Week Before Christmas

We spent Thanksgiving with some friends from John's work who have a son a few years older than Joshua. They blessed us with several of their son's toys that he no longer played with which I decided to give to Joshua during the week before Christmas to prepare him for opening presents on Christmas morning.

This last gift was a remote controlled train and tracks. Joshua absolutely loves it and has been wanting to play with it every day.

Celebrating Daddy's Birthday

John's birthday was the weekend before Christmas. John's sister came to town for the weekend along with her husband and 2 daughters. This was Joshua's first time meeting any of our family. He did great and especially loved playing with his cousins. We got to celebrate John's birthday with them and then later as a family of three.

 Do you think he likes cake? And yes, that's a Care Bear plate. Someone gave it to us and it was the only one we had clean. :-) That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

More Christmas Fun

One of my favorite memories from this first Christmas with Joshua is singing Jingle Bells to him while he was having lunch, and wearing Santa hats while doing so!

One of my other favorite memories is him playing with his Little People nativity set.

He loved to put the angel on top (or camels) and hit the button to play the music (Away in a Manger). As you can see he was quite pleased with himself whenever he did it. :-)

Christmas Outtakes

Well as usual I am behind on blogging. So I plan to do a bunch of picture posts to get caught up on what Joshua is up to and hopefully I will manage to write something a little more substantial in the near future.

I got the idea of showing the “outtakes” of my attempt to get a cute Christmas photo of Joshua from Wendi’s blog. I never did manage to get the picture I was hoping for, but hey that’s the way it goes with a toddler. They may not have been Christmas card worthy, but I still think they are pretty cute.

   

 

And a little later that day, not part of the Christmas picture taking, but just for fun.

Countdown to Grandma!

Joshua will be meeting his Grandma (my mom) in just 3 hours! This is his first visit from a grandparent and also the first visit from my side of the family. I am so excited!

Of course, as usual I am lagging behind in posting Christmas pictures and an end of the year post. John was off for 10 days, so I didn't have much time for blogging with celebrating Christmas and then spending time together to take advantage of John's time off. We also worked on getting our Christmas card and letter out to family and friends during that time. Thankfully, we got all our addresses entered into a word document, so it should be much easier next year.

Anyway, we had a great Christmas, though Joshua is still too young to really get it. By the end, he really didn't want to open any more presents. I think Christmas is going to be a lot of fun next year when he is two and a half and can understand a bit more. Also, I realized John and I have totally different styles when it comes to opening presents. I want to take it slow, open one present, let Joshua play with it until he is tired of it, and then move on to the next present. John wants to move things along and open all the presents really quickly. Hopefully, we can find a good compromise that keeps us both happy next Christmas. :-)

Well, a little somebody is waking up from his nap so I had better go.