Christmas Morning 2011

We have decided to try and make a point to always be home at our house for Christmas. Trying to travel with gifts and have Santa follow us is just a hassle and kind of takes the fun out of the holiday. And we want to be able to build our own family traditions as Andrew gets older. This was our first year of Christmas at home. I was really excited. I couldn't wait to get the house all decorated and be able to have Andrew open all of his gifts.

On Christmas Eve some of our really good friends always have an open house with tortilla soup and tamales and caroling and fun with friends. We have always missed it because we were out of town or had family in town so this was our first year to get to attend. We had so much fun and look forward to many more years of the Jackson's "Twas the Night Before Christmas" fun. Thanks Guys!

On Christmas morning, Andrew woke up pretty early - 6:30, but I guess he could tell how excited I was or something. We had homemade cinnamon rolls - something we did many years while I was growing up -

and banannas.
Here is the tree and gifts below it, before all of the mayhem began.


We got Andrew a power wheels quad with Lightning McQueen for Christmas. I figured it would be the best of everything he loves. Cars the movie, cars in general and noisy things. How can you go wrong? You can see as soon as he finished breakfast and got down, he ran straight over to it and jumped on.
Daddy hadn't even unplugged it from charging yet, so we had to adjust pretty quickly. His patience was non-existent with his excitement.

He didn't really know what to do so we pushed the button and showed him how it worked. And he liked it briefly, until he couldn't figure out how to stop it. Then he freaked out a bit. It was really funny. He wasn't too interested in it for a while after that. But I got a couple of good pics.
After that he decided to come over to the tree and see what all the fuss was under there. He did get the hang of ripping the paper off.

Although the first gift he opened had cars in it and as soon as he saw those, he quit tearing the paper and started trying to get those out. And it was hard to get his interest back after that!
We put his car race track from Santa together and he was loving that as you can see.



He got quite the gift collection this year. He got a tractor from Aunt Kiersty, Aunt Megan and Uncle Seth,
and a "tractor" which is actually a monster truck from Mr. Jim and Tyler and mommy's office, lots of new books and some new clothes.
James got a lot of new clothes, and the Lord of the Rings movies, but these were a fun gift I found. At Hobby Lobby they started carrying a line with vintage ford stuff. This little hook has the lightning bolt gear which was on the unibody pickup that was sold to pay for my engagement ring. Pretty perfect find right?

I got the Kindle Fire that I have been wanting, and a cute little casserole dish and a cupcake holder. Now I better get cooking!
The final results of Christmas.....