Christmas

I forgot to take pictures at our house opening presents. But Jefferson got some as we went to other houses. Christmas morning we got up and opened some presents. We got a new TV and it's been mounted on the wall in our bedroom for awhile, so we didn't have much to open. Lincoln started opening a present, but was having too much fun with the toothpaste I gave Jefferson in his stocking. So he opened one of his three presents before we left for my parents house. It was a small dump truck from Santa.

We got to my parents at 9 a.m. so my family could do our gift exchange before the extended family showed up for breakfast. The little kids all opened their gifts. Then we played a game with gift cards. Instead of presents to each other we brought a $20 gift card to exchange (it was the Porter family's idea). Anyway I read a story with right/left in it and we passed the cards around the circle. Whichever one you ended up with at the end of the story you kept. We did have to do 2 trades so people didn't end up with their own card. Jefferson and I ended up with Kohl's and Training Table.


After presents we took a family picture and started cooking breakfast. I didn't get any pictures of that, but Grandma & Grandpa Pay, Jerrold's family and my Aunt CA and cousin Allyssa all came over for scones, french toast, ham and scrambled eggs. YUM!

After breakfast we headed over to Grandma Pay's house. She didn't bring her gifts over so we stopped by. Lincoln got a super cute Sunday outfit and Jefferson and I got knives. Then we headed to Grandma Catlin's house. All the Allphin cousins were over there and we thought we would stop in to say hi. She had sent her gifts up to our house (Lincoln got a book about a mouse with the accompanying stuffed mouse and we got Lehi Roller Mills mixes and towels.) We were able to watch Grandma open her gifts and say hi to our cousins. We didn't stay long - it was almost 1:00 and Lincoln hadn't napped yet.

Lincoln slept on the way home and didn't want to go back down when we got home. He managed to open another present - a new shirt. So about a 1/2 hour later we loaded up the Porter's presents and headed to Jefferson's parents house. Everyone got there at 2 and we had food (sandwiches, meatballs, smokies, Christmas jello, pumpkin roll, and lots of other goodies). After eating we exchanged gifts and played our gift card exchange game. At the Porter's we went by age to pick a card. It could get stolen twice. Ramona kept getting all the good gift cards and was stolen from quite a few times. I took Target from her and Jefferson took Home Depot. Earlier Heather had taken Papa Murphys. It was fun and I am happy with what we ended up with. (FYI - to the Pays we took Kohls & Smiths and to the Porters we took Papa Murphys & Smiths).

Here is the Porter family photo.

Lincoln actually went down for a nap upstairs at the Porters while we opened presents downstairs. He slept for a nice long while. We went home around 6 and I was exhausted! Heather had given Ella a play tent with a tunnel. I had the exact one wrapped up at home waiting for Lincoln to open. I was thinking of saving it for another occasion, but decided to go ahead and let Lincoln open it. He did and we only took out the tunnel. He's had a lot of fun crawling through that tunnel!