Christmas Traditions

Whew - sorry it has taken me so long to post an update! Since Thanksgiving, I've been so busy with Christmas shopping, parties, school events for Sean, etc. As Sean gets older, it's so fun to start Christmas family traditions. This year we had some friends over to decorate Christmas cookies and Sean had a blast! I have to admit that I didn't make the dough from scratch; I just bought the pre-cut sugar cookies. I figure that as Sean gets older we can progress to making the cookie dough and cutting out the shapes. After Sean was done decorating his cookies, I couldn't tell if he even had any cookies on his plate because his plate was covered in sprinkles!

This year we also decorated a gingerbread house and Sean really enjoyed it. I waited for a good sale and bought a gingerbread house kit. Sean took his time to place each piece of candy in the right place and didn't complain when mommy realized that the frosting had to set for hours before the house could actually be decorated! Oops! I was also surprised that he didn't fuss about not being able to eat the gingerbread house (although we had our share of candy while we decorated!).

We hope to look at some lights this year and Sean enjoyed helping to decorate our house. He has several of his own decorations in his bedroom and it's cute that each one has it's own place.

One last thing - a funny story about a mommy mistake I made this year. Sean didn't have any presents under the tree so I put 2 out one morning. One was from Ryan and the other was from my sister. When I got out of the shower that morning, I heard running downstairs up and down our walkway. I didn't think anything of it at first and then I got this bad feeling that he was up to no good so I went downstairs and heard the sounds of paper ripping! I found him hiding behind our recliners opening the gifts. He had already opened one of the toy packages! I was shocked and mad at first until I started to think back to when I was child and all of the sneaky things I did to try and get a peek at my Christmas presents. He helped me re-wrap the presents (I didn't put them back under the tree this time!) and he asked me not to put them under the tree because he was too tempted to open them! Now I've learned my lesson not to put any presents for him under the tree until Christmas.