Catching Up On Christmas: Christmas Eve

I'm way behind! I have so much great blog material, but I've just been occupied with all of the holiday festivities and recovering. Yesterday, I finally started feeling like myself. It turns out it was bronchitis, which makes a lot of sense, and makes me feel better. It explains the flare up, they put me on antibiotics and steroids (which make you gain weight -- oh well).

So, back to Christmas Eve. We spent Christmas Eve with the Moores at our house. In the past, we've done it at their house, but this year I'm having an especially hard time breathing at their house, so we decided to play it safe and do it here instead. We had a really nice time, and we are all incredibly spoiled rotten, especially Eli.

Here are Dendi and Eli in the sea of presents:


Andrea, Jason and BaPa with their presents--



Eli with two of his favorites of the night. His Elmo CD player, that came with four "CD's" that he can open, close and play all by himself. And, his Thomas Duplo trains that he can use with his train set he already has.




The requisite pictures in front of the tree. *Note -- We broke down and bought an artificial tree after putting the live one outside so I could breathe. Eli was really sad to see it go, and was a little slow to warm up to the fake tree. But, all's fine now, and it was definitely nice to have some sort of tree for the festivities.




These are our fairly sad attempts at family photos for the evening, which was why we took a picture without Eli in front of the tree.



We started the evening early, and so we were done by 7:30, which was really nice. Eli definitely enjoyed Christmas this year, but it's still a lot of excitement and stimulation for a two-year old. So, the wind down time was much appreciated. Here's a few pictures of the tree that night and a few of Eli and Daddy relaxing and reading one of his new Elmo books.