Christmas 2014

This Christmas is what I consider Carter’s “first Christmas”.  It’s the first Christmas, just days shy of three years old, that he truly understood Santa and all things related to Christmas.  He knew why we were leaving cookies and milk out on Christmas Eve night, he knew what Santa did for a living, and he got excited, for the first time, about coming downstairs Christmas morning.  Let’s begin by taking a look at Carter’s FIRST time ever for taking a picture with Santa and not crying!!!

Garrett wasn’t quite comfortable in Santa’s lap, hence his face, but this is the very first picture of both of my boys with Santa.  I will cherish this picture forever!!!

After that came the Christmas with my extended family that lives in Gordo, AL.  We only really get to see them once a year at this time.  One of my cousins, Quinn, had just had a little boy (after having 3 girls she finally got her boy!) and is roughly 2 months older than Garrett so it was nice having 2 babies for everyone to love on!

My aunt Delane (left) is holding Garrett.  To the right is Emily holding baby Cole.  These women loved on these precious boys most of the evening!

These are all the kids in the family.  That’s a lot of kids!!!  Thank heavens for Quinn and her three girls…otherwise our family would be nothing but boys!!!

Cole and Garrett….Love Cole’s face in this picture.  He’s like “ummm…why is this kid laying on me?!?!”  And for being 2 months apart, they’re basically the same size.  Garrett’s in the 75th percentile for weight while Cole is in the 25th percentile, which makes sense for why the look the same size!

Where our families started.  To the left is my grandmother and to the right is her sister.  Love them!

 

Love this boy!!!

And then came Christmas Eve.  We do Christmas Eve with my side of the family-this time it was just my immediate family instead of the whole extended family.  We went to my sister’s house in Tuscaloosa again and we had so much fun!

My grandmother held Garrett the majority of the time we were at Lindsey’s house.  Unfortunately, she had to ask whose baby he was several times (Alzheimer's) but you could tell that holding a baby again absolutely made her day.  And I will absolutely cherish this picture whenever my Nanny goes to be with the Lord.

 

On the left…these two boys.  They so love eachother.  I’m pretty sure that this was when I was playing “Turn Down for What” by Lil’ Jon on my phone.  Carter calls that his song and he loves dancing to it.  So I’m pretty sure this was him dancing on the ottoman and then Anderson hopped up there with him to dance too.  On the right is us skyping my other sister, Jennifer, who lives in Tampa and couldn’t be there.

My photographer sister found these fun props at Target and had to buy them.  So glad she did because we got some super cute pictures with them.  See:

 

When you have a baby, you can almost always count on never once holding him during a family function.  Everyone else wants to!

All the fun wore this kid out!!!  We were trying to get home in time to see Santa on the fire truck driving through our neighborhood, but we left too late and missed it.  So we decided to go to church where, shocker, Papa held Garrett the entire time…

 

We really wanted Carter to see Santa on the fire truck, so we went to Papa and Nana’s house after church because he was supposed to be on there street at 8pm.  Well he never showed up so we sent Justin to drive around the neighborhood to find him.  He found him alright…but he was leaving the neighborhood!!!  Justin came back to his parent’s house and we piled the kids up quickly.  The website said Santa would make one last stop in another neighborhood so we drove around trying to find him.  When we finally found him he was leaving the neighborhood!!!  We followed him in the fire truck back to the fire station and when they were in the turning lane, we pulled right up next to them and he waved at Carter through the window.  We went through A LOT of trouble, but finally got Carter to see Santa!  After all that drama, we went back home and put out cookies and milk.

 

You’ll notice that each cookie has a bite taken out of it.  That’s because this three year old decided he needed to make sure the cookies tasted ok for Santa.  He also took a sip of the milk to make sure it was ok too.  He cracks me up!!! 

Then came Christmas morning!!!

Carter’s main gift from Santa was a fun little dune buggy.  He also got a cookie monster toboggan (he still LOVES cookie monster) and that thing he’s eating??….well when you asked Carter what he wanted for Christmas he ALWAYS said “double cookie” (a double doozie cookie from the Great American Cookie Company).  So naturally, Santa brought him a few of those to put in his stocking ;)  I’ll have to learn how to better spread out the money for Carter and Garrett’s Christmas.  At Carter’s age, the toys are just more expensive…for Garrett’s age…I mean what do a baby need other than clothes, books and a toy? 

Santa got all of Carter’s favorite things in his stocking….candy canes, double cookies, twizzlers and blue M&M’s!

Why are there no pictures of Garrett??  Well, because my master sleeper did this while Carter was downstairs opening his presents…

 

After a while, we got Carter dressed and took him outside to drive his dune buggy!

I didn’t want him to eat only double cookies for breakfast so I gave him a bowl of fruit and he insisted on eating it while driving.  Toddler’s first to go food I guess :)

 

This is why I love our neighborhood and particularly our street.  All the kids were in our culdesac playing with their new toys so all the kids got to play together while us parents enjoyed cups of coffee in our pajamas :)

Carter thought Garrett wanted to read his Farm Animals book so he gave it to him.  But then he wanted to show Garrett his brand new lunchbox so he brought that to him too.  Poor Garrett!

After playing with toys for a bit, we packed up and headed to Papa and Nana’s house for lunch with the twins!  I didn’t take many pictures there because we were outnumbered by kids!  I took a great video of them all opening presents, but for some reason I can’t put videos on my blog via Windows Live Writer anymore.

 

Nana gave the kids Gingerbread Cookie Decorating kits so after opening presents, all the kids decorated their cookies (there may have been some assistance from the adults!).

 

That was our Christmas!!!  It was great!  We only had a couple of days before we had to gear up for Carter’s birthday party (will add that stuff to another post).  After his party we drove to Florida to have Christmas with extended family and stayed for a few days before coming back home.  Our December was super busy!!!