Christmas Stuff

Although we don't know yet if Richard will get orders to the deployable Ike, we're thinking he will. And if he does, we're thinking he will still be here next Christmas. But being sea duty, there is the possibility that he will be gone for the next three Christmases. So, we're kind of doing it up big this year. Which is kind of hard to do for a toddler who probably won't remember any of this. But at least we're taking pictures of most things.

We got Christmas photos taken of Lillian, both in her fancy red dress and in a Christmas sweater with lights.

Lillian helped me wrap Christmas presents and LOVED it. Wanted to be wrapped up herself.

She helped us in putting the ornaments on the tree. Richard was sitting at the box of ornaments and I was standing at the tree and she would grab each ornament from Richard and hand it to me.

Her ornament this year was a puppy, as she is obsessed with puppies right now. Our family ornament is one from Disney World.

She helped me make fudge and chocolate covered pretzels.

My good friend from high school, Kerstin, hand made us a huge felt Christmas Tree advent calendar. Each day Lillian gets to pick a small toy, piece of candy or a sticker.

Richard has picked out and purchased his special gift for Lillian, now he's just waiting for it to arrive and him to wrap it.

We're going outdoor ice skating on Friday night at MacArthur Mall. Lillian gets to have her own pair of double runner skates.

Next weekend we are going with friends to Busch Gardens' new Christmas Town. And then on Sunday, we're having our Sunday School party, the theme is "tacky Christmas". We all have outfits and I can't wait.

We've been teaching Lillian to say Merry Christmas. Right now it sounds like "Merry its". We're also teaching her to say "ho ho ho" in response to "what does Santa say?" She picked up on this, perfectly, right away, until she realized we wanted her to do it, now she's just refusing.

We're studying colors right now, so I printed off little photos of baby Jesus in the manger, and colored it in, two of each color. She is playing a matching color game with them. I also printed off four colors of a stable and there is a Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus and star that color coordinates with each stable and she places them in the correct color.

We watched the Thanksgiving Day Parade and saw Santa come to town. We also bought the Radio City Rockettes DVD and Lillian is just mystified by it.

We have a bag that I made that holds all of our Christmas music, DVDs and books, and it hangs on our front door. Each day we read a book or two and sometimes watch a DVD.

We're always working on various Christmas coloring pages and crafts.

We all got new pajamas that we will open on Christmas eve.

We are hoping to head to Michigan early Christmas week. While there we will be spending a couple nights in a hotel in northern Michigan with Richard's family and a couple nights in a hotel near Chicago with my family.