Christmas Traditions

As a parent, the Christmas season seems to bring more excitement and more fun with each year. It's all so magical and is an excellent opportunity to create traditions and to incorporate special ones from your own childhood. Dan and I have talked about some of the things we loved as kids that we'd like to continue with Leah, and we've come up with some brand new ones to call our own as well.

One of my most favorite memories is making Christmas cookies with my mom and my sister. Mom would use her spritz cookie gun and shoot the cookie dough onto the pans, while Laurs and I decorated with food-colored sugar. Naturally, baking cookies with Leah around the holidays (and throughout the year!) is one of those traditions I want to continue. I mixed the food coloring with sugar, just like my mom used to, and let Leah go to town on our frosted sugar & gingerbread cookies. She had a blast, as did I. :)

One of the traditions Dan remembers fondly is receiving gifts not only from Santa, but from his favorite characters as well. He opened gifts that were from G.I. Joe or Superman. It all added to the magic of Christmas. So, this year, we decided to do the same for Leah. We ordered two small stuffed animals from The Wiggles website - Wags the Dog and Dorothy the Dinosaur. Rather than coming from Santa or from us, we decided The Wiggles should send those along with Santa for their big fan, Leah. Bolt also chose to send a stuffed Mittens and Rhino, as well. ;)

Another tradition I am continuing is letting Leah unwrap a gift from us on Christmas Eve: Christmas pajamas. But I'm adding a new one this year as well. Leah will also open an ornament from us. This year, it's Bolt. Her first favorite movie.

Since Dan and I have been married, he's created a couple lovely traditions that have remained: on Christmas morning, he lights some holiday candles and puts on Christmas music or a holiday movie in the background. At the end of the night on Christmas, he saves one last gift for each member of our family. It's funny, because he does this every year and yet, on the actual holiday, I always seem to forget and it is still a fun surprise. ;)

We figure this is the last year Leah will be sleeping in her crib, so next Christmas will be a bit trickier with her in a bed and having the freedom to get up. Dan and I are planning a new tradition of Santa putting presents under the tree in our family room, while the gifts from family will remain under the tree in the living room (which is right next to Leah's bedroom!). We hope this will save us from making too much noise on Christmas Eve. And we figure we can leave a trail of candy, or something similar, from the fireplace to the tree in the family room. But we have another whole year to figure this one out!

We have less than a week to go until this Christmas and I am so excited. As Leah gets older and more aware with each holiday season, I eagerly anticipate her reaction when she enters the living room on Christmas morning. We're having so much fun already and I know we have so much more to look forward to in future years.

I leave you with a few more photos of Christmas with a toddler. :)

Munching the freshly baked cookies:

Choosing a magnet for each day of the Advent calendar:

Ornaments that are clinging for dear life onto the tree:

And the Virgin Mary... on a Little People tractor?

Christmas Parades

This past Saturday, Leah experienced her first and second Christmas parades. Two nearby towns were having theirs on the same day - one at 11am, the other at 4pm. It was such a fun day!

The first parade lasted almost a solid 90 minutes. Leah saw floats, horses, marching bands, dance troupes, old-fashioned cars, and Santa on a fire truck. Many of the floats were tossing candy to the kids on the side of the street, and boy, did Leah love that! Since we were there for awhile, I let her have several tootsie rolls and a couple dum dum lollipops. What a sugar high! By the last 15-20 minutes of the parade, she was so bubbly, talkative, and was dancing and jumping all over the place. It was hysterical!

The second parade was much shorter, as that town is smaller. By then, it had gotten colder and since it had been drizzling shortly before the start time, the crowd was small as well. Because of this, you should've seen the amount of candy Leah made out with! We collected more than on Halloween. It was incredible, especially since most of the candy throughout the two parades had been smaller items like tootsie rolls, peppermints, and dum dums.

I think it's safe to say Leah is enjoying this holiday season. ;)

Waving at the floats:

Sugar high ;)

Doing her best Captain Feathersword impersonation: "Ahoy there!"

Santa's Message to Leah

This has been going around Facebook in the past 24 hours with a lot of my mom friends and I had to try it out. It's so adorable! Leah is currently napping, but I can't wait for her to see it later today. :D

Santa's Message to Leah:
http://www.portablenorthpole.tv/watch/guest/u_k5OsbcbBfkBeBMboCa0w

Video Share

Since I've neglected the blog recently, for Thanksgiving and Christmas prep (almost done shopping!), I thought I would at least pop on here and provide you with some recent photos and videos. :)  Happy Thanksgiving!

Dancing to the Wiggles

Amused by pushing her bike; notice the dogs in this one. ;)

Talking to the little ants crawling along the driveway.

You want candy?

