Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time!

I hope everyone has had as wonderful of a Christmas as we have! We've had four different family Christmas parties and have really enjoyed the time we've had to spend with them all. It was fun to celebrate Christmas with Charlotte this year since last year she was just five weeks old at the time, but she still didn't quite get into all the excitement of opening presents. We made the mistake of bringing muffins over for Jared and I to eat while we were opening presents on Christmas day, so Charlotte couldn't have cared less about the presents in front of her. She just kept pointing towards the muffins and grunting for more. (She had already eaten breakfast.) So she didn't get into all the hype of presents, but she did love that there was almost an endless supply of food for her. At each of the family parties, she would go from person to person, getting a little bite from each one. And whenever anyone picked her up, she would point to the counter where all the food was. The child acts like we never feed her!

She racked up on gifts as well. She got a little shopping cart and some toy food that she's had a great time playing with. And her Grammy (my mom) made the cutest little purse for her, and it was the most adorable thing ever watching her push her shopping cart around with the purse on her arm! She's my mini-me!


We went to the park the day before Christmas Eve and let her play for a little while. If she fell down while walking on the mulch, grass, or dirt, she would keep her hands up and look down and try to figure out how she could stand back up without putting her hands down on the ground and getting them dirty. Such the little Priss!
Playing on the swings

Chasing Daddy


Charlotte usually seems to prefer women over men, but every now and then, she will find a man that she just latches onto. On Christmas Eve she was having fun playing with my cousin, Ryan, and he was brave enough to let her play with his glasses.

And yesterday Charlotte couldn't get enough attention from her Uncle Chad. It was so sweet seeing her cuddle with him!


Oh, and the conclusion of the Christmas tree saga... You might remember that we had issues with it falling down twice within a few days of putting it up. Well a week or so before Christmas, the tree was looking pretty pathetic. The needles were falling off with the slightest bump to a limb and it wasn't the nice deep green color that it was when we bought it. After reading Melissa's story of putting up her tree, I started to wonder if we ever cut some off the bottom of the tree so it would soak up the water when we put it in the stand. I asked Jared if he happened to do it when I wasn't looking, but he couldn't remember doing it either. So I am hoping that is the reason for the Charlie Brown looking tree that we had on Christmas day! Since it was so ip

On Saturday after celebrating (a.k.a. eating) with the Rollins family, Pam Saxon came over to take some family pictures for us. It was a gorgeous afternoon and I am so excited to see how the pictures turned out, especially the "jumping shots" of the siblings and wives. We had a great time and Pam, thank you again for doing that for us. I'm blog-stalking you until I see a few teaser shots!

Since this post is already so long, I will save my rant about our aggravations with the retail stores and political correctness of this country. But we hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and remembers why we celebrate this wonderful holyday.