Our little Christmas at Home

For Christmas this year, we went down to Mobile to spend time with the Holley side of our family. However, Santa told us he was going to stop by a night early for sarahbeth and tj. so on the 23rd, we did our Chrismtas eve rituals, including a yummy ham dinner, opening 1 present (this year was slippers!) and driving around looking at Christmas lights. BTW, people here are scrooges when it comes to Lights and decorations... we would turn onto a street to see maybe 3 or 4 houses with lights... brad got the hang of driving slow and letting the kids (and me) enjoy the lights. then when he would start to go, tj would say "Wait daddy, not yet!" in the morning we wanted to capture the suprise on video and camera so we set everything up to do so, and then set our alarms for 6 am. sarahbeth had another idea though. She was awake at 4:30, and was so excited! so we settled a deal for 5:30 to let tj sleep a little longer. when we were finally ready for the big suprises the reaction was a little less than what we expected. "oh, a bike" and smiles! Santa Clause left new bikes and helmets for them (thanks mom!) and oma (noel's mom) got them a kitchen set. When it came time to open the presents that were wrapped TJ kept getting upset that we wouldn't let him play with the one that he just unwrapped and didn't want to open the next one. after a yummy breakfast of candy and hot chocolate, we went outside to try out the new bikes! They didn't quite get it until we went down to mobile and tried again the next day with all the cousins...