Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!

It’s Christmas Eve, our baby girl’s first one ever! We were so excited to share this day with her. This year we did things a little differently than we will in the future.

We had Lillian open all of her presents tonight instead of in the morning. Next year she’ll open them on Christmas morning! (This year she’ll look in her stocking on Christmas morning, and we helped her open her presents tonight!)

This purple kitty isn’t one of her Christmas gifts, it is a toy she’s had from her Grandma and Grandpa since she was born! She was just loving to play with it yesterday when I took these pictures of her.

Josh got these beautiful pictures of Lillian:

These gifts are for me??! Oh boy!!

 I took these pictures with my iphone:

A tradition that my parents did for me and my brother and sisters when we were little is they’d have the presents from them to us wrapped and under the tree in the days leading up to Christmas.

Then on Christmas morning when we all raced upstairs we’d see that there were miraculously more presents under the tree! These were from Santa Claus! Such fun and happy memories! 🙂

(Here is a vintage photo of me, far right, and my brother and sisters on a Christmas morning!)

We are going to be doing that tradition with Lillian!

This year though we put Lillian’s gift from Santa under the tree already and let her open it along with the gifts from us. (Santa brought her a Fisher Price Little Superstar classical stacker.)

From Mama and Daddy Lillian got the B. Meowsic kitty keyboard that she loved at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, a book that has animals spelling out her name, a blanket embroidered with her name, and a Fisher Price Laugh & Learn Learning Lantern. She was serious as we helped her open her presents…I think she was trying to figure out what we were doing! But then she got really excited and wanted to play her little piano and actually took a couple of rings off her stacker! No pics of her opening her presents (well, us opening her presents, ha ha!) because we wanted to videotape it instead and we were too busy helping her!

Now we’re eagerly looking forward to Christmas morning when we’ll be going up to my parents’ house for a wonderful family feast and presents for the children!