Happy Holidays!!!!

Hooray, Christmas finally came! I usually have a hard time sleeping excited for what I will get for Christmas, but this year, I couldn't wait to see what Kade would get for Christmas! Santa got Kade a Thomas the Tank train set with a play mat and extra track. We also got him a bunch more Thomas the Tank stuff. He'd gone over a year with only 1 train and we knew he loved it. We had been buying him train stuff for a while and holding it all until Christmas. He was so excited. He walks in the family room, stops for a second noticing the train stuff, then says "Track!". He proceeds to walk towards it and says, "Train track!". The only other words that came out of him that morning were "toot, toot" and "uh oh, crash!" as he played with his train set. Oh, yeah, and the word "no!" when we pried him away at about 11:00 to get ready to go to his grandparents. I felt bad knowing he'd have to wait until tomorrow to play with his train stuff again. But his grandparents had gotten him a big dump truck and he played with that thing the rest of the day like it was his job only taking short breaks with us to chow down on some candy or get a drink. You'd think he'd never seen a toy before! He has a TON of toys at home (2 bins full and some) so we were always reserved in buying him more throughout the year. Only now do I realize why he loved his new toys so much; The 2 bins full of toys are all for infants. He outgrew his toys quite a while ago except for the pile of hot wheels cars he has. Poor kid! Well, at least we've rectified our neglect.

The girls had fun this Christmas as well! We didn't get them many toys (they inherited the 2 toy bins), but they got a lot from their grandparents like car seats (ok,those were more for us), clothes and baby dolls. I thought they were too young for dolls, but they loved them! It was a great Christmas!

I've had quite the change in attitude about things this year. Before, I looked forward to Christmas as the day I got my yearly bonus for being good. Now that I'm older and have kids of my own, I've realized that God has blessed me tremendously the 364 days since the last Christmas with a good job, great coworkers, a lovely little home, a great wife who loves me and beautiful, healthy children. I got all my presents early this year. I'm not looking under the tree excited to open up the biggest present. Now I'm just hoping the biggest present there is from me. Christmas is now the day I get to really thank Him. The birthday of the one who gave me everything: and it's my favorite day of the year.