Christmas

Above is what Christmas at 6am looks like. Our Christmas morning actually started with Tori climbing into bed with us at 5:30am, super excited and asking to open presents. At least we could reason with her a little bit and tell her she needed to sleep a little longer - however, once James was also up at 6am we gave up. We realized a few days later that James was teething and that's why he's been getting up so early lately.

Above is a very happy Tori with her presents from Santa and below is a groggy, but very happy James driving his car from Santa.

Tori and James were really sweet and had a lot of fun opening presents, stockings and playing with toys. They both had a blast and loved playing with each others' toys, too.

Below James is petting his pillow pet in his car (both Tori and James got pillow pets and were thrilled with them). Tori's reaction when she opened her unicorn pillow pet was priceless. She was so excited; unfortunately, it was right when we turned the video camera off.

Dance Christmas Party

Tori's dance studio had a Christmas party where they got to talk and dance with Santa. Tori loved this - especially the dancing part.

Above, Tori is coloring her Christmas picture while waiting to see Santa. It's interesting - lately, Tori has gotten very wary of strangers (a good thing in many ways). She was the little baby and toddler that loved sitting on Santa's lap, would talk to or smile at any stranger we passed by. She's a bit more reserved around strangers now and as you can see in the video below - she will hardly even look at Santa, even though she was really excited to get to see him. I guess this is what happens when you start getting older and more aware.

Christmas Pictures

A local picture place was having a deal on photos, so I took the kids in to get some pictures in their Christmas outfits. Tori loved an excuse to wear her Christmas dress and spent the whole time dancing around the photo place while we waited. It went pretty well, except that James really did not want me to put him down and was pretty upset at the beginning. At the end he finally warmed up a bit and I love his and Tori's smiles in their individual pictures.

Merry Christmas

These are a few pictures of Tori and James in their Christmas outfits the Sunday before Christmas. Tori thought her dress was very fancy wanted to wear it all the time.

Here are Tori and James on Christmas morning. John had to work at the hospital on Christmas morning so I kept the kids happy up in our room having breakfast in bed and watching all of the classic Christmas cartoons we recorded off TV until John made it home at around 9:30am. It was the first time I can remember being showered and ready before opening presents on Christmas morning- which I actually thought was pretty nice.

These pictures are of Tori and James with their presents from Santa in front of the tree. As you can tell, the airplane and tiana doll were both a big hit.

Below is James in the new jumper he got for Christmas (probably one of my favorite Christmas presents :)).

Christmas Morning

So we didn't really take any pictures Christmas morning, but we took a lot of videos. Lots of them are pretty long, so have fun watching whatever part of it you want. Tori really loved Christmas this year. She really has started to understand a little bit about Santa and a lot about the nativity story. It was a lot of fun watching her open presents, too, this year since she was so excited to get everything and has really loved playing with/wearing all of her presents.

Above is a video of Tori after she came in to wake up mom and dad on Christmas morning and right before we went downstairs to open presents.

Above is a video of Tori when she first went downstairs to see that Santa had brought her a Dora Tent for Christmas. Also, notice the several "Tori-made" ornaments on the Christmas tree. In a book her friend gave her for Christmas a mouse makes Christmas ornaments, so this was her favorite thing to do the week or so before Christmas. For her ornaments she would cut out a piece of paper, color it with markers, cut out a piece of ribbon and tape it to the paper so it could hang on the tree - all by herself.

For Christmas Tori got ballet lessons and Great Grandpa and Grandma Facer got her all of the stuff she needed for the lessons - leotard & skirt, tights, ballet shoes and tap shoes. She was so excited when she opened them that she had to put them on immediately. She also insists on only wearing the leotard, no matter how freezing I think it is in the house. She says, "I must be naked when I wear my ballet stuff." Most of the time I am eventually able to convince her to wear a sweatshirt over it, though.

