Tag Archives: holidays

New Year’s Eve!

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We don’t usually do anything special for New Year’s Eve, but this year, some friends with kids invited us over for an afternoon/evening get together at their place. We had AMAZING weather for Dec. 31st here in Atlanta, so when we saw they had a nice flat yard and culdesac, Paul went back home to get Andrea’s Jeep and the kids spent some time playing outside even.

Santa brought our friends’ son a drum set for Christmas, so their boys were going to town on the drums when we got there. Andrea was really cautious about them at first, and wouldn’t go near them. But after a while, when everyone else was out of the room, we heard someone playing the drums and realized it must be Andrea! Paul snuck in and got these pictures of our little drummer girl!
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I snuck in later and got some video of Andrea playing the drums. She’s not bad! 🙂

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Lights of Life

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While my parents were in town, we drove to the Lights of Life, a lovely Christmas light display near our house that we’d been to before and enjoyed. Andrea loved the lights and kept pointing out all the different things and saying, “Oh, my!” a lot. 🙂 She pointed out every Santa, every reindeer, every snowman (all Frosty, according to her). Then after we drove through the light display, we parked walked through a carnival-type area they have setup with pony rides, a petting zoo, a little train for the kids, and a place to roast marshmallows. They also have a bunch of trailers filled with Christmas scenes, like Santa’s workshop, and before Christmas, you can sit on Santa’s lap too.

Andrea had a great time. She loved her pony ride, just like she always has in the past. But this time was extra-special because Granddad was with her. Now Grandma and Granddad have both gotten to take her on pony rides!
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Christmas Extravaganza

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Partly just busy with Christmas and then my parents flew in for a visit, plus I also had a hard drive fail that slowed me down even further. But now I’m back in business! I thought I’d do a big dump of Christmas stuff, and then I have some more posts in the pipeline…

For a little while, I was nervous that Andrea wouldn’t have many presents to open under the tree to open, since Santa was bringing her the princess dollhouse castle, and Paul and I just had a couple other things for her (a cheap camera and the Holiday Barbie that she asked for). But between our extended family and a few little things I picked up, she was totally spoiled. She got princess stuff galore of course, and my parents surprised us all with a ride-on Jeep for her!

This year, she really understood everything, and Christmas was so magical for her. She was obsessed with Rudolph and “his reindeer friends”. When she woke up on Christmas morning, the first thing she wanted to do was go see if Rudolph had eaten the reindeer treats she left. What a sweet girl. 🙂

Here are some highlights from Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, and the following days…

She was an angel in our church’s Christmas Eve performance. She was super adorable and sang Away in a Manger with all the kids. This picture cracks me up though – when everyone applauded she covered her ears. (She doesn’t like loud sounds.)
She covered her ears when everyone applauded their performance. (She's a little sensitive about loud sounds.)

When we got home, we made sugar cookies for Santa. Andrea put on her reindeer antlers to help me.
She put on her reindeer antlers to help me make cookies for Santa.

We put out the cookies and milk for Santa, plus some reindeer food on the special “Reindeer Treats” plate they made at school.
Here are the treats we left for Santa and his reindeer.

Here’s what Santa left…
Santa brought Andrea the

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Christmas Portraits 2011

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Our Christmas cards should have arrived in most people’s mailboxes by now, so I feel like I can post these pictures on the blog now. We did our family Christmas pictures in front of our tree, like we’ve done every year since Andrea’s first Christmas. I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. We got a nice family picture, good portraits of Andrea, and some great pictures of Andrea with each of us individually. The first three are what we used in our Christmas cards, and the rest are some of my other favorites.

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We saw Santa!

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Sunday night our church had a Children’s Christmas Party. Andrea was enjoying the crafts when she was surprised by Santa and Mrs. Claus arriving to the party! She was too scared to approach Santa last year, and anytime I’ve tried this year. But Mrs. Claus was a lot more approachable I guess, because Andrea was pretty brave. Santa and Mrs. Claus were up on the stage, so I walked Andrea up onto the stage and left her waiting in line and walked down in front so that I could take her picture with Santa. As soon as it was her turn, she walked right up to Mrs. Claus and climbed up in her lap! She was still a little too nervous to actually sit on Santa’s lap, but she had no problem sitting right next to him and telling Mrs. Claus that she wanted a “castle doll house” for Christmas. I heard her add, “I saw it in my girl magazine.” I’m sure Mrs. Claus may have been a bit confused by that, but that’s what she calls the Target holiday toy sale flyer we got in the mail. When it arrived, Andrea went through and circled about half the toys in it.

Here’s her picture this year with Santa & Mrs. Claus:
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Other than her “princess doll house”, the other things she’s talked about most are a Disney Princess scooter (that I told her will have to wait until she’s older) and “the girl with only one sleeve”, which turned out to be the 2011 Holiday Barbie. Notice the resemblance from Andrea’s picture on her Christmas list, and the picture from the Target sale paper. She even remembered which sleeve to draw!
The

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Christmas Artwork!

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How has it been a week since I last updated the blog??? Oops. We’ve obviously been busy. I still haven’t had a chance to finish going through all the pictures from our trip, so those updates will have to wait, but I did have some of Andrea’s artwork that I wanted to show off… At this point, she’s about as good at drawing as I’ve ever been. LOL!

We got out the tempera paint a couple of times last week, and both times she wanted to paint Rudolph. The first one was in rainbow colors (she loves coloring/painting things in rainbow colors), but the second time she did it in brown and red, just like Rudolph. I was so impressed! 🙂

She’s also gotten really good at coloring/painting inside the lines, and has been doing that at every opportunity, so I offered to draw something for her to fill in with paint. She requested a Christmas tree (notice the rainbow colors she used):

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