Baby's First Christmas!

I always love Christmas time. I love the white snow on the ground (ha! I can't believe Tyler's first Christmas was green/brown instead of white!), I love twinkly white lights and pretty decorations, Christmas baking, buying gifts, and especially time with family. And most importantly I love hearing the Christmas story and being reminded of why we celebrate and of all God has done for us. What an amazing God we serve! This year it was fun to tell Tyler the story of Jesus' birth (listening or not) and include him in our Christmas traditions.

On the Thursday before Christmas we celebrated at our house as a family. We had a delicious lamb. That's right, lamb! Carl always suggests lamb when I ask his opinion on dinner and I always laugh in his face. So for Christmas I decided to surpise him. I didn't have a clue what I was doing, but it did turn out really well. Then we emptied our stockings and opened our gifts. Tyler is just old enough for Christmas to be really fun with him! He liked tearing the paper and he really liked his presents. In his stocking he got some glow in the dark pacifiers for his crib, a bath toy and a toy cell phone. We were planning to just wrap up the pacifiers and some other things he needed, like some new socks and maybe some Gerber puffs for his stocking. But I saw the bath toy and cell phone at Target and got them in a weak moment. Oops! His big present was a Mega Blocks dump truck full of blocks and the most important part: a little dump truck driver. When he opened it he immediately started grabbing at the little guy and trying to pull it out. Carl was hurrying as fast as he could to untie it while Tyler was very anxious to get it out! He carried it around most of the next day and has brought it most places we've gone since.

The next day Tyler had his 9 month check up (which I will get to in another post) and then we came home, finished some packing and got in the car for the long, LONG drive to Kansas. We left a little later than we wanted to, but it turned out to be perfect. We picked my brother up around 3 and got to Manhattan at about 1:30 am. Tyler did better than we'd dared to hope for. He played happily when he was awake, took a nap, was awake for awhile before dinner and then slept until we got there. Good job Baby!

We had such a fun time with my family. We played lots of games, made and decorated Christmas cookies, went to dinner at Hu Hot, made a mandatory stop to Orange Leaf for ice cream and ate way more than we should have. It was awesome. :-)  Tyler got quite spoiled by everyone, and stole the show most of the time. He got some adorable new clothes, a rocking lion, and the Little People Farm and Tractor. He had a familiar reaction to the little people toys. He could not wait for Carl to get the boxes opened so he could get to the farmer and the animals!

Normally we keep our tree up for too long after Christmas. I won't lie, it has made it until February at least once. But we actually took it down today. Kind of sad! But the living room is where most of Tyler's toys are and where he spends a lot of his time, and the tree just took up too much space! And we spent half our days telling him no when he craweld over to pull ornaments off. As pretty as it is all lit up, our living room feels much less chaotic without it. I never thought I'd say that. I think I'm officially a mom.

It's getting late, so I will add some pictures tomorrow. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, and New Year!