This last video below is of Tori in the Sleeping Beauty outfit she got for Christmas. She loves this dress and must wear it several times everyday! When she put it on she told me that we had to go back to Disney World so she could meet Sleeping Beauty. Then I said, "Tori, we already met Sleeping Beauty when we went to Disney World, you have a picture with her." To which she replies, "But I was dressed like Cinderella."

Christmas morning

I'm very late in adding blog entries lately, but I'm going to try and catch up without leaving much out.

These are some of the pictures that we took on Christmas morning. She got lots of wonderful things from Grandparents, Great-Grandparents and Santa. Tori's Grandma Katie got her a Cinderella dress up outfit that she loved and looked so cute in that we had to take lots of pictures.

Very often when there is music playing she insists on wearing her princess dress so she can dance. She also wears the shoes all the time. She calls them either her"glass slippers" or her "high-heals".

When she was little, I didn't think she was very much into all the "girly" things; well, she definitely is now! She's loves being "fancy", wearing fun shoes, dancing, and talking about how she is a princess and daddy is a king. However, we still haven't given up hope that she'll be our little athlete. She loved the Dora tennis racket that Dad got her for Christmas.

Mom also made her a warmer blanket to sleep with since this winter has been so horribly cold.

Tori also still absolutely loves books and she got some really fun ones for Christmas, too.

Our little Angel

John just got a few days off for Christmas so we decided to stay and celebrate Christmas in Iowa. Many of our friends also stayed around, so we all got together for a Christmas Eve party and had the kids dress up for a live nativity. When I asked Tori what she wanted to be for the nativity, she said, "Baby Jesus". After explaining to her that she was a little too big to be baby Jesus, Tori's then decided she wanted to be an angel. The following are several of the pictures taken of Tori as an angel and the whole group as the nativity.

The ingenius idea for the halo made out of a coat hanger taped to Tori's back was all John's. We thought it was pretty cool, but Tori wasn't quite sure what she thought about it.

Anne & Andrew were Mary and Joseph. Tori, Hannah, & Rowan were Angels. Megan & Anna were wise men. Claire was a sheep and Ronnie was a shephard.

Decorations and Church Christmas party

Here is a picture of our Christmas tree with lights and train. Apparently we were a little late in picking our tree and the choices were very slim, but we were very pleasantly surprised with how much we liked this tree. (Tori loved it and it withstood all the love she gave it.)

Here is Tori playing with her new Elmo ornament she received this year while we put the lights on the tree.

We had an unseasonably cold December this year, with a pretty impressive ice storm and a bunch of snow. It was nice having a white Christmas and the lights looked pretty cool covered in ice.

The following pictures are of Tori in her Christmas dress and us all dressed up to go to our church Christmas party. (The middle picture is of Tori with hot curlers in her hair. At first she thought they were neat, but that only latest a minute and she didn't keep them in long enough for them to actually curl her hair.)

Santa made an appearance at the party. Some kids didn't know quite what to think about him. I was holding Tori's hand on the stage and trying to lead her to Santa so she wouldn't be afraid, when she tore her hand away and said, "I do it all by myself, mama." She was, however, a little hesitant on Santa's lap until he gave her the lollipop.

Opening Christmas Presents

Tori absolutely loved finally getting to rip into all those nicely wrapped packages under the tree that mom kept telling her not to touch for the past month. The only problem was that she loved each present so much that it was hard to get her to stop playing and to move onto the next one. It was just a ton of fun to have such a happy, sweet kid that was so into Christmas this year.

One of the funniest things was that she loved getting the Chicken Run DVD from her Grandpa. She wouldn't let it go and just ran around the room with it saying, "Bock, bock".

Her big gift this year was a kitchen set that she can't get enough of. I think she thinks it's Christmas every morning when she comes down and still sees the kitchen there.

Nativity

Tori received an adorable Little People nativity set from her Grandma for Christmas. She has just loved playing with it. Her favorite thing is to push the button on top to make it play the song "Away in a Manger". It has also been a wonderful thing to distract her from the Christmas tree, which she is fascinated with.