This is Julia’s second Christmas coming up and she is not a baby any more. Her milestones right now are that she has finally gotten her second tooth and she is quickly improving at standing and walking. Her teething hasn’t passed yet so maybe another tooth soon, but the second tooth that came in was a top tooth directly opposite the first tooth. I guess she wanted to be able to crush a cheerio between some teeth and hurried that one out.

Julia has a lot of control in her standing. She can stand up without holding onto furniture if there is something small to push off from. She likes to stand and swing her shoulders back and forth and giggle. She can squat down and stand back up too without much support. I still love to watch her plop down onto her bottom from a standing position, but that trick’s days are numbered. She can take 3-4 steps in a row to get some place, but if she is walking to me as she gets close she just falls toward me knowing that I will catch her. She knows that crawling is more efficient, so if she can’t get someplace by walking along the furniture, she is more likely just to get down on her knees and crawl.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas at our house! The other day Emily helped me finish up wrapping a gift for Robby. She picked out three bows to place on the gift and stuck them down. We then hunted for the perfect hiding spot under the tree among the other gifts. When Robby got home, she promptly told him that he had a gift under the tree and tried to take him to the tree to find it. Thank goodness I had the gift in the box before she started helping me or else she would have told him what was in the box too. Emily hasn’t mastered the art of keeping secrets yet!

God was good to give our girls friends who are almost identical in age that they can spend a lot of time with. Elena and Maeve will not always live close to us so we thought it would be fun to get their photos taken together. Everything was pretty distracting so it was a little hard to get them interested in looking at the camera. That’s kids for you! Emily and Elena spent a lot of time dancing together. Thankfully they paused and looked at the camera for this amazing photo.

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.

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.