Christmas 2011

We broke with tradition for Christmas 2011, by not waking up at Noosa. This year, Tyden and Anne wanted to host Christmas at their new house in Brisbane, so Eli and I stayed over to ensure that we could wake up to see what Santa had delivered. Fortunately, Santa was also comfortable with this plan (I wrote him a letter explaining where we would be) and Eli woke to discover that Santa had brought him a reindeer as promised (this is what he'd asked for when he paid a visit to Santa at the shopping centre a few weeks earlier. As an aside, when Eli asked for a reindeer, Santa said "But it's much too hot here for a reindeer", to which Eli replied "A pretend reindeer, not a real reindeer!" Needless to say, I'm glad he set Santa straight).



There were heaps of presents piled under and around the Christmas tree and Eli and Alora were very excited...



After some initial gift opening, Eli sat down with Alora and educated her on how to play with her Prince, by showing her how his Star Wars figures could fight with him! Armed with no weapons or super powers, I figured that these battles might be a little one-sided for the Prince, but to Alora's credit she went along with this game for a lot longer than I thought she might (and she had the vision to keep her Princess well away from the action)!



The gift giving and opening was pretty chaotic (as always) with Eli, Alora, Oliver, Harrison and Charlie really cleaning up (in terms of gifts) and messing up (in terms of wrapping paper). All of the boys actually took quite a likling to the big pile of wrapping paper (we should have saved on gifts and just given them paper!) and all four of them spent some time wrestling around in it...



Eli has always been good at trying new foods and Christmas Day was no exception, as he asked if he could try prawns and crab for the first time. Here he is looking like a very big boy (in my opinion) with his first ever prawn - he liked it, but he liked the crab meat more as he devoured a leg - he even sampled some of the crab shell, just to see what it was like! Even better, he didn't have an adverse reaction to either of them, so maybe we'll see a bit more seafood on the menu now (not that I can afford to buy crabs all the time!).



We headed back home after a fun-filled day, so as is his want, Eli finished the day off with a nice snooze on the mat in our living room...you can't really have a better Christmas Day than that!