11 months old and Christmas

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As you can see, I have a bunch of blogging catch-up to do.  As usual, really.  Anyway, Christmas was a
pretty eventful day...there's the obvious, of presents, little kid excitement, LOTS of yummy food, and family. Along with all of that, a certain little miss turned 11 months old.  Crazy hard to believe, it is!

11 months old at Christmas dinner

Micaela at 11 months old is definitely coming into her own. She is crawling, climbing stairs (constantly, much to our chagrin), pulling up to standing and letting go for a few seconds at a time, saying a few words and phrases - "uh oh!" is a favourite. Middle-of-the-night sleep training has begun...it is a little rough right now, but I am still hopeful that she will be sleeping in her crib for the whole night by the time I go back to work...in less than 2 weeks! She has also started going to daycare pretty much full-time. She cries like crazy when I leave, with tears and snot everywhere, but she is reportedly doing pretty well settling in, eating big-kid food on her own and napping in the playpen. She loves it when they go outside to play and even cried yesterday when she got the 5-minute warning that it was time to go in. What a monkey! :)

So Christmas this year was a ton of fun. Avery had a much better idea of what was going on and knew that Santa was coming and would bring her presents. And boy did she get a lot of presents! Too much really, and I think one of my tasks in the next couple of weeks will be to do a toy sort and put away some of them to pull out later in the year. And also find some to give away. At any rate, she was pretty excited about most of the things she got, but the favourites had to have been the princess dress-up treasure chest, the princess shoes and the cash register. Here's a video of when she was opening the shoes:

In case you didn't hear it, she said "oh my..." when she figured out what they were :)

 

Opening stockings

Opening stockings

With regard to the "too many presents" issue, I was asking my mom what it was like when Dan and I were kids. I have distinct memories of not getting as many presents as a lot of my other friends - not that we lacked for anything, but it just seemed like most of them got a pile, while we got something big, and then a few other little things and clothes. And I finally figured out why...we didn't get presents from our extended family. My mom's whole side lives in Switzerland, so we typically didn't exchange presents with them. And my dad's side wasn't really into present-giving for various reasons, so basically we received presents only from our little family of 4. And please don't think I am complaining, but it just all became really clear when I saw the ridiculous amount of stuff under the tree on Christmas morning.  I guess it doesn't help that there aren't very many grandchildren/nieces/nephews on either side of our families, and people really like to buy presents for little kids.  I enjoyed shopping for our little nephew Jacob! :) Anyway, next year we will have to come up with some sort of strategy, because this year was really too much. That being said, thank you to everyone for all of the presents, from the girls and from Greg and I too. Christmas 2010 was definitely one to remember!