Joyful, Joyful: First Christmas

So, I wrote my first blog post and then I got overwhelmed thinking about going back and recapping the first six months of my girl's lives. SO much has happened and so much as changed and I did not want to forget any moments. This seemed to paralyze me in terms of blogging. I made the girls and our families a book for Christmas that included the girls first 6 months of life. Since they will have this book to look back on, I decided to pick up the blog where we are right now in life. Maybe, hopefully, I will be able to go back and blog about how the Lord met each of our needs through our longing to have babies. That is a huge part of my testimony and one that I want to give the Lord all the glory for. For today, especially since I hear rumblings coming from the nursery, I am going to blog about the girl's first Christmas.

2012 Christmas card

I was a little nervous about how the holidays were going to go, but the Lord met every need. We had such a sweet first Christmas with Sally and Mary Kate. I know I will always look back with such fun memories of their first Christmas. This was our 2012 Christmas card and the front of the card read "Joy!". I have used the word "Joy" for both our Christmas card and their birth announcement because that is how my heart feels regarding these two- such great JOY!

Colonel, my dad, bought the girls their first Christmas ornaments. This was really special to me as I love decorating our Christmas tree. I want each ornament to have a special meaning so I was so excited to get these ornaments. I cant wait for each Christmas to tell the girl's that their grandfather gave them these "first Christmas" ornaments.

These are Sally's little feet. She always crosses her feet, which cracks me up.

We did take Sal and Mary Kate to go see Santa. I know Santa is old, but this Santa was very old! The girls did really well. Mary Kate was a little concerned by the large man with the white beard. She gave him a very skeptical look and tugged on his beard a little. These outfits the girls have on are their first Christmas pajamas! This was something else I was also very excited about. I wanted them to have candy cane striped Christmas pajamas.

On Christmas Eve, we went to IPC's Christmas Eve service. It is one of my favorite services of the year. Ford came down with the flu on Dec 22 so he did not get to go to church with us. He was still in bed, but he did get to be a part of Christmas Day. We hung out at my parents house on Christmas Eve. My dad has created a Christmas Eve tradition of Bingo. It is really fun, and great prizes are involved. This year, Ford and I own Apple TV! We were pretty pumped. On Christmas day, we woke up and did our family Christmas, just us and the girls. After that, we did Christmas morning at the Williams and Christmas afternoon at the Norton's. I was a little nervous about how the girls were going to do going back and forth, but they did great. I was really impressed. It was a really fun Christmas Eve and Christmas day! We loved celebrating our Savior's birth with both sides of the family.