Monday, December 31, 2012

Christmas Day- Morning

Christmas Day was a whirlwind day for us. We had so much going on, that I'm going to break the Christmas Day posts into two posts- one for Morning and one for Afternoon/Evening.  First up, is Christmas Morning!

We slept in until around 8:30ish and then had breakfast together. Kate and her Daddy got in a little quality time when she first woke up...


Of course my mom just HAD to let Kate open up a present from her stocking before breakfast. I didn't even know this was going on! Luckily she and Kristi snapped a few pictures.



 One of her favorite things, a new book!


After breakfast we headed to the living room to open presents. Kate is at such a hard age. She's still too young to really "get" the opening presents thing so she wasn't all into it like I thought she would be. She is big into wanting to help though, so she handed out all of the stockings.


When I say that she wasn't all into opening presents, I don't mean that she didn't enjoy what she got.  She just didn't get into the ripping them open part, but once she saw what was inside THEN she got excited.  One of her favorite presents from Christmas this year has got to be her baby stroller.  She has pushed this thing ALL over our house.


 Her Aunt Kristi also gave her a big bag of stacking blocks.  I think she'll have lots of fun with these.


And my parents gave Kate a child's size table.  I love it, but at this point Kate was way past opening presents.  She helped Kristi open the gift but then decided it was way more fun to stand on the box.



See what I mean about LOVING her stroller (and bebe)?



And pretty soon she found a way to play with both the stroller AND the box.


We stayed around and visited with my parents through lunch, and then packed up our car and headed home.  Kate had been awake from about 8:30am until 2 and was way past needing a nap. We knew we needed to get on the road because we had a 1.5 hour drive ahead of us and still had a lot left to do before bedtime, so we said our goodbyes and headed home.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Celebrating Milestones

I'll get back to the Christmas posts soon, but since this is technically Kate's "baby book", I think it is important to mention that we are celebrating 2 weeks of being paci-free. :) YAY!
 
Although, I am pretty sad that I won't be seeing this sweet little girl with a paci in her mouth anymore. I'm sure that sounds weird but the paci just makes her seem more like a baby. I hate thinking of her as a toddler or even a "big girl" but the truth is, that's what she's become. How has it already been 16 months?
 
 


Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Christmas Eve

I am SO behind on my blogging.  I've got NYC posts ready to be put up, but I wanted to go ahead and share our Christmas.  I'll get back to the NYC stuff next week. :)  Get ready for a Christmas-picture-overload!

This Christmas was 100% different from last year.  Last year Kate was just 4 months old and honestly, she pretty much "missed" Christmas because she slept through the whole thing.  Not this year.  She is a ball of energy.

We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day at my parents house.  My parents have an oyster roast on Christmas Eve, so we spent some of the morning getting things ready for that.  Of course Kate had to lick the spoon from the Chocolate Eclair.


And then, as was my tradition growing up, she got to open ONE present on Christmas Eve.  



My parents got Kate a baby doll (or as Kate would say, a bebe). 



I LOVED Kate's face when my mom and Kristi got it out of the box and she could really see that it was a doll...




Later that afternoon she opened up her last Christmas book.  I have loved this new tradition, and hope Kate enjoys it for many years to come.


And of course, as is tradition, our friends Jillian and Jonathan stopped by with their little boy, Bennett.  Bennett is about 2 months younger than Kate and it was so fun to see them actually interact together this year.


They pretended like they were at a middle school dance... aka- they "hugged".




What a difference a year makes!

Christmas 2011

Christmas 2012
And then it was Kate's bedtime!  




Tuesday, December 18, 2012

The Great Christmas Card Debacle

I thought I was on the ball this year. Back in early November, I saw a “deal” on zulily.com to pay $16 for $45 worth of Christmas cards from on online publisher. I checked out their designs, liked what I saw, and jumped on that deal. You couldn’t beat saving $30 on Christmas cards! We got our Christmas pictures taken on November 20th , which was early considering when we had our Christmas pictures taken last year. We got our CD of the pictures the next week and by December 1st I had ordered our cards. Like I said, I thought I was on the ball.

The order status said they would be printed within 2 days and then shipped immediately. That means shipped by December 3rd or 4th at the latest, right? Wrong. They shipped on December 8th. A week later. I tried to track the shipment using the FedEx tracking number that I’d been given, but it kept saying that no information had been received. I started stressing because I had to address all of these cards. FINALLY, on December 12th, tracking information started showing up and our cards were to be delivered the following day.

