Our Christmas Eve was a late one, with Lynnea finally in bed my wife and I wrapped gifts until the wee hours. She was very tired because she had been traveling all day, and I was in a lot of pain because I'm having trouble with some oral surgery I had done recently. But we finally finished by like 3 AM.

However, every Christmas morning I always want to get a shot of my daughter Lynnea as she sees the tree for the first time, and also a shot of the tree with all the presents piled around it, and each year my daughter sneaks down early before I can get up. Heck last year, when I got down, she had pulled all the presents out from under the tree and sorted them into piles by recipient!!! So much for getting a nice photo! :-/

So call it proactive discipline, but this year I sealed the entrance to the downstairs with wrapping paper and put a sign on it telling Lynnea to go back to bed and wait for us. To no avail... she was too keyed up about christmas and tore the paper while trying to squeeze around it so she could peek at the gifts. However at least this time she didn't move anything and came back upstairs and harassed us until we dragged our exhausted asses out of bed at 7 in the morning.

Money's been tight this year so there were almost no gifts for Patty or I, which is okay, we don't really need anything. Pat asked only for a Nintendo DS Lite--she had picked up some "braintwister" type games for the DS and she wanted to have her own DS to play them on. Me, I got a copy of Understanding Exposure by Brian Peterson, the xbox 360 game "Mass Effect", the ridiculously bad horror film "Black Sheep", and a replacement for my copy of the film "The Eye" which was damaged when I loaned it to someone.

Lynnea had a blast and tore into the presents with gusto. And we also had another visit from our friend the cardinal and I managed to snag a few shots of him. Then it was off to my sister Donna's house for a Christmas meal and an afternoon watching Pirates of the Carribean 3.

All in all, not a bad christmas, except me having to pop tylenol with codeine all day to keep the pain manageable. *sigh* It's always something.

Anyway hope you all are having a happy holiday season, and I wish you all the best in the new year.