didn't seem to act as though it was all about the presents, and certainly not all about Santa's presents. In fact, Santa's gold presents sat there patiently until we were done with the stockings and it was MOMMY who reminded Ellie that there were presents to open.

She got exactly what she wanted... a super soft stuffed unicorn. The rest is just a blur.

We spent the morning making a mess in our house, which has yet to be cleaned even 2 days later. Just sitting around and BEING was such a blessing. I simply could not get enough of my daughters. For those of you who have younger kids, I officially declare 4.5 years as the PERFECT age for Christmas.

In the afternoon, we decided to take advantage of the cheap movie tickets and we watched the Muppet Show with Aunt Erin, Adam and Uncle Jacob. It was nice, though, to not have to hurry and worry about the hustle and bustle of hosting an official dinner. We just "were."

The girls were so much fun. Ellie loves her unicorn as "unicorn" is her pretend animal of choice. Addie loved seeing the dragon movie as "dragon" is one of her pretend animals of choice (along with a cat). She also got a penguin stuffed animal which is perfect as she is always saying "I got happy feet like pen-gins!" whenever she's happy. She must have said that 20 times today, and quite honestly I couldn't agree more.

I have happy feet too.