the Rizzo Report: A Cowboy Christmas

As expected Christmas morning with our two girls was a lot of fun. The anticipation for Ava had been slowly building thanks to taking her to the Dollar Store to buy Christmas gifts for Dada and a trip to the Target $1 bins with Dada to buy gifts for Mama, hanging a nativity piece on the Advent Calendar each day and then all the presents appearing under the tree a couple days before. I made the fatal error of wishing her a Merry Christmas Eve the day before and having her leap out of bed and exclaim, "Presents!" and go running down the hall. Then I had to try and explain that it was Christmas Eve and that tomorrow was actually Christmas. As you can imagine that didn't make a whole lot of sense to her and I could tell she thought I had just played a really mean trick on her.

On the for real Christmas morning Tony and I got up and got dressed and got out the video camera before going in to get Ava up. She leapt out of bed just the same as she had the morning before and ran to the tree. I think I was as excited as she was and said to her, "What present do you want to open first?" She said, "The tiny one." What? What child picks the smallest gift to open first? Maybe a smart girl since that gift turned out to be a pair of earrings for me from Tony. Already she knows the size of a jewelry box . . .

But then Tony reminded us that there's a Christmas morning tradition protocol that we have to follow and so we all sat down (Madelyn in her Bumbo seat) and opened up our stockings and Christmas cards to each other. Ava got some plastic play tableware for her play kitchen in her stocking and after opening them she got up and ran off to play with them in her kitchen, perfectly content with only those plastic plates and bowls. I guess we could have just taken her other gifts back. . . We called her back and Tony read the Christmas story and we prayed together and sang Happy Birthday to Jesus. THEN, we moved on to the gifts.

Present opening took awhile. One because two year olds have to open up every gift and play with it before they'll move on to the next one and two, because since we live half way across the nation from both sides of our family we had all the gifts all the grandparents and aunts and uncles to open too. But that was fine with us, we didn't have any thing else planned for the day and we did stop half way through to eat breakfast and put Madelyn down for a nap.

For Christmas breakfast we had homemade cinnamon rolls, which is our traditional Christmas breakfast and traditionally they never turn out. They are either uncooked in the middle, over cooked and dry or don't raise properly. But this year, they were my Christmas miracle, and they turned out perfectly. They were so good. Except for the fact that suddenly it turns out I'm allergic to pecans as well as walnuts and I'd put a good healthy dose of pecans in and had to pick them all out of mine.

Ava was thrilled with every gift. Each time she was handed a gift she'd draw her breath in and go, "Ahhhh! For Hi-You! For Hi-You! Yay! A [fill in the blank] for Hi-You! Yay!" Madelyn enjoyed opening her gifts too, but mostly just because she liked trying to eat the wrapping.

Here's some pictures of our morning.

Reading about the birth of Jesus. Ava clutching her dishes from her stocking.

I love their matching jammies.

Cinnamon rolls

Madelyn wished she could have some too.

Ava loved her "cowboy hat" from her Aunt Danielle. After opening it she stuck it right on head, raised one hand in the air and yelled, "WEE-HAW!" The girl is a native Texan after all . . .

"Wee-Haw!"

Happily serving cake from her Melissa and Doug play food from Papa Jim and Manga. The food is pretty amazing and Ava loves being able to cut it with her wooden knife.

Her Dora backpack from Auntie Megan and Uncle John. She only had the corner of the wrapping off and she exclaimed, "Dora backpack! Hola!" I don't know how she knew what kind of backpack it was since she could only see a small pink corner.

All of us ladies put Christmas bows on our heads. Ava was very into it and kept putting Madelyn's back on her head for her when it would fall off, which was often.