'Twas the Night Before Christmas

Okay, so I know I, like, just blogged and all but with it being Christmas Eve there was just too much excitement and therefore too many pictures to try to share later. So, I'm back with mostly pictures. Again.

During Easton's nap you'll never guess what happened: it started snowing again! Didn't we just get more than enough to last for awhile? Oh well. It didn't last too long...actually, I haven't looked out the window in awhile. I think it stopped at least. We did end up having to wake our sleeping beauty, er, sleeping dude so that bedtime wasn't too messed up. Then we took these pictures, mostly trying to capture the snow falling again in the background which you can see did not work:


And would you take a look at the embarassingly large number of presents we have under our tree. And all those are for just the 3 of us!

Sadly, due to the blizzard, Easton and I never made it to Children's to donate a couple of already purchased gifts (identical to ones Easton is getting, by the way). We'll have to figure something else out to donate them as I still feel that's important and we already bought 'em.

We had our special Christmas Eve dinner and then after dinner Easton was allowed to open one present. We set out 3 from The Maws for him to choose from. He picked it out and dug right in:

Waiting excitedly but patiently for Daddy to remove the tightly packaged toy from it's box:

Woo hoo! She's free! Easton stands his new singing Uniqua on the floor:

And gives her a hug:

And a kiss (I think he looks a lot like a little me in this picture):

He was so excited to have his new Uniqua that I think he suspects what was in the other similar packages and he kept wanting to open those:

Caught you! Not tonight, Eastie...we'll do them all tomorrow... (Oh, and Jason thinks he looks a lot like Little J in this shot.)


Instead Mr. E had to settle for getting the cookies and milk ready for Santa:


We even covered the milk with a napkin to keep Blitz out and for Santa to wipe his milk moustache with when he was done. During bathtime Blitz already had broken in to the milk! That darn cat! :)

We let Easton stay up a tiny bit later to play with his new toy. We started our routine about 15-20 minutes late...bedtime is usually 7:45. I had to rock him extra long tonight because he was so excited and kept talking about everything from this afternoon. Then when I finally had him calm enough to put in his bed (8:10) I could hear until at least 8:40 that he still wasn't asleep yet. Doesn't he know that Santa, "knows when you are sleeping...he knows if you're awake..."? Guess not.

Jason and I have also come up with our plan, for this year anyway: first we come downstairs to see what Santa has left under the tree, then we'll check out the stockings which are right near our tree (hung by the stairway with care here in our fireplace-less home). After stockings (therefore after Santa) we can move onto the wrapped gifts. Sounds do-able to me. What a team of compromisers we are, eh?

Okay, so now that you've got all the latest I am off to see if I can't give Santa a hand and then to get some rest myself. Looking forward to tomorrow! Enjoy your Christmases!