Merry Christmas!

Since on Christmas, our little family will be with our really big family up in DC, husband and I decided to have Christmas morning for baby boy yesterday. I never realized what a big deal this must have been/be to our parents until I couldn't sleep the night before because I was so excited to see Cullen's reaction in the morning. There is something indescribably special about the anticipation of Christmas morning from a Parent's point of view; all the sudden our mother's desires to be with us on Christmas (as adults) make a lot more sense. (In fact, I could write an entire week's worth of posts about entitled Things About My Childhood that Make Sense Now that I am a Mother, but I'm not ready to admit all of that quite yet.) So 'Christmas morning' arrived and at 6:15, we heard baby boy squirming in his crib. We waited to see if he noticed that Santa had left his stocking in the bed, a tradition of husband's, but all we heard was "Momma! Dada!" and into his room we went. We brought the stocking back into our bed, but Baby Boy apparently takes after his mom a little bit and isn't quite ready for anything before his morning coffee..err.. milk.


Fast forward 20 minutes, Momma and Dada had their coffee and Baby Boy had his milk and english muffin and back to Christmas morning we go. C was a little unsure about unwrapping gifts at first, but caught on pretty quickly that there was awesome stuff underneath that pesky paper.

That afternoon, I took a hand at my own family traditions and made sugar cookies with C. My mom always made Gingerbread houses with us, completely from scratch, from my grandfather's bakery recipe and while I know I am not ready for that, I was admittedly pretty proud of myself for putting on an apron and finding my rolling pin. I even made my own icing, which is a big deal because I really hate baking. My friend Cate put it perfectly, when she told me 'You are Martha Stewart, but the jailbird one, not the magazine one.'

I think jailbird Martha and C$ did a pretty good job for our first attempt. And the cookies were really good, at least while they were warm anyways...after that, they were really hard. O well, it was still fun!

All in all, it was a wonderful day and made us excited to continue the Christmas celebration with our extended families over the next few days. Merry Christmas!