The West Family: Christmas Day

We had a great Christmas this year. It was joyful and relaxing. Bren woke up with a runny nose which is unfortunate but he is 2 and it is winter so there is not much you can do to avoid that. As a happy result he did sleep in for us..horray! Once he awoke we led him to the living room where he lazily walked around the corner as usual until.....he spotted it..... oh boy..... it was....drumroll please......A TRAIN TABLE!!! And we watched as his eyes grews and he processed what he saw and then it was a dash for the gift of all gifts in the eyes of one Mr. Brennen West!! Oh the joy! One pleasing part of him being the age he is, is that he's very polite and very greatful and does not get the concept of Santa so we got all the glorious credit "thank you mama, thank you daddy"!!!! It was worth all the work it took to get it here.
What work you ask? Oh let me tell you the story of getting the table here. We had been storing the table at the empty New Haven house until we could pick it up on Christmas Eve. Anthony drove over there after we put Brennen in bed and to his suprise the power had not yet been restored to the house yet. My neighbor friend had hers back so we made an assumtion which was incorrect. So here is Anthony in a dark house with a big table upstairs in the farthest corner from the door. So off to the store he drove, in bad weather no less. He picked up some flashlights and headed back. Once he got up to the room he began getting the table ready to move and that is when it happened...Anthony had the scare of a lifetime!!! HAHAHA I had an old toy that had recently (unkown to Anthony) been pulled out of the attic and left next to the table to be given to Bren. It was a talking Mr Potato Head and there in the dark at 11 pm in an unfamiliar, empty house he hears ...." WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT" he said he jumped a foot in the air and looked around for the person talking. He said it scared him to death and that his heart didn't stop pounding until a mile down the road! Then once he got home and proceeded to spend 2 hours trying to configure this track perfectly only to fail at the perfectly architected 2 interlocking track concept. So I took over and finished the task in 15 min which annoyed him a little more (I realized right away that his concept would never work and came up with an alternative). So while the look on Bren's face Christmas morning was priceless, I think the story of how it came to be was even better!

After gifts we did some cooking. I let Bren decorate Jesus' birthday cake (pictured above) which was fun and he told Jesus Happy Birthday. Then we headed off to dad's for lunch. After lunch we relaxed for a bit then headed home for a family nap. Later that evening Jaron came over and enjoyed a fire and dessert with us. It was a nice relaxing Christmas. Oh wait it didn't end quite that easy, of course not we do have a toddler!!! Thanks to Aunt Kimberly, Brennen got his first piece of electronics. A perfectly "great in theory" MP3 player! Oh we were all excited about it. It has an external speaker and it swithes songs when you shake it! Excellent fun, until he wanted to take it to bed with him. We thought sure, you can take your music with you to bed what will it hurt?!?! Let me warn all you out there, sending a 2yr old to bed with an electronic device is a recipe for disaster, or at least a recipe for a toddler awake 2 hours after bedtime. We kept hearing "mama fix it" & "daddy broken" for a very long time uhhhgg! We would go in to check it out and he would have hit the pause button or it would be playing the wrong song etc. Oh what a lesson learned. But it is over and we enjoyed it and we have stories to tell!!! So I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas as well!!!!!