Our Christmas

This was definitely a fun and exciting Christmas for The Muffin! I had stressed how we were celebrating the birth of Christ and had failed to mention very much about the whole gift-giving thing. She knew Santa was coming to bring toys, but didn't realize that we would give and receive gifts from others too. She started to get the whole idea of giving and receiving last Friday. Muff's adopted grandparent's, Gammy Gladys and Paul gave her Christmas gifts. She was thrilled. Then on Saturday, we had more visitors who gave her gifts (Larry and Gloria). She realized that there were exciting things in the wrapped boxes and the colorful gift bags. She decided that she wanted to know what was in every package under our tree. Luckily, we didn't have many presents under the tree and none of the presents were for her.

On Christmas Eve we visited with Big Daddy's parents. Muff opened the gifts from Grandma and Grandpa and played a bit before we headed home to get ready for the Christmas Eve service at church. After church, we had dinner and she made a trip to a house on our street that has lots of lights, then had a bath and played really hard before bed.

Christmas morning was lots of fun. I was up at 3:30 with a case of too much on my mind. I've started stressing over our ultrasound appointment in January and then I have vasa previa issues that pop up around holidays, too. I had a cup of coffee and watched the news. I rearranged the gifts that Santa brought and made sure that everything was ready for when The Muffin woke up. As soon as her little eyes opened I told her that I had been downstairs and Santa had defintely made a delivery to our house. She told her Daddy and we headed down. She didn't know where to start! She was thrilled to see that our Advent calendar had been taken off the wall and was under the tree. She had new letter magnets because Santa knew that she'd lost the letter A. A new backpack that I won from JoLynne's blog wasn't wrapped, so she snatched that up and wanted to color with the markers inside. I had to encourage her to open her other gifts. Muff enjoyed all of her presents and was too excited to eat breakfast. After playing for a while, we left our house bound for Nana and Pawpaw's. She loved opening the gifts there and seeing what her cousin Callie had from Santa. Needless to say we were all exhausted by bedtime. I missed my nap and had been up since 3:30, so I couldn't wait to go to bed.

We actually slept until 7:45 this morning! I started removing the indoor Christmas decorations shortly after we went downstairs. By 10:00 I had all of our mess cleaned up, a load of laundry in the dryer and we went to Wal.mart. We were home by 11:30 and had lunch together before I started putting away laudry and getting our clothes together for our little beach trip. We're all three excited about getting away together. Muff is looking forward to visiting R.ipley's Aquarium and Big Daddy and I are thinking about where we want to eat.

And one last, very exciting thing...last night after I had put The Muffin to bed and was getting ready for my shower I felt the first movements of our sweet little Baby-to-be. I can't wait until Big Daddy, The Muffin and Callie can feel them too!