PRESENTS!!!

I just received a box full of beautifully wrapped Christmas presents from my mom. As much as I would love to tear into them now I decided to let the anticipation build…which is hard for me. So instead I stacked them in a neat pile where I would have put the tree had I put one up. Husband and I decided against gifts this year but thanks to our parents we will still have something to look forward to Christmas morning. It took me a long time to learn to appreciate not knowing exactly what was under the tree. I like to know what is coming to me and always have to know the who, what, where, and when. You can ask Husband and Jenn about the months of planning and covert ops that go into surprising me with anything. It is like I have a sixth sense about when a present is brought into the house. I must then sniff it out and find out what it is. As a child I learned to peel the tape away from the wrapping paper so I could pull it back a bit to see what goodies were hiding underneath. My early attempts were sloppy. So sloppy that my mom could easily see that the presents had been tampered with. In fact there was one year that she had to completely rewrap all of my presents to throw me off on Christmas morning. But in time I got better at covering my tracks. I would say that between the ages of 6-13 I always knew exactly what I was getting. Now you may say that this takes all the fun out of Christmas...but for me half the fun was the thrill of the hunt. I recently posted this photo of us three kids sitting in front of the tree Christmas morning as my Facebook profile picture. You can see I have a present in my lap and an evil grin on my face. It is because I know that in that box is Dallas the palomino Barbie horse. And below this photo are a few of the comments made by my sister, brother, and mom. I can see that the wounds of my “detective work” are still a little fresh for my mom. P.S. I did get over the whole snooping thing...eventually