Christmas, Christmas: Part 1

Well, I totally meant to do a mid-week post and then totally didn't. I'm going to try to get caught up this week, though. We're mostly recovered from the holidays and it only took me a week! Ha! I still need to clean up the garland and glitter debris and help Mike carry the boxes upstairs but things are taken apart. It's kind of sad to not have all the decorations up but I left a few fun red things out to leave until Valentine's Day so it's not too bad. If you want to see our decorations, you can click here to see my other blog. I also posted some of my reflections on the past year.

The holidays were quite a bit more fun than I expected. Thanksgiving was, oddly enough, harder than Christmas but I think some of that might have to do with just how excited Autumn was about the whole thing. She even got a good photo with Santa! Here we all are after visiting with Santa. Penny got to come,


so did Lainey,


and, of course, I was there. :) This holiday was the holiday of no one believing I am Autumn's mom. First, the Santa people didn't for reasons I can't figure out. And then New Year's Day, Mike, Autumn and I went to the local Chinese buffet and the waitress didn't think Autumn was my daughter because "she doesn't look Asian enough." Now, don't get me wrong, I know I look not entirely "white" but, really, I don't look that Asian. Anyway, here we are, apparently looking nothing alike, haha.


Mike didn't do Santa but later that day, he and Autumn played I Spy together with her I Spy wand. I thought it was pretty cute when I came upon them behind the table.


A couple days later and it was Christmas Eve! This is the first year Autumn's really gotten the whole Christmas/Santa thing. We read from her storybook Bible every night leading up to Christmas and talked some about how we're fitting Santa into the season. I discovered that while I don't have a problem with Santa, I don't care for the whole "be good or Santa won't bring presents" thing. She and I talked about how I want her to be good, not to get stuff, but because she loves us and wants to behave. :) Anyway, here she is putting out cookies for Santa for the first time.


Santa left her a note and ate the cookies! She was pretty happy except she didn't like that Santa left half a cookie on the plate because Autumn very specifically wanted him to have 5 oreos.


We only got her one gift (a dress up center for her dress up clothes) and Santa just put gifts in her stocking. We figured that between all her family, she'd be getting plenty of gifts. She didn't seem to notice or care that there weren't a million gifts in the living room (the tree is in Mike's office, lol).


One fun thing we did this year that we definitely want to do again...my mom spent the night with us Christmas Eve! We ate popcorn and watched Tangled and my mom got to see Autumn put out cookies and get up all excited. And, believe me, it was a good thing Mike and I showed restraint with the gift buying because my mom went way, way above and beyond!


Oh, my big gift this year? Mike got me a new lens. This is the first photo I took with it!


My family had Christmas dinner at our house. We were excited to have everyone over, especially Donnie and Liz who were here from Las Vegas. Here is Liz having a little milk with her dessert.


Roxie was hysterical Christmas night. She went and got a chair from Autumn's little dollhouse in the living room, brought it to the dining room, said "chair?" and tried to sit in it. Here is Donnie laughing so hard he turned purple.


:) And that was Christmas at our house. If you can believe it, our night wasn't over! We still had to head over to Mike's parents house to open gifts with them...here's a preview of that:


That would be a face of anticipation, excitement, and insanity brought on by it being 3 hours past her bedtime!