From The Ground Up: Christmas #2

Continuing on with the series of Christmas posts....

This was the first year that we celebrated Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as a family of three in our own home. Now that Lilah is starting to really understand what is going on, we decided to stay at home to begin establishing our own family traditions.

We got back to Birmingham from Elba the day before Christmas Eve. Lilah helped me bake cookies on Christmas Eve morning and I have to admit that she wasn't the greatest helper. :) All she wanted to do was eat the frosting and sprinkles. She did last long enough to help frost and sprinkle a couple of cookies.

Later that afternoon we all got dressed up for church.

While I got everything packed up, Lilah and Papa went for a quick stroll around the neighborhood in the little, red wagon.

Then, we had to quickly snap a couple of pictures.

When we got home from church we were surprised to find this cute little Tiger marionette. Santa must have come early thinking we were already asleep and we ended up scaring him away. ;) (This always seemed to happen every year when I was a kid, too!)

Lilah was obviously on the "nice" list after seeing all of the presents under the tree!!

Lilah woke up at around 6:00am as usual on Christmas morning. At first, she wasn't too concerned with all of the presents under the tree. All she really wanted was her yogurt. She's a creature of habit! As soon as she was finishing up her yogurt, Papa woke up and we got ready for a marathon of present opening.

Lilah was really into opening her presents this year. She had a great time ripping off the paper and was so excited to see all of the things that Santa had left. It took us a couple hours to get through all of the gifts because she wanted to immediately play with whatever she opened.