Christmas - Round 1

We celebrated our first of several Christmases this year in Mountain Home. We woke up and opened presents like it was Christmas morning. Mia found it all super amazingly wonderful. She helped my mom pass out presents and she helped pretty much everybody open presents.


After that, we had a chance to go see the Baxter County Library, which is absolutely beautiful. I haven't been able to see it since it was rebuilt across town. It's wonderful.


For supper, my mom invited over lots of family friends that we haven't seen for two years. It was so nice to see everyone: Jackie and Carol, the Bergmans and Bobbi Burchard.

A new camera!

It arrived! After a long, long, long ordeal, we finally got a new camera! There was research, Black Friday shopping, Cyber Monday returns, Cyber Monday shopping and a whole string of shenanigans that made me not like Target very much. Nevertheless, our new Cannon is here and we got a smashing deal on it.

I decided to play around with it after Mia had gone to bed. The dogs were kind of surprised by all the attention they were getting. Deter was slightly confused, but you know Skye was all about it. Look at these sweet faces.

Last day as a tutor

Today was the last day of the semester for Oklahoma City Public Schools, so it was the big Christmas party for students at the school our company has adopted. This was my first semester to tutor, and it was a rough experience. I'm sad to say that I won't be returning in the spring to work with my student. It was a complicated decision, and I got a whole new appreciation of what teachers do. There are so many kids who have so much going on outside of the classroom. For me, it was an experience that taught me a lot. I hope my student learned some things, too.

And stretch

Leigh's mom swears by yoga to calm down her pre-kindergarten students. Leigh's trying to same technique with Mia. It worked. Briefly.

Dangers of a big girl bed

Jesus and the rooster

We love our church. After going there for nearly a year, our favorite part is that it's not crazy. That sounds like a really low threshold for success, but it's kind of a big deal here. All the services have been great during the holiday season, and they hosted a special Christmas night just for little kids.

The children were all supposed to come in their little pajamas. I didn't really get it until we arrived. Every kid - seriously, every single kid - would be passed out in the car before their parents drove home.


They had all kinds of crafts for them to do, and there was a very short, very cute Christmas pageant. Mia ate cookies, made decorations and (her favorite part) saw the animals in Jesus's stable.

One of the activities was to ice your own cookie. Mia was only so-so excited about this.

UNTIL she discovered that she could use her little knife to just put icing directly into her mouth. I was so proud. She truly is my child.

The holly, jolly tree

We decorated the tree tonight, and it was so, so great.

Last night we had the traditional "assembling of the Christmas greens" like they used to in the old days. We put together our fake tree and put up some of our decorations. We had the following conversation several times.

Mia: *points at tree* "Whas dat?"
Me: "A tree."
Mia: *looks confused*
Me: "A Christmas tree."
Mia: *still looks confused*
Me: "Sometimes people have a tree inside the house during Christmas."
Mia: *using a suspicious tone* "Ohhh."

How weird that must be as a kid: all of a sudden your parents build a tree in the living room.

Tonight we finished the job of decorating with Mia's help.

I'd like to just point out that what used to take two hours now takes two days with a toddler.

But seeing Mia's excitement about the ornaments and the lights was fantastic. She squealed the entire time. I tried to capture it but only got a little bit.

I can't look at you, Santa

Today was my company's holiday Christmas party for children. Mia was, of course, immediately suspicious of Santa. I knew this was coming, so I considered him a warm-up Santa. We could get real photos with Santa another day if maybe she had at least one chance to get an eye on the big man in red. This was as close as she was wiling to get:

Mia laughs it up

Merry Christmas!

We kicked off the holiday season with our first (and the BEST) Christmas party in town! Leigh and I had an absolute blast at the Leadership Oklahoma City shindig. We saw our friends from LOYAL and met some new, fabulous people. Of course, I talked the entire time. The. Entire. Time. This was the only picture we took the whole night, and of course it's ridiculous.