Merry Christmas

We had a great Christmas celebration here. It started off a little rough because Lily had been feeling sick for a few days. She had an earache on Tuesday, so Amanda took her to the Urgent Care. They diagnosed her with a double ear infection and sent her home with a prescription for some amoxicillin. As always, once she started taking the medicine she felt fine. That was good because it would have been a very tough Christmas day otherwise.

 I also wasn't feeling great Monday evening, so we ended up not going to our church's Christmas celebration. We hated to miss it, but we also know that it was going to be a lot of work to attend it. I think by Monday evening the only person with the energy to do it was Noah.

We went to the McKenzies' for the family Christmas celebration on Tuesday. We had a lovely meal with ham, mac and cheese, and various other trimmings. A wonderful time was had by all.

Of course, to the kids all of this is just a warm-up for Christmas morning. My videography was not quite as extensive this year, but I did capture the highlights. Lily had a hard time coming up with gift ideas, so we got her a refurbished iPod Touch. Now she has her own device with a camera and won't have to clog up ours with her "artsy" photos and videos.

Noah got a lot of stuff through my involvement with Amazon Vine. He still doesn't know that his big gift is a series of golf lessons with me. He was happy just to get this basketball hoop. He also got a batting tee and a big net that you can use for hitting balls. He also got a few new games for the Wii. It's pretty nice that the Wii is an old system and the games can be had fairly cheaply now.

We ended the day with some standing rib roast, which came out really good. We kept the meal simple with roast, roasted asparagus, and mashed red potatoes and gravy. Nobody seemed to mind the simplicity. 

Everyone had a wonderful Christmas. Although I tried to do this at dinner, I think that we need to do a quick refresher of why we give gifts. After all, the incarnation of Christ was the ultimate gift to everyone who believes. So as we enjoy our new stuff, we need to remember that:

James 1:17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

I hope that you and yours had as nice a Christmas as we did. Now that I'm off for over a week I look forward to catching up on some stuff and just relaxing a little bit. That and hitting golf balls.

Putting up Christmas

With Thanksgiving being a bit later than usual this year we decided to get a quick jump on putting up Christmas. This will end up saving us from a little bit of the hectic pace that December tends to bring anyway. Besides, I like having the tree up before my birthday on the 11th.

Lily and I went down the street to the Christmas Tree lot that we usually patronize. We are officially in charge of picking out the tree. Last year we got a little crazy (I keep thinking of the old man in "Christmas Story" asking, "Don't you have a big tree?"). This year's edition fits better in the corner. Lily is getting the hang of putting on the ornaments, though she still tends to bunch them up a bit. Nevertheless, she is getting pretty good at it. She also had some very creative ideas for using bows and ribbons around the house.

I got the outside lights up too. While it may have felt a bit strange, there is something to be said for weather in the high 60s when putting up lights. It doesn't feel particularly Christmasy, but we'll take it for now.

Noah likes the decorations too. I think he is slowly getting trained about not playing with them. We're also working on him not throwing balls near the tree too. It's a process. I think that things will go better than they did last year anyway.

Christmastime in Cary

Christmas has arrived at our home. Lily and I picked out a tree yesterday. I was leaning toward the 7 foot trees, but Lily picked out a gorgeous 7 1/2 foot tree. I did manage to get the angel on it, though I had to bend the top of the tree over a bit to get her on. There is probably a good inch or two between her head and the ceiling. It really is a beautiful tree and Amanda thinks it is our best out of the 9 trees we've done.

We also made sure to put some lights up outside. Lily has started taking notice of the neighbors and what they are doing. She started saying things like, "Everyone has put up lights except us," when in reality there are only a few houses on our street with lights. Most have very tasteful white lights, but I've recycled some old colored lights that we got way back in our California apartment in 1998. We don't have a Griswold-esque lighting spectacular or anything, but it does add a festive note to the house.

I think this is the first year that Lily is really aware of Christmas. She made up a song yesterday with the words "Christmas is tomorrow" in it. I showed her the calendar and explained where we were (December 1) and showed her how many days had to pass until we got to Christmas Day.

Amanda said that she had to wait until 7:00 to get up on Christmas. I think I got up at 6:00, but we had to wait for mom to get home from work to open gifts (she worked as a nurse 11-7). Since I'm the early-riser I'll have to decide what to do with Lily. The key is understanding that these decisions set precedents.

Noah continues to charm. He also continues to spit. We had some good chocolate cake at a great Peter Pan themed party yesterday. I think Noah had some reflux as a result, but that's OK. I'm about 99% sure that he will have some rice cereal before his 6 month birthday.