When It Was Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

We have had a very full and fun holiday season and there are over a thousand pictures of all our events for me to sort through!  It is fun looking back through them all, though, and it helps me to realize how many wonderful people we have in our lives and how gracious God has been to us during Callie's recovery from her broken leg.  She is scheduled to have it removed in three days (her cast, not her leg!) and we are very excited!  She has done amazingly well with her little handicap and it really hasn't slowed her down much.  Having so much to occupy her through the month of December really helped it to go by faster.  Here are some of the happenings for us from mid-December and up to the week before Christmas.  And, of course, there will be a bunch more posts to follow of all our Christmas activities.

Christmas Portraits:  We actually had these pictures taken in November to give as gifts and to use in our Christmas cards.  Good thing we got them taken when we did because shortly afterwards, she got a stomach virus, a cold and then broke her leg.

Our Grace Presbyterian Family:  We were overwhelmed with support, prayers and donations of toys to help keep Callie occupied during her time with the cast.  I asked for some loans of puzzles or videos and ended up coming home from church with a car full of them!  Callie could barely wait to start working them and pulled them out in the entryway as soon as we stepped into the house.  We are so blessed to have such a wonderful and loving church family!  (side note: I cut about three inches off Callie's hair soon after this picture, as you can see in other pics in this post.) 

Special Friends:  Callie has two favorite people her age.  Her cousin Brighton, who she always connects with immediately, and her local "bestie" Sara.  She and Sara have the normal love-scream "mine!"-then hug it out toddler relationship.  Sara is a December baby so Callie got to enjoy an evening eating pink princess cake and helping unwrap presents with Sara and her brothers.  We gave Sara a princess castle that Callie was obviously envious of!  Good thing Mommy was already planning to give her one for Christmas!

 

This is Callie and Sara at our house enjoying their nuggets and fries and what I am sure is some very intelligent conversation.  Sara comes over pretty regularly now for play dates since I am finding it is easier to get things done around here with two toddlers who can occupy each other rather than one just following me around and begging for attention.

Decorating:  Callie especially loved decorating for Christmas this year.  I put one of our trees up while she was napping and when she woke up and saw it she squealed with glee like it was the best thing she had ever seen.  She was also a great help.  She put a good amount of the ornaments on herself and we had a great time laughing at her particular placements of several of them.  She would usually hang five or six ornaments on one spot on the garland.  We would wait until later to space them out.

She put Indiana Jones right beside Barbie in this position all on her own.  I was able to get a quick picture before she added four more ornaments to that spot!

And naturally, the Hokie helmet goes on C3-PO!

 Callie also helped me with two other trees.  She put the little bulbs on the ceramic one, just like I always did when I was little.  And she also enjoyed bringing me each of the different limbs for the smaller artificial tree we use in the living room.  She helped organize all the limbs into pile by their colored tags and all I would have to do is ask for a several of whatever color and she would bring them to me.  It made putting that tree up so much easier!  I can't wait to see what kind of help she will be next year!  (These picture are also pre-haircut, but you can see the difference in the next pictures.)

My Little Elf:  Callie was also a great help with making and wrapping presents.  She painted three birdhouses for Nana, Yoo-Hoo and Ma-maw and she was in charge of putting the bows on the presents I wrapped.  Several presents were wrapped mostly by her.  Those were pretty obvious because they have more than one kind of wrapping paper on them.

Uncle Donnie's Visit:  The week before Christmas, Matt's uncle Donnie came in to visit from Missouri.  He brought Pa up to Richmond for a nice dinner at Matt's parents' house.  Callie and Pa had a great time working puzzles together.  He tickled her for every piece she got right, and since she is very good at puzzles, that was a lot of tickles!  This weekend visit to Richmond also give Callie and Mimi a chance to make their annual gingerbread cookies and then enjoy the results, over and over again!

Christmas Houses:  This will always be a year we will remember as the one where Callie first really started appreciating outdoor Christmas lights.  She first started calling them "Halloween Houses" because she thought they were leftover lights from the previous holiday.  But once we corrected her, "here's a Christmas house!" became her mantra during all evening car rides.  We went, one evening, to have dinner at Friendly's in Chesapeake (the night she broke her leg, actually) and just in that 15-20 minute ride, I counted over 70 "here's a Christmas house!" statements.  She was practically out of breath from pointing them all out.  So she especially enjoyed Yoo-Hoo's annual Tacky Lights of Richmond tour this year.  We were able to fit that in to the same weekend as Donnie and Pa's visit.

 All bundled up and ready to go!

 Describing to Daddy that she was going to see "big Christmas building with lights!"

Walking up to the house... with practically everyone else in Richmond.  We have really watched these two father and son houses gain in popularity over the years.  Now you can't even park close because of all the limos and charter buses.

 They use a cherry-picker to put decorate every major limb of the tree.

One happy little girl!