Call me Santa's little elf!

Christmas Eve this year was spent entirely in the kitchen...prepping food for our family Christmas brunch, baking a ridiculous amount of cookies, and baking 4 huge batches of homemade granola (for gifts). Kapri was such a trooper - she slept for a good while during her nap, then hung out with me...then back & forth from the living room to the kitch...she's good playing by herself when mamma needs her to ;-)

I also made some seriously cute holiday gifts on Christmas Eve Eve and Christmas Eve - literally these were the only two days I had to start AND finish them all. Phew, glad i did it in time...barely! Check them out...click here.

And of course I made a special big cookie batch for Santa, with a big mug of ice cold milk. The only way I got K to pose next to these cookies (and without eating them), was to promise her one of her very own...she did good - ps, I love bribery:

Before heading off to bed, Kapri got to say farewell to our beloved Buddy...I explained to her that Santa would come while she was sleeping to drop off her special presents, and our little elf would hitch a ride back to the North Pole with him to work on more gifts for the next Christmas. I'm excited to come up with new hiding places for him when he comes back after Thanksgiving 2012.

Here's a recap of all his hiding places - there's also a full online 'scrapbook' of Buddy's adventures here

James worked late Christmas Eve - so we literally didn't sit down to wrap presents until around 10:00pm! Next year I'm definitely going to wrap as I buy - instead of all at once the night before! As we stumbled upstairs around 11:45, I snapped this pic - oh my nice clean house, it looked so nice...before the gift-opening-paper-chaos that was just a short 7 hours away.