We spent Christmas Eve at my Dad's and Barbara's house. My mom and Rick, Donna and her family, my step-sister Lynn and her family, and step-sister Nicci and her boyfriend and his parents were all there as well. The kids had fun playing together, and there was an impressive spread of food, as always!
Here is Emma all ready for Christmas:
Carter and Emma played some "tunes" on the piano.
All the little kids had somehow lost their pants once time to open presents came around!
It was fun to watch them all open presents and get excited about new toys.
Here is Carter with Uncle Chris, trying our a megaphone gift from Nana.
Carter opened one gift and would have been happy to stop there. It actually took a while to get him to open something else! Which says a lot, really. He wanted to open a little airplane playset while we were still at Dad's house, and we told him that we would open it when we got back to Nana's house. He fell asleep on the way back, and then slept until 9:30 on Christmas morning! When he woke up, Mom asked him if he wanted to see what Santa Claus had brought, and he said, "Did he bring my airport from Papa's house?"
Once in the living room, he completely ignored the pile of presents, went straight to the box with the airplane playset, and insisted that we open and assemble it. It was a good 15 minutes before he could be convinced to open any presents!
There were lots of toy tractors for him to unwrap:
And a big fire truck from Grandpa and Grandma Smith.
John Deere was definitely the theme of the morning!
He also enjoyed this crane from Nana.
We lounged around and had a brunch of red velvet pancakes. We headed up to Mount Airy in the early afternoon for the family gathering at my Aunt's house. My mom's parents and both her siblings and all my cousins were there. It was a big crowd, but fun as always!
We got the kids to sing a little before we started opening presents. Sort of...
Here they are waiting patiently for the gift opening to begin.
Then it was a blur of paper and boxes for a while!
After the presents were unwrapped and played with, one of the kids decided it was bathtime, and the next thing we knew they were all naked. So, into the bath they went!
After that we all just hung out and enjoyed each other's company.
Carter had a great time playing with his cousins. I have such great memories of these family get-togethers when I was a kid, and the Christmas ones were so very special to me! I can remember being so excited and everyone laughing and enjoying each other's company. I really hope Carter has similar memories of Christmases spent with family!
We lingered over conversation and full tummies, and then finally set out to go back to Greensboro to my Mom's house. I'm always sad that Christmas is over. It's a holiday I look forward to for months, and then it seems to pass by so quickly! And Mom and I realized too late that we'd forgotten to get a picture of all the kids with my grandparents, and we were both sad about that. It's so rare that ALL of us are together like that, and we definitely missed an opportunity to get a photo. :-(
The holiday wasn't over yet, though. We still had an awesome gift left: my dad and Barbara had gotten us a night at the Great Wolf Lodge in Concord as a Christmas gift! I'll write all about that in my next post.
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