These are some of my favorite pictures from Christmas morning at home:
On Christmas morning we let Gemma wake us up at seven and then she gets to open her stocking. She was really, really excited this year, bouncing up and down excited! We made her wait a few minutes so I could put my contacts in. (I'm legally blind without them.) She could hardly contain herself!
She loved everything in her stocking. There was a jump rope, lots of lip gloss, little notebooks and journals, pens and stamps. She was pretty happy about a small toy rabbit I made.
After the stocking, I put on my make up and do my hair while Matt makes breakfast. This year it was homemade cinnamon rolls, eggs, and bacon. Doing things this way gives Gemma a little while to play with the things from her stocking, instead of them being forgotten in the excitement of opening gifts. After breakfast, we read the Christmas story from the gospel of Luke, and then open presents.
I gave Matt a ukulele, as well as a few other things. I had Gemma pick out a gift for him and she picked out slippers and Monopoly. They like to play games together in the winter evenings.
Matt tried to take Gemma shopping for me, but he said she kept picking out stuff for herself and he gave up. She made me her own gifts all by herself though, which I love more. As you can see, I am wearing a lovely jingle bell bracelet made out of a pipe cleaner and I'm holding a butterfly, also made out of pipe cleaners. She gave me a bunch of money from her piggy bank, lots of pennies and nickles, and a few dimes and quarters poured into a gift bag as well. She gave Matt some money too, but only a quarter, a nickle, and a penny. He said he knew who her favorite was!
I made Gemma (and my three nieces) Black Apple dolls and they were really fun and easy to make. Gemma loved hers. She knew I was making them for her cousins, and asked if I would make her one too. I told her maybe sometime after Christmas when I wasn't so busy. She was pretty happy and surprised to unwrap her own!
For Gemma's final gift, we sent her searching for it with clues. She had a lot of fun running around and trying to figure out the clues.
Matt's Grandma McKinney always did that for him as a kid and he loved it. We did it because we knew Gemma would know what her present was if she saw the package.
Gemma's last clue led her back to the tree when she found a package (that Matt had lugged out while she was searching) almost as tall as her. When you're a kid and you have a giant package to unwrap, I don't think what's inside it matters so much at the moment as the excitement at it's size. She was over the moon! And then she opened it...
and found the keyboard that she had been wanting! It was her favorite gift, well that and the fish.
It was a great Christmas!
