Christmas has come, but it hasn’t gone yet. The remains are still scattered over our living room floor. This is the first year we have celebrated Christmas with a child who is capable of interacting with it so much. Our celebration began on Christmas Eve at church being reminded of the story of Christmas. It continued on to Christmas Day where we opened gifts, ate good food, visited with Grammy and Granddaddy, and played with lots of toys.

I was so pleased to see the joy that Emily found in the day. She loved opening gifts and playing with what was inside. The word ‘play’ was added to her vocabulary on Christmas. I’m sure that she got the concept but today when she got up from her nap I told her that we would have lunch and then play. She then requested to skip lunch and go and ‘pay’ which I translated to play. She proceeded to use the word for the rest of the day.

I love to watch her explore things. How she is willing to do the same thing over and over again, how she is willing to try the same thing from different angles to see what happens, how she adds sound effects to actions, and how she imitates Mommy’s antics in her play. There was a lot of exploring because of Christmas! We so appreciate our family and friends their generosity with us and our daughters. Thanks so much – we love you all!

Merry Christmas! We are looking forward to this Christmas – the joy of Emily opening gifts and hugging on Julia.

A few funny stories from Christmas Eve.

I’m not sure what is sweeter than this display of love. I had put Julia on the couch, and Emily had proceeded to climb up to play with her. Hugging and kissing is one of her favorite games to play with her sister. After hugging her she got a blanket, laid down next to Julia, and covered the two of them up with the blanket. I guess she wanted to play night-night with Julia.

Julia has started to smile and express herself in ways that do not involve fussing or crying. If you get close to her and start talking in an animated way – out pops a grin and smile. It is so much fun! I tried to teach Emily to play peek-a-boo with her yesterday, but Emily didn’t quite get the consept of doing it to entertain Julia. When Emily understands that Julia is smiling because of something that she did, we will not be able to stop Emily from being a ham.

Julia is learning to use her arms and neck. She will reach out for a toy that catches her eye. This morning Julia decided that she wanted to wake us up and play. Today is Robby’s first day of his Christmas break, so I decided to let him sleep in and got up to play with Julia. I held her ‘sitting up’ on my lap, which is one of her favorite positions, and enterained her with her rattle. She would reach out and touch the rattle and bob her head in excitement. I guess it was some of her first multi-tasking, she had to move her neck while at the same time move her arms. It was hard work because she needed to take a nap.

We needed to move some leaves in our yard, so Emily and I spend a couple of hours outside accomplishing the task while Robby had baby duty. Emily had some toy rakes to help me with, but she liked to use Mommy’s rake. Lucky for me, she didn’t enjoy wrangling the awkward adult rake for long and went to play with other things. More leaves have fallen so I will put her to work again soon.

Julia has been enjoying the Christmas tree lights. We have found that when she is fussy, she likes to look at the lights to distract her. One day she was a little fussy, and I needed to lay her down to do something. I decided to try laying her just under the Christmas tree, so she could watch the lights. By the time I had finished what I needed to do she was asleep.