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.

I decorated for Christmas in stages because of sickness in our house. One evening I brought out the fireplace decorations. Emily was very curious about the decorations and inspected each one. She was very taken with the snowman and brought her blankets over to him. She proceeded to lay down next to him to hang out. It was so funny! She talked/babbled a lot when I explained the birdhouse decoration. I wondered if she wanted to know where the bird was that was going to live in the house. The perch was her favorite part of that decoration.