I Never Expected

Christmas is full of surprises. M and I were agonizing about when to open presents, because the morning church service was at 9am. That meant that we wouldn't really have time to tear through the loot before heading out the door, so the plan was to make E wait until after church. Uh, I did not hold out much hope for that one.

The first thing she said when she woke up was, "Are there presents under the tree?" I told her that we would have to go look. Out she went to the living room in her footie pajamas, where she found a pile of stuff from Santa. She actually jumped up and down...just like the commercials. She also found an empty cup ("Santa drank all the milk!") and a half eaten cookie ("He took a little nibble!") She started grabbing presents, but I told her that we would have to wait...we softened the blow by showing her that there were gifts in her stocking that we could open immediately.

M and I got our coffee in hand and went over to the couch to watch E paw through the little things in her stocking. Her favorites were the lip gloss and a pink fuzzy pen...ever the girlie. Baby m did say "Oooh" a few times as he looked through his stocking stuffers, but he really just wanted to hold E's fuzzy pen.

We got out the door for church without incident, and the service was very nice. We decided not to shake hands during the peace, after E rocked the church with a really gnarly cough. As it was, I'm sure those pews are still covered in toddler germs. Sorry, parishioners. Silent Night and Joy to the World were played beautifully by the organist, and we drove home in some very Christmassy weather.

I was really proud of the patience E showed in waiting for her gifts...but there may be another explanation. Later in the day she looked a little lethargic, and her temp turned out to be over 101. So maybe what looked like patience was actually the inability to put up any kind of fight!