Our Family Christmas

In keeping up with the tradition on this blog, I'm going to blog about things that happened even when they're weeks old.  :)  Bear with me as I try and catch up with all of our Christmas festivities.  Including our Christmas with just the four of us, we have SEVEN Christmas celebrations so the loading of pictures, editing, blogging, etc, is taking longer than I would like.

We ended up doing our "family" Christmas gift exchange after lunch on Christmas Eve.  We wanted to be able to enjoy giving our gifts and didn't want to be rushed, and this also helped spread the gift giving out for the kids.  Also, there were some gifts on Christmas day that were contingent on these gifts so we wanted to get them opened.

Before we started the present opening I made both kids sit together for a picture.  Charlotte still wasn't letting go of her new dog, Nikki, at this point!

And then the unwrapping and the "mama-razzi" and the fake smiles.  Thankfully the enthusasim was not fake.  I couldn't get over how excited Charlotte was for EACH AND EVERY present and she was so good to say thank you!  I was impressed!  And James would get excited about everything too and squeal and stare intently at his presents.  It was so much more feedback than I was anticipating and I loved it!

We got Charlotte a charm bracelet this year.  I had one growing up (ended up with three that are covered with charms) and loved getting to pick out charms for special occasions and having them given to me.  I can tell you details about most every charm that I have and they're so special.  So I wanted to start this tradition for Charlotte.  She was so excited about it and has asked to wear it a lot.  We started her out with the following charms: an elephant, a tap shoe, and a "C" initial.

James wasn't really sure about pulling the paper out of his first present but he was excited about the look of his big construction blocks!

We give Radko ornaments to the kids each year based on something that happened in their life that year.  This is James' from this year: two penguins and a surfboard for his first trip to the beach.

And Charlotte's radko was a ballet dancer since she started dance this year.

James gave us some classic expressions.  Like this one when I interrupted him reading one of his new books!