Christmas morning

We celebrated Christmas morning with just our family of four on Christmas Eve because the plan was to go to Sam's parents house 2.5 hours away after lunch to celebrate Christmas there. After seeing what Santa brought we had a big breakfast of pancakes, sausage and cheese eggs before getting dressed and opening presents.

This year our goal was really to scale down on Christmas and not totally spoil our kids. That is so hard because we love them so much and there are so many things I know they would enjoy. We really wanted to have a Christ focused Christmas though and having an overwhelming amount of gifts when it is HIS birthday does nothing to bring the focus to Christ's birth. We gave each person in our family 4 gifts. We were going to go with the cute themes I read about "something to wear, something to read, something you want, something you read" but our gifts just did not fit into those categories so we just had one from each other person in our family, including the dog.Both girls really got into opening presents. Caroline received a book, a Belle dress up outfit, a baby doll with stroller and a dinosaur toy with balls and tunnels. She loved all of her toys and the beauty of her age is that the only thing that I bought new was the book. The rest of the gifts were either Katherine's at this age or bought at consignment sales.
Katherine received a bag of books, a pettiskirt (tutu on steroids), a dress up costume and a Ballerina magnet doll (like paper dolls).You can tell she loves the pettiskirt.

Mommy and Daddy do not get as exciting of gifts. I actually bought most of my gifts myself this year.

It was a fun morning with just the 4 of us. The kids had a great time. It ended up leading into a stressful afternoon as it began to snow up north and we had to decide if we were going to drive to Sam's parents or wait a day. It was an emotional decision as Katherine was asking every 10 minutes when she would get to go see her cousins and of course we all want to be together for Christmas. Sam was checking the weather reports and talking to family as I was finishing the packing and loading of the car. We ended up deciding to hold of driving and that ended up being a wise decision. Sam's sister, Carissa, left about an hour or so before when we were going to leave and her family ended up stranded for 11 hours in one place when a truck jacknifed and they were trapped on slick roads. They spent the night in their car with their kids and ended up having a 2.5-2 hour drive take 21 hours.