The Best Christmas EVER!!

This Christmas was "The best Christmas EVER!" in the Staten home! We had decided to make presents this year and the kids were so excited to give what they had made that between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning I never heard "I want...." or "Can I open.......?" even once! Christmas Eve was wonderful as ususal with our cheese fondu, visit from Santa, our "Christmas Eve program" and, pj's (all made by mom this year!). This year though we had an added surprise! Matt had made body pillows for everyone (except for himself and me) for his presents this year and he really wanted his brothers and Dad to have them to sleep on "so that they could have really good Christmas Eve dreams". Well as he was giving them to everyone you could tell that as excited as he was he also felt a little down because he didn't have one too. But the smile on his face when he realized that I had made him one too was priceless! And somehow Mike had convinced Tyler to make me one too, so we all had new body pillows for Christmas Eve!

Christmas morning was a great "mom moment". We had decided to open our gifts to each other before anything from Santa. And not once did the boys ask to even look at the Santa presents!

Here's what everyone made

Tyler: made me a body pillow, Mike a framed drawing of Harry Potter and a letter about how he loves to read with his dad. And then he cut everyone's name out on the bandsaw and painted or stained them.
Matt: made body pillows for everyone else, and a beautiful wood bowl for me.
Isaac: made me a magic wand and then for everyone else he drew a picture of him and them doing something together. Then he and Mike made frames and he painted and decorated them.
Lucas: Made magic wand's for his brothers.

It was amazing! Of course they also loved their new suits, the tickets to "Dinosaurs Walking", the Wii and everything else, but the homemade gifts were still their favorite!