The Best Laid Plans...

What a fantastic Christmas Eve and Christmas Day! Nick and I have been working on plans for these two days for a while since we were pretty excited about starting some of our own family traditions with Cayle. Ever since Cayle was born, Nick and I have been pretty good at going with the flow, understanding plans will change, and just trying to be generally more flexible. So, it should have come as no surprise to us that even though we put lots of thought in to our plans for the past two days, nothing went exactly as we had planned. But we still had lots of fun with the three of us having lots of time together!

We had planned to put Cayle down for bed at his regular time on Christmas Eve (about 7 pm) and let him sleep until we left for church. Nick and I were planning to play board games, watch Christmas movies, and have some appetizers while Cayle slept before church. But, about 15 minutes in to "It's a Wonderful Life", I went to bed, and slept for 2.5 hours! So much for games, and movies, and appetizers :( Nick woke me up and we got ready for church and headed out to look at Christmas lights. Cayle loves looking at lights! So we drove around Eagle a bit, then headed up to Beaver Creek for church. The place was packed! Cayle did well, but he is in a very talkative state...so he seemed very loud as he pointed out all of the lights at church, and made cow and horse noises, and said "bye-bye" to people who got up, etc. He was by far the youngest person at church (by about 7 years??), and he stuck out like a sore thumb! But he did a great job and even got lots of smiles from those sitting around us. We got home from church about 145 am and put Cayle to sleep so that Nick and I could play Santa. What fun that was! After putting out the gifts, Nick and I had some yummy cheese sticks and played a game of Sequence (I won yet again!). We finally went to bed about 3 am.

presents all set out by the tree

chef nick with the cheese sticks

Cayle slept in a little bit today - all the way 'til 730 am! We had a butter braid (yummy pastry) for breakfast, and opened some gifts. Cayle skyped with grandma and grandpa Brummer for a bit and showed off his new toys.

having fun opening his gifts

he played with the basketball hoop for hours...literally

his new bike!

it's so cute when he lays on his belly like this in front of the computer

I started lunch, and figured it would be served with perfect timing for when Cayle usually eats his lunch. But, he decided to take a nap about 11, so Nick and I went ahead and ate without him. We had a ton of food - ham, brussel sprouts, mashed potatoes and gravy, macaroni and cheese, rolls, and cheesecake. Nick and I had planned to go cross-country skiing with Cayle after lunch...but the little guy ended up taking a 3.5 hour long nap! When he finally woke up, he had a little lunch, and then we were able to head out. When we got to Sylvan Lake, we found they didn't have nearly enough snow for us to ski, or even snowshoe, so we ended up just going on a walk. We spent the rest of Christmas skyping with grandma Hammers and just hanging out.

daddy and cayle on the hike

mommy and cayle by the frozen lake

Nick had been concerned about us not differentiating to Cayle that some presents were from Santa and some were from mom and dad...no worries here, he had no idea why he had presents to open, or who they were from, or why we went to church at midnight last night. I think he's just enjoying all the attention he gets from mom and dad being around 24-7. I promise you, his mom and dad are enjoying all the family time. He's a great little boy, and tons of fun to be with :)