Christmas Day

I LOVED Christmas morning with my wonderful family (Dustin and Leah) this year.  We got the downstairs all set up with the fireplace going, Christmas music playing, toys all set out and then videotaped Leah coming down. She was so excited and ran over to her gifts and didn't know what to look at/play with first! 

Santa was good to Leah this year!

Checking out the stuff in her stocking first.

Bouncy donkey!

She is a pro at opening presents now!

One of my gifts from Dustin, Toms! Love them!

Some of Leah's presents from Mommy and Daddy

Leah's main gift from Santa. She LOVES it!

Breakfast - orange rolls and turkey bacon

Worn out from the excitement. Watching Toy Story.

As I said before, such a great day. Now that Leah is becoming a little girl who is walking and talking and has a hilarious personality, holidays (and every day!) are going to be that much more fun!

Christmas Eve

I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas!!

We had so much fun with Leah this year. She really got into it and was so excited ripping open presents.

Christmas Eve we hosted at our house.  And this year we had my dad, his wife, my brother, his wife, my grandpa, and Dustin's mom.  Luckily everyone brought something to add to dinner so that I didn't have to prepare a whole meal by myself. :-)  My family has a tradition of having our homemade mac&cheese on Christmas Eve, and Dustin and his mom have a tradition to have crab, so we combined the two. It was kind of random, but I made a few appetizers and desserts (plus drinks of course!) and it was a good meal!  My favorite holiday drink is sparkling poinsettias, which is champagne and cranberry juice, garnished with fresh cranberries. Yum!

We were actually able to get Leah to bed at her normal time that night which was great.  So after our guests left, "Santa" got to work assembling and arranging all the gifts for Miss Leah! :-)

Wrapping

I got all my wrapping done last night. And I just have to say that I am the world's worst gift wrapper.  Seriously, even worse than most men or kids probably. I usually put stuff in nice gift bags, but Leah needs her presents wrapped so that she can rip them open!!  But, ugh, I don't know what it is but I just hate wrapping. I have no patience for it. So anyway, I tried to get it all done as quickly as possible last night. :-)
Tiger wanted to help......or maybe just attack the ribbon. :-)

So here they all are (well not including gifts from Santa!). Hopefully nobody notices the crappy wrapping job. :-)  Now I just need to put them all under the tree!

And I might as well take this opportunity now to show the goodies that will be in Leah's stocking! 
New sippy cups with straws (because she is obsessed with drinking from straws!), Dora toothbrushes, hair clips, a pink plastic harmonica (since she loves playing with Daddy's real one), Elmo books, sparkly toy bracelets, kitty hand puppet, Mickey "magic" washcloth, Hello Kitty mango marshmallows, animal crackers. I have a feeling it is not all going to fit into her stocking. ;-)

I can't wait to share what Santa is getting for Leah. We did go a little overboard on her this year.  But she is really in need of new bigger kid toys. We don't regularly buy her things so we are stocking up now. :-)  She is the easiest person to shop for EVER. I can't wait for Christmas morning!

Tuesday

I couldn't think of any clever titles for this post since it is just random things :-)

Today we went to the mall with Sheri and Ashlyn. Wow it was so busy there. Luckily I am pretty much done shopping so we didn't need to fight the crowds of the stores too much. We walked around, let the girls play and ate lunch.

They had fun on the riding toys -

I think that is one of the only pictures I have where they are both looking at the camera!

Last night I tried another recipe that I kept seeing all over Pinterest. Poppyseed chicken. I had the wrong size casserole dish and not as much chicken as the recipe calls for, so I improvised a bit and it turned out super yummy!  I served it with brown rice and green beans. Original recipe here.

Leah is getting more and more "kid-like" every day. This morning I gave her half a bagel for breakfast. She is currently obsessed with raisins (thinks they are candy, hehe), so I told her if she eats her bagel she can have some raisins. I heard her say "all done bagel" and this is what was on her tray -

She tried to hide it under her milk!!  Sneaky girl!

Leah is starting to talk a lot more and string 4 or 5 words together now. Not proper grammar of course but she will say something like "Please Mama more raisins" or "Dada at work make money" or "Car go by outside". 
She is also so polite and almost always says please, thank you, and her new one - excuse me (scuuzmee) :-)

Today is Dustin's last day of work until January!  Woohoo! We are planning some fun family activities and also need to get our house ready to host Christmas Eve!

Last Week Recap

Wow I haven't blogged in a week! I guess we have just been busy getting things ready for Christmas. Also, I have been sucked in to the Hunger Games trilogy. I read the first two books last week and now I am reading the third. I like it a lot more than I thought I would.  But all of my free time I want to spend reading!

Here's a little of what we have been up to...

Last week I took Leah to the indoor playground that we have been to once before. They had Santa visiting and I thought that maybe if Leah saw her cousin Dallas sitting with him that she would too. Well nope, she wanted nothing to do with him. Oh well, maybe next year!
Leah LOVES bouncy houses!

Then one night last week we went to the Bellevue Botanical Garden light show. It was really neat.

One night me and Leah made pizza. She ate half the can of olives and a couple of handfuls of cheese in the process :-)

During the weekend we did a lot of Christmas shopping. I think we are mostly done now! This week we have a few playdates and parties. We are so excited to give Leah her presents and see her get excited for everything this year!!