Josie's First Christmas & So Much More

Okay, before I even launch into the full report of Josephine's first Christmas, let me begin by sharing much bigger news. It is about 10pm on Friday night. Lou is playing a spirited round of Wii tennis; I'm finally getting around to updating the blog; and our tiny little girl is sound asleep in her crib!! That's right - our baby girl has moved up to her big girl bed! And it happened totally by accident. Truth is, we've been dreading the move to the crib for lots of reasons. (I'll admit we were mostly dreading it due to the simple fact that we love Josie so much and absolutely adore having her in our room with us. Really, we'll just miss her.) Anyway, we knew the time to switch her to her bed had to come soon if for no other reason than the fact that she has totally outgrown our co-sleeper & we would need to upgrade to a King-sized bed to keep her in there with us. Well, last night at around 8pm we got her into her pajamas, fed her & I put her down into a crib to read her a story. Wouldn't you know - the little darling started getting all droopy eyed and drifted off to sleep! I turned on her new "Sleep Sheep" (thanks Aunt & Uncle M&M) and that was all there was to it. We turned on the monitor and came out to the living room in a complete state of disbelief. She did wake up a few times, but I just walked back and put my hand on her belly and she went right back to sleep. At around 11:30, we decided to go ahead and move her into our room because we didn't have the humidifier or space heater in her room yet. So tonight we decided we're going to go for the whole night. We started our new bedtime routine of getting into pjs, nursing, and reading a story. It worked again! Straight to sleep in less than 5 minutes! We'll see how the rest of the night goes. I promise to issue a full report. Now, on to Christmas! :)

Clearly little miss Josephine is her mother's daughter because she simply loves getting presents! And it's a good thing because she was quite spoiled by everyone this year. (Let me start by sincerely thanking everyone for going to the extra trouble of getting Josie the safer wooden, fabric, and non-toxic toys that we requested. We know it is more time consuming and costly, but we really deeply appreciate the effort.) Here's Josie with one of her new friends that we've named "Squeakers." She hugged him right away. She even tasted this new cuddly to make sure it met her approval. As it turns out, this is her new favorite toy for sure! (Try clicking on the photo to see it larger.)
This Christmas was also the time for starting new family traditions. Here we are looking at the book "Polar Express" that Lou & I bought for Josie. We're going to start reading it together every Christmas Eve.
Obviously the holidays are also about spending time with family. Josie really enjoyed getting to hang out with her Grandparents and Aunt & Uncle. And we really enjoyed having a couple extra pairs of hands to help out. :)
Here is the obligatory family Christmas photo which Josie apparently thought was pretty funny. And here's Lou & I relaxing in the hot tub. Okay, so relaxing is a bit of a stretch. We were too curious about what the baby was doing to totally relax. After all, it was the first night we were there and it always takes a little while to realize that the baby will survive if we're out of the room.

In fact, one of the great things about spending time in Xenia is that there is no shortage of love for Josie to spread around. We feel so fortunate that she has so many people that love and care about her. Even Claire - who was Josie's size not too long ago - loves her "Juicy." Here she is giving Josie her Nuk. Too cute!

Overall it was a wonderful Christmas. It had all the necessary elements - family, friends, food, giving, receiving, reminiscing (did I mention we spent 5 hours on Christmas day watching old home movies?), resting, relaxing, and all things merry and bright. Everyone was right, sharing all of these things with our baby girl definitely made it all even more special.

There are *lots* more photos of Josie's first Christmas on her Shutterfly collection at http://www.josiemarie.shutterfly.com/. They are the combined photos from my mom, sister & me. There are a lot of them, but I of course think they're worth sifting through because there are some real gems that I wasn't able to include here. So if you have some time on your hands, check them out.

I should also probably mention the other exciting news. My Christmas present from Louie was a digital body for my 35mm camera. This means better quality photos for the blog so expect even more of that sweet little face in the new year.

Hope everyone's holidays were as happy as ours.