Baby Gant Days: Christmas in Austin

For the first time, we celebrated Christmas in Austin. We started things off by having Christmas eve brunch with our dear friends Joel, Stacy and Gideon Hock.

They are about a year apart in age, but Jasper and Gideon are chums.

We attended Christmas Eve service as a family which was special. We're now a family of four, and it feels to us like we're so much more of a family than we were with one child. (Maybe it's just because we're so tired all the time. There are fewer breaks as parents of two.) It felt nice to sit in church each holding a child and singing Christmas hymns. And since Jasper is growing up, learning and understanding more about things, it feels right to create memories of our own that have impact. After church, we returned to enjoy a wonderful meal. It's very similar to the Christmas eve meal Erica's family has enjoyed for years. We made Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes & seafoam salad. For whatever reason, not having vegetables as adults was totally ok ... but we made some carrots for Jasper. The meal was great, and Jasper enjoyed "Nana's special meatballs".

After dinner, we gathered around the nativity scene as a family to discuss the Christmas story. We considered this year a practice since we anticipated Jasper wouldn't be that interested. We've read & talked about the Christmas story a lot throughout the month of December. Jasper loved reading about the baby Jesus, the angels coming to talk to the shepherds & glorifying God, the shepherds running to find the baby Jesus and the wise men coming a long way on camels to worship the baby Jesus in his Bible. He can even gladly tell you that the angels sang "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill to men." However, on Christmas eve, he was more interested in playing with the characters as if they were truck drivers than he was talking about the significance of Jesus' birth, but that was ok.

After Jasper was asleep, Erica and I got wrapping! Jasper tried to unwrap a gift that arrived in the mail a week before Christmas. He didn't understand that you had to wait and impatiently did not want to wait. Since we don't have tons of storage space in our house, it was easier to keep things hidden when they were not boxed and wrapped. But that meant last minute wrapping. Oh joy!

In addition, I needed to put together the "Jeep" that Nana and Papa got for Jasper. I had a funny thought realizing this was the first of many years where I, the father, had something to put together during the evening hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas. It was a long night of assembling and wrapping.

here is the "Jeep" in pre-assembled form.

After we finished preparations, we tried to get some sleep. Unfortunately, Benjamin needed to feed during the wee hours and then Jasper woke up very early. We don't think it was from anticipation for Christmas, but regardless it was way too early and a bad combination with Benjamin. (I think they're in cahoots sometimes!) Since pancakes are fast becoming a special Saturday morning tradition around here, we thought there was no less reason to celebrate with them on Christmas morning. Here are some fun photos from breakfast. The pancakes are green & red from sprinkles. Jasper really liked that.

We started things off with Jasper opening his stocking.

His favorite gift out of there was his new spiderman toothbrush that plays music.

Jasper, having just had a birthday, was very excited about having gifts to open. He opened them with glee, and he didn't waste any time nor try to preserve any paper. The kid's got flare.

This is a four-foot puzzle Jasper got for Christmas. He and daddy took a break to put it together. Jasper loves puzzles, and I don't think it will be long before he can do this one himself.

In preparation for our trip to Utah, Jasper got new long underwear and a neat hat. We love Smartwool!

Jasper got this cool front end loader spoon from his Minnesota cousins, Auntie Brittany and Uncle Adam. He thought it was sooooo cool!

Benjamin was sleepy on Christmas morning, but he still got into the spirit.

While he was awake, we tried to take advantage of Benjamin's alertness for some Christmas morning photos of the boys.

We're checking out Benjamin's new book "Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes." Jasper helped me count out his fingers and toes to verify that he did indeed have ten of each. He can count to ten, no sweat now! We counted Benjamin's, too. It was nice of Benjamin to be sock-less. It really facilitated the counting.

Here is the Jeep. This was our last gift to open on Christmas morning. We actually didn't wrap it, we just ceremoniously led Jasper out to the garage to see and play with it. He knew exactly what it was and was happy to get started playing with it right away.