Happy Holidays!

Here's our Christmas morning face 2010:

I recently saw a story where a family took a photo of the kids every Christmas morning on the stairs before they came down and saw the tree, presents, etc. The children were talking about how frustrating it was to sit for those photos, but how special they were now as adults. Although I don't plan on staying in this house forever (or much longer, hopefully!), I thought this would be a nice way to chronicle our Christmas mornings. So, I had Ellen sit on the stairs and asked her to smile--here's what we got:

It kind of cracks me up because she looks soooooo excited & I'm pretty confident that she has no idea there are presents downstairs! (This was confirmed after we got downstairs and she ran straight into the kitchen without even a glance over to the tree.)Although Ellen & the big guy didn't hit it off the day before, it seems he still made a visit to Colt Drive out of the kindness of his heart.. Opening stickers!

Enjoying my new mini-notebook & crayons

Check out my new headphones!

(In case you couldn't tell, the "theme" of Ellen's stocking was "things to keep her busy on the airplane" as we fly to NJ in a couple of days.)

Even Guinness got in on the gift fun.

Loving my new wooden pegboard

Check out those fine motor skills!

Opening another gift...

Cutting my new wooden fruit set.

So much fun! It was exciting to see her getting into the opening of gifts this year. She would tear off a little piece of paper and handd it to me. Each present took quite a bit of time to open with that process! Well, we're off to eat some breakfast & then head over to Grandma's house to see Jessica & Jerrod for lunch & more gifts!