Christmas Summary

Well now that the dust has settled I thought it would be good to take some time and gather my thoughts and stories from our Christmas. This year was my year to have Maddox on Christmas Eve and morning. Hayley decided to have Maddie's Christmas with her on the 23rd so that I could enjoy not only Christmas Eve, but also ALL of Christmas day with him. Big time sacrifice for her to not have him on Christmas, but as we try to do as often as possible, she looked out for his best interest and stability and decided that the going back and forth on such an overwhelming day was probably not in his best interest. So ya, rambling to start this post but had to give some props to his mom for looking out for him.

Our Christmas Eve tradition always takes place at my grandpa's house. It involves quite a bit of food, family, and now it involves Maddox trying to steal the show and get all of the attention he can get. He's the only child there, so everyone loves seeing him. Sadly for him it's probably pretty boring. This year he set up shop in the dining area and split his time between singing "Hey Jude" to whomever wanted to listen, reciting the pledge of allegiance, and most importantly throwing touchdowns to people as they walked by. These were mostly unsuccesful touchdowns because if you're not looking and someone drills you in the crotch with a football or their blanket or whatever they may be throwing, where I come from that's considered an incomplete pass. I'm trying to teach him that before you throw something to someone you should make sure they are paying attention and wanting you to throw something to them. And that they aren't carrying anything in their hands. It's a work in progress, but he's getting better with it. Like most 2 year olds the he thinks the funniest thing in the world is catching someone off guard and hearing something to the effect of, "ouch," "ooomph," or "aaaah," or anything like that, he always finishes it up with his catch phrase, "BONK!" Pure comedic gold in his mind. Afterwards my immediate family, brothers, sister, and parents met up at my house to get Maddox ready for bed and hang out. I'm terrible at the Christmas waiting thing so I let Maddox open a couple of presents, which turned out backfiring on me because who wants to go to bed when they just opened some cool presents?

Christmas morning was pretty calm. Maddox made his typical 4-5 am wakeup call in dad's room. It's like clockwork lately, he comes walking in, throws his blanket up on my bed, and climbs up pulling on the sheets for leverage. As he's climbing he lets me know that he is there. "Dad, dad, um hi dad. I'm gonna lay with you for a minute." Of course my best parenting skills aren't at work at that hour, I don't even know my own name about that time, so I just nod and let him lay completely sideways taking over the entire bed, and he rests his bed head right in my rib region. Just another way for him to remind me that it's his world and I just live in it. About 8:30 am Maddox let me know that it was time to get up and eat, oatmeal time as we typically call it. Once in the living room he lost track of his hunger after seeing his gifts he'd opened the night before. After he played with them for about 10 minutes I was able to convince him he had other gifts and he needed to open them. Every gift brought the same result, "oooh, what is it? Oooooh, A BOX!!!!" And then of course he would find out what was in the box, and say, "open it!!!" Then he would play with each toy for a few minutes until I could convince him that the next one would be sooooo cool and he needed to open it. After he was completely overwhelmed with the new toys he'd received and he ran around not knowing what to play with, we decided it would be a good idea to head to grandma's so that he could get even more spoiled and open even more gifts that would likely end up in the closet after the next two weeks. Now grandma decided that it would be a good idea to get Maddox a car. This is the equivalent of giving Cookie Monster a years supply of Chips Ahoy. Unfortutely it was also a gift to me, the gift of scratched up kitchen drawers and walls. He LOVES the car. It was the hit of the holiday season. He drives it into the kitchen and repeatedly slams into the stove just so that he can see his reflection and yell "crash!!" I'm already stressing about where my car insurance premiums are headed here in 14 years. Watching him with this car is so fun though. He talks about it like it's a real car. He takes trips around the house like he's heading to the store, to mom's house, or my personal favorite "to the emergency." Since he's a fireman of course. I finally gave up protecting the walls after about an hour. I decided that I could probably fix up my house when he turns 18 and goes to college.

We had a great holiday weekend though. After Christmas we spent the next few days just lounging around the house and playing with Maddox's new toys. One of the new gifts I got for Christmas was a new video camera and camera so that I can post new pics and video of Mad Dog since this is his blog. SO that's one of the new years resolutions for me, more pics and video of him. I got some good stuff Monday night of him reading me books for story time. It's impossible to keep track of all that he's doing, about 50 times each day I think, "I wish I could record this." But I will do better this next year.

We hope everyone had a Merry Christmas, and we hope to keep in touch with you all in the new year.