This is Leah's new thing. She'll come up to me or to Dan and ask, "You want candy?" We say, "No, do you want candy?" She answers, "Okay!" like she wasn't the one who suggested it and we're actually offering it to her. And she gets a HUGE grin on her face. Heh. She's a stinker. She also does this when she wants a tastykake.

The time change has gone relatively well. Leah's daily schedule has pretty much been moved up an hour, which is great for us. I'm an early riser and typically showered & dressed before Dan leaves for work anyway, so I don't mind Leah starting her day earlier as well. Then, we can all get to bed earlier too! (Yes, I am an old lady and I don't care. Ha ha.) For some odd reason, she's always in a more pleasant mood when she naps earlier (1-3 as opposed to 2-4), so this is another bonus with shifting her routine.

And lastly, Leah finally knows all her colors! A couple days ago, she was pointing out colors on a pair of socks or something, and in addition to getting blue and pink correct, she even knew white. I was so impressed. I still don't think she's too familiar with black, but for the last several days, she seems to have all the other basics down now. Yay. :)

Halloween

Finally got all the pictures uploaded, so we can talk about Halloween. :)

Momma woke Leah from her nap that day around 4:30pm. Boy oh boy, what a grump she was! Leah has her moments, but this was probably the grumpiest she had been in a long time. She wanted to go play outside, then come back inside, then go back out again... whining the whole time. Ugh. We weren't even sure if we'd make it to trick-or-treating.

Thankfully, after some dinner, Leah perked up. She played for a little bit and then we got her dressed in her costume: Jessie the Cowgirl from Toy Story. Her mood started to deteriorate, however, when Momma took too long trying to find an appropriate shirt to go underneath the costume (so that the tags wouldn't irritate her and set her off more!).

Daddy saved the day by taking Leah back outside to play a bit before we left for trick-or-treat. Momma, Grammy, and Grandpa all came outside to take pictures. Leah wasn't feeling the cowgirl hat though. Daddy helped her out with that, and sported the hat throughout trick-or-treat. ;)

Since our neighborhood is pretty rural and spread out, we piled in the car and drove to the neighborhood we visited last year. It had come with a good recommendation from a co-worker, though with Leah being only 18 months old last year, we only hit a small handful of houses before leaving. This year started out about the same as last; it was fairly quiet as we began trick-or-treating around 6:30pm while it was still light out. Leah seemed to enjoy herself, though she was too shy to say "Trick-or-treat", which we pretty much expected. She did say thank you and bye to pretty much every homeowner though, so we were proud! And she made sure to talk to every dog that she encountered. :)

Then, the neighborhood became a zoo. As it grew darker, the amount of trick-or-treaters increased... as did the amount of cars slowly driving through the neighborhood alongside their kids. Clearly, this place has a reputation! Unfortunately, we noticed several kids (especially older/preteen ones) walking through yards, not saying thank you, and trying to grab handfuls of candy. Later, as we were on the way back to our parked car, some 11 or 12 year old boy came up behind Dan, who was holding Leah, and reached his hand into her bucket to take her candy!!! Momma yanked that kid's hand out so fast and asked him what he was doing. His mother (we assume) came up then, apologized, told us he was autistic, and called for him to come over to her. Whatever he was, he should've had an adult with him at all times. No one takes candy from a two year old; especially not MY two year old.

Needless to say, we will not be going back to this neighborhood. It was just too crazy. We felt bad, then, for the homeowners there and that we were trick-or-treating in their neighborhood. Even if we were being polite and respectful, it seemed a shame. So, I'm not sure what the plan will be for next year. Maybe a friend's neighborhood or something.

All in all, Leah seemed to have a good time. She got a modest amount of candy and a fun-size bag of popcorn (that she would not allow in her candy bucket! Ha ha!). She had several pieces of candy when we returned home, and has had a few more pieces each day since. Her favorites seem to be Reese's peanut butter cups, Whoppers, Milky Way, and Skittles.

More pictures, for the fun of it:

Getting Ready for Halloween

This past weekend, Leah helped me clean out our two biggest pumpkins for carving. She loved digging her hands in there, pulling out the seeds, and dumping them into bowls. She surprises me at times - she's come to dislike having food on her hands and always wants a napkin, yet she had no problem with the stringy pumpkin gunk. Go figure.

I had a couple big spoons to help us dig out the seeds, and Leah loved stirring what we had in the bowls, exclaiming, "I'm making pumpkins!" (What's really cute is "pumpkins" sounds like "cumpkins".) :)

Later in the evening, Dan and I each carved a pumpkin while Leah looked on and played with the little pumpkin pieces that popped out. We did two traditional jack-o-lantern faces that are smiley and fun!

We plan to trick-or-treat Sunday evening. So far, the weather forecast is very promising: low 70s and sunny. Yay! We can't wait to see Leah's reaction this year, as she realizes people will be giving her candy. Aside from ice cream, that's probably her favorite thing in the world.

Here are a couple more pumpkin pictures: