Braden's First Christmas!

A Christmas We Will Forever Cherish
pics from Christmas Eve DayChristmas Eve ~ First gift, from Uncle Pat

Christmas Morning ~ Happy Birthday Jesus!

Mommy & Me...cool new hat from Daddy!
Braden being silly!

3pm: all done opening my gifts! I love everything; thank you to everyone!
I love my Da-Da! He's so fun to goof around with!

Braden, we love you ~ you were the best Christmas gift EVER! xoxo

We had such a special First Christmas with our precious boy, Braden! This year we have established many traditions for our little family. Jesse & I both LOVE the holiday season and we want this to be something Braden looks forward to each year as well!

Christmas Eve we enjoyed a wonderful dinner at home ~ one of our favorite dishes, burritos! Nothing fancy, but oh so yummy! They were awesome and I think this will be a regular for our family each year! Jesse only worked a half day and then we had the afternoon together. We enjoyed an early dinner and then got all dressed up for our Christmas Eve Candlelight service at our church. This was one of the best Christmas Eve services either of us had ever been to! It had awesome music, an adorable kid skit (which I actually whispered to Jess how it is going to be so fun to see Braden in that play someday...I remember all the Christmas plays I was in as a child and they were so much fun!!) and surrounded by families. We enjoyed seeing some friends and then we went to see more Christmas lights afterwards. I'm so sorry, but I have no pics of Braden all dressed up, he ended up staying in his car seat since there were no seats left at church. He looked absolutely adorable though in the outfit my Mom & Dad bought him!! When I was growing up it was a tradition to open one Christmas gift on CE...and that gift was always fun new jammies! We chose the CE gift for Braden to open being a gift from his Uncle Pat since we had already given Braden his Christmas jammies...Braden had such a great time opening the package...and about an hour later he LOVED playing with his basketball/baseball/football play set...but we all know he would rather eat his basketballs and chew the baseball bat :) Adorable... Jesse and I sipped on my absolute favorite Dessert Wine from Cass WineryVineyards and our yummy homemade chocolate chip cookies...we had a wonderful evening, just the 3 of us!! Braden slept with us that night and we cherished every moment. We completely forgot to read the Christmas story...oh well. One thing we did different this year, that we will probably never do again was put all the gifts under the tree the night before Christmas Eve...we won't be doing this again because we want Braden to enjoy the fantasy of Santa, but this year it worked out great!

Christmas morning we woke up at just a little after 8:30 ~ yes, we have a rock star sleeper :) We got up and we all sang Happy Birthday to Jesus!! When I was growing up the stocking was always my favorite - my parents were always so creative with our stockings and it's something I still (at age 27) look forward to!! Jesse is wonderful and does such a great job stuffing my stocking and keeping this a continued favorite for me :) So, first things first :) We ecstatically handed Braden his stocking ~ handmade by his Great Grandma (yes, you are amazing Great Grandma)...I wasn't sure what to expect from him this Christmas in regards to him opening gifts...I wasn't sure if he would get into it being that he's only 6.5 months old, but he blew both Jesse & I away! He just LOVED opening all his gifts and was talking, and laughing and eating tissue paper & wrapping paper...we have it all on video and tons of pics (I think we took about 600 if you can believe it!! LOL!)...he opened gifts until just after 3pm Christmas afternoon. He was spoiled to say the least. Jesse & I started a tradition last Christmas for Braden...we started a Disney collection for him. We are HUGE fans of Disney movies and are disappointed that they rarely show any decent disney cartoons anymore, so we started our own collection for him. We went a little overboard both last year and once again this year...but we just love Disney movies too much!! This year we started another tradition for Braden ~ a book club...he LOVES to look at his books (and chew them), but what better gift than the gift of wonder and creativity through reading!! We had an amazing breakfast, blueberry cream french toast ~ yes, it was very yummy!! For din-din we enjoyed an amazing wine, good ham, spinach/mushrooms. We had a wonderful day celebrating our Savior's birth with just our little famliy. We did not get out of our jammies all day nor did we drive anywhere and I would not trade it for anything in the world!
We had a Christmas to remember and have so very much to be thankful for.

We hope you all had an amazing Christmas! Happy Birthday Jesus!