Traditions

I hope that everyone had a very Merry Christmas! Our Christmas was pretty awesome! We have had 3 Christmases together before this one that have been so good and full of family. Before we have had to balance and split up Christmas so we could feel like we both had times with our families and having time with our own little one. But this year it was all different. This was our first Christmas in Virginia and our first away from our families and being on our own. We put together our favorite traditions growing up and made new ones, making our Christmas this year our own.

We built a fort on Christmas Eve and Oliver loved crawling in and out of it and playing peek-a-boo. The fort didn't last very long before Ollie started to pull down the blankets or trying to climb up on the blankets bringing them down. It was a fun way to pass the time but I'm not sure if it will be done every year. 

We opened up two presents on Christmas Eve - pajamas and a Christmas book. We changed into our pjs and then read our new book (The Night Before Christmas) and then put Ollie to bed. And the next morning it was fun to see how excited he was when he saw all the presents stacked up in the middle of the floor. 

One thing that I wanted to do was to have shrimp salad with our Christmas dinner (which has been done by my family ever since I can remember). We usually only have it on Christmas and it's so good that I just had to have it this year too. It was my first time making it so I was a bit nervous that I would mess it up. I checked everything twice and was very careful in making it but still for some reason I messed it up and it was not very good, so this year we did not have shrimp salad. But we still had a very yummy dinner with turkey, funeral potatoes, super yummy rolls and other yummy foods. 

Another tradition that both of our families have had but that we really don't like and have tried not to follow (and I am sure other families have this one too) is of course having a child sick on Christmas. We had a great day full of food, presents and fun. We enjoyed opening our presents and spending the day enjoying them and each other, but then late afternoon our little Oliver got a fever and started to be fussy. We had a rough sleepless night and early on Thursday we took him to the doctors. It ends up that he has strep throat. No fun. Another rough night leading to a morning of tired people, and Oliver just didn't want to be awake but did at the same time. So this is us still in bed at 10 am. I hope that all of you did not take part in this tradition and that your children are all healthy but if you did, I hope that they get feeling better soon and can enjoy the rest of their break and the beginning of the New Year.