On December 13th I logged in to check the tracking information and it said that our cards had been delivered. Yay! Istopped by the post office on the way home to pick up lots of stamps and was planning on addressing all of our cards that evening. We were starting to cut it close. When I pulled into my driveway, I could see THIS in the yard. My stomach sank.


Our dogs definitely destroyed all of our cards. Kevin tried to salvage a few of them, but it was useless. I was so upset that Iwanted to cry! We have an underground fence and there is an area that they cannot get to. We’ve told our FedEx, UPS and post office people where to leave packages but apparently our Christmas cards were left on our front porch (where the dogs CAN get to). Apparently at age 3ish, they still haven’t outgrown the puppy-chewing stage. Here was my pretty card that ended up getting destroyed…



Anyway, after this I pretty much figured we weren’t going to be able to send out any Christmas cards this year. I quickly called the company that I ordered the cards from. They were based in Seattle (which I didn’t know prior to ordering the cards) and basically said they would reprint as quickly as possible but best-case scenario would mean I’d get the cards on December 21st. That wouldn’t work. Plus, I’d used a 20% off coupon and my zulily coupon and gotten about $65 worth of cards (including shipping) for $16. They were going to make me re-pay, not allow me to use the coupons, and charge me $25 for 2 day shipping. No thank you. 

So I started checking out other options (Walgreens,Shutterfly, TinyPrints, Walmart, etc). I ended up settling on Walmart because they would do the cards as 1-hour photos. The quality wasn’t as great as the first cards, but you really can’t beat the whole 1-hour processing. We picked them up that night after dinner and I was still able to address all of my cards that night.  Thank you, Walmart.  Here are our 2nd cards...




See the similarities? I really wanted to use the same picture, so I was limited on which card I could pick out. The orientation had to be portrait and the card had to be formatted to use only 1 picture. Not easy to find, but I was lucky to find something similar to our original card on Walmart’s website.

So much for being “on the ball” this year. I tried; I really did. Maybe next year will be better. I’ll definitely not ship our cards to our house next year.

PS- I'm joining up with Faith's Christmas card carousel this year, so check out her page for lots of other cute Christmas cards!






Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Christmastime in the Big Apple- Part 1

Whew.  I am exhausted!  As if December is not already a busy enough month, I added a trip to NYC!  I had to fly to NYC this past Thursday and Friday for a class for work, and we decided to make a girls weekend of it.  So on Friday, my mom and my sister flew up to join me and we had a great weekend in NYC. 

We made plans for Saturday and Sunday but it was hard to know how to plan for Friday.  Mom and Kristi's flight was supposed to get in around 2 and then they had to get from LaGuardia to our hotel before we could do anything.  I was supposed to be in class until 4 anyway, BUT our class decided to take a short lunch and no breaks so we could get out at 3.  Then mom and Kristi's flight landed on time but because of NYC traffic they didn't get to the hotel until 5. Like I said, hard to plan. 

When they finally made it there, we decided to just do some walking around.  First stop was Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas tree.  It was awesome! 





We walked around the Rockefeller Center area and took lots of pictures of all of the decorations.  I have to say that Christmas in NYC is really pretty.  I'd never been to NYC before, but there were lights and decorations everywhere!




We'd already planned to go to Times Square on Saturday but decided to head on over Friday night.  As we expected, it was CRAZY.  At least we thought it was crazy. It was a bit rainy, so when we went back to Times Square the next night, we realized how not-crowded it actually was on Friday. 


And then we just walked around.  We saw the lights, we saw the shops, we saw some of the landmarks.  Lots of fun.





I'll catch up over the next few days with everything we did Saturday and Sunday, but it was definitely a trip to remember.  Lots of fun, and a great first visit to NYC!!

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Oh Christmas Tree

I think I may have a workaround for the picture. Thanks, Julie!

It has gotten SO hard to get pictures of Kate lately. This girl is on the go. See below for my half-blurry pictures in an attempt to get a few recent ones of her.

 
 
 
 
On another note, Kate LOVES our Christmas tree. She's actually been very good with it and so far none of the ornaments have been broken. I'm sure that will change even though the bottom 1/3 of the tree is made up of non-breakable ornaments. She loves to look at the different ornaments and point or touch.
 
The other night she was pointing and I would tell her what each ornament was. First there was a dog, then a snowflake, then a ball and finally an angel. When I said "angel", she looked at me kind of funny so I repeated it to see if she could say it. She finally did but it definitely comes out as "anal" instead of "angel". Hopefully she'll get the hang of the g sound soon!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Merry Christmas!

 


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