M’s First Christmas!

We had such a lovely Christmas.  It was so fun to be with family in Utah and M Bug made it the best Christmas I’ve had yet.

M loved the attention from family members he doesn’t get to see nearly as often as we would like.  We kicked off our Christmas Eve by acting out the nativity.  As you can see, Spence and I were Sheppard's, and M and Liz were lambs.  We followed the nativity story with a reading of “The Night Before Christmas.” 

We opened our Christmas Eve presents (it’s a tradition in my family to open one present on Christmas Eve which is always pajamas, and in Spencer’s family they open one small present that’s just a fun little gift usually from the dollar store) and thennnnnn it was bath time!   

Though it wasn’t planned at all, M Bug got a pair of PJ’s that matched his cousin Jared’s!  What a cute coincidence! 

M celebrated Christmas with two cousins just a few months apart from him in age.  Jared is three weeks older, and Ben is a few months younger. 

I could NOT sleep that night.  I have never been able to sleep well on Christmas Eve, I just get so darn excited!  This year was no exception.  Needless to say, we woke up pretty early.  We snuck upstairs before the rest of the crew was up and helped M open a present.  Somehow his cars pj’s had mysteriously gotten soggy in the night, so we had to open another pair of jammies for him to change into.  I love my little reindeer! 

After breakfast we all opened presents!   

I made several of our gifts this year.  It was fun to see the reactions of the recipients who were present.  It was also so fun to help M unwrap his gifts.  He tired of it pretty quickly, but it was so fun to pass him back and forth between laps while we showed him what he had received.  Honestly, M was too young to really get excited about much of it; he was more interested in the ribbon than anything else.  But, even though the experience was over his head, I LOVED every second of it.  It was sweet to see how many loved ones had given him very thoughtful gifts.  He is loved by so many.  Spending Christmas day with my little family was priceless. 

Later that afternoon, we took M outside to play in his first real snow!  We hadn’t gotten much snow in Idaho, and never enough to play in so we were excited to see what M thought.       

The little cutie seemed to really like it!  He adores being outside, so we weren’t really surprised that he had fun just watching the snowflakes fall. 

While we were in Utah, we rode the train to temple square to see the lights! 

Nat and her friend joined us and we had so much fun walking around temple square.  M was so fascinated by all of the “pretties.”  It was snowing lightly, which really just added to the overall experience.  M was so cute and fat in his snowsuit, it really was just like cuddling a big teddy bear. He spent more time in our arms than in his stroller.  We probably looked kind of funny pushing a stroller full of purses all around temple square while Baby sat happy as a calm on someone’s hip.      

We wandered around the City Creek Center for a while and got hot chocolate (except for Natalie who got a smoothie, crazy girl :) ).  M begged for tastes of smoothie for much of the evening.  Of course Nat complied.  Who could possibly resist that face?!

We spent the rest of our vacation visiting with family and playing lots of games.  We also attended our Grandma Smith’s funeral.  In looking over the past few days, I am kind of surprised how many pictures I DIDN’T take.  But like I said earlier, I am trying to be better about carefully choosing between recording versus just enjoying the moment so there were many times I chose to just be with family rather than have a camera between my face and theirs.

We did manage to sneak in one more visit with Natalie before heading home.  She stayed and helped get M Bug ready for bed, which was really fun.  And we enjoyed reading stories and playing with some of M’s new toys.   

We had so much fun.  Let’s do this again shall we?  Same time next year?