Christmas Day at our house

Ready to go into the living room to see if Santa came!
(in our matching red Christmas pjs! Thanks, Mom!)

Santa came!

He deposited his gifts in (or near!) the red rockers...

He filled the stockings and left them up on the mantle...

He drank his hot chocolate, ate the cookies, and left the mug by the fireplace!

Christian finds his MP3 player...

(How strange that we have a child old enough to want electronics!?! )
Santa had already loaded it with songs... he'd even programmed it to play "Free Fallin" by Tom Petty (Christian's new favorite song) when it was turned on for the first time!

Here's Christian as he turns it on and hears the music - he was thrilled!

Time for Isaac to check out what Santa brought him:

Hmmm... not sure what to think about this...

until he realized that when he bounced, music played!

He quickly decided...

that he LOVES this toy!

We thought we'd let Isaac try to open one of his gifts. (It was his first Christmas, after all!)
But, of course, he thought the paper was for eating...
Here's my gift from Isaac and Christian - huge bags of M&Ms and jelly beans to refill my candy jars in the kitchen!
Christian's school did something neat - they had a "Christmas Store," and everything in the store was $2 or $4. It was set up for two days before the kids got out of school for the holidays, and the students could purchase gifts for the entire family. The gifts were wrapped and tagged at school, so Christian was able to bring home his gifts and put them right under the tree. He got Jacob a screwdriver and a tape measure; he said, "I just went straight to the tools section for Daddy!"



Christian opens his new bible.

Here's my gift from Jacob:

a Beaba Babycook!
Yay!
(I knew about this, but I was still super excited about it!)
Contrary to the name of the appliance, it's not used to cook babies... it cooks baby food!



Isaac gets another chance to open a gift...

this is a special one...

his very own Eiffel Tower for his room!

If you look closely, you can see that he's trying to eat the corner of it...
He likes it!



Another present to open
Daddy helps with this one:

woops... distracted by the paper again!

It's a cloth activity book!

Jacob's gift from me:

a laptop lap desk

Christian wanted to take this picture of us helping Isaac open his stocking.

Papa Jack came over, we ate cinnamon rolls, and Christian loved showing him all his new stuff. Jacob tried telling his dad that I'm pregnant (I'm not!), since that's what we told him last year when he came over on Christmas morning! Christian's final gift that he opened last Christmas was a t-shirt that read:

Promoted to the big brother

Effective July 2008

It took a couple of minutes for everyone to get it, but it was pretty funny!

And here we are, a year later, with Isaac opening gifts with us on Christmas morning!

It was the first year we've ever been alone at our own house on Christmas morning. I was a little worried that it would be lonely, but it wasn't at all! We knew we had an afternoon with the rest of the Holmes, and we were leaving for Texas the next day.

It was a really special Christmas morning!

Here are a couple of little snippets of Isaac enjoying his horsey: