An Ellsworth Christmas

Our little family was blessed to have a wonderful Christmas yesterday.

Here is our Christmas tree.  For some reason I particularly liked the lights on this year.

I wanted to make sure we captured Cadance's expression when we came down the stairs.  I know it's not much, but we could tell she knew something was going on.

Growing up, my siblings and I took an official picture every year with out stockings.  We are continuing the tradition.  Here it is

I told her to touch her stocking.  One finger.  

After a fabulous breakfast of sausage bread and fruit salad we got on those gifts! I'm still a little surprised at how good Cadance is at this stuff.  I loved how she turned her stocking upside down.  It's apparently the best method for removing gifts.

And here she is looking at the photo album I gave her.  I filled it with family members pictures and then we added basically every other 4x6 photo we had in the house that wasn't already in an album.  She loved it.

Steve opening the clapper light system.  I know it's kind of an old person thing, but if you understood the electrical system of our house, you would understand just how amazing this makes our life now.

And just so you can get in on the action, I took a video of Cadance opening a gift.

After all the presents were unwrapped we took Cadance upstairs to show her her final gift.  She walked right up to it, exclaimed, "table!" and then sat down and went to work.  It's so nice having a table for her upstairs. And I love that it's blue.

We spent the morning painting with watercolors. (courtesy of Santa)

And then we decorated the easiest gingerbread house known to man.  It quickly turned into the ugliest gingerbread house, but that's okay.  It was also the most frustrating thing in the world for Cadance.  Decorating with candy is not an easy task for a toddler.

After a fantastic ham dinner we took a tacky lights tour around Richmond.  Definitely a tradition.  These people are intense.  They have websites.  They can register to become an official tacky lights house.  Get excited.  But, some of my favorite decorations weren't from the tacky houses, like this little gem of a snowman.

He actually freezes.  And then this was the most hilarious one.

It was set up next to this house.  This house was the ultimate.  Visitors from 93 countries.  Over 600 homemade decorations.  170,000+ lights.  Ummm...yes, that's amazing.  This picture only captures about a third of what they put up.

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and good luck this coming year!  Now onto Texas for our vacation.  We head to the airport in 2.5 hours.  Better start packing!