It Will Always Be Remembered As A Very Elmo Christmas

I’m not even sure where to begin with the telling of the holiday weekend.  Everything was really pretty low-key, which is just the way I wanted it to be.  Zach, although waking up a little sick on Christmas morning, seemed to enjoy opening his presents.  He actually ripped the paper off himself with just a little help getting it started.  He got many, many, gifts (probably too many if you ask me) and was the least excited with the ones from Mom & Dad and/or Santa.  It seems that his extended family really likes to spoil him.  I think his favorite gifts so far are his Sing ‘n’ Boogie Blue, and his Sesame Street tool bench.  The TMX Elmo freaks him out a little but after a couple minutes he starts laughing at it.  When he can keep the animals out of it long enough to sit in it himself, his Elmo chair also giggles at him and freaks him out just a bit.  He seems to be warming up to that one though.

We spent Christmas Eve with my Dad and his wife.  I enjoyed the Christmas Eve service at our church, although Zach and my 2-year-old nephew were both really wound up and didn’t want to sit still at all.  Afterwards, we returned to my dad’s house where we had a quick dinner and exchanged gifts.

We had a nice and quiet Christmas morning at home, just the three of us.   I would have liked a little more time to just hang out with Zach and play with his new toys, but we headed over to my mom’s around noon to hang out with my family.

My sister and her family were already at my mom’s when we arrived.  We spent the afternoon lounging around.  While the younger boys took naps, we watched a few episodes of Grey’s Anatomy (still not done with the second season) and I took the opportunity to do a little knitting.  It does seem to get a little easier the more I practice, but the hat I’m making might not hold up for long.

When my brother and his wife arrived we did our gift exchange there.  We all got some pretty good loot, but the best gift was my Wacom Tablet that I’ve been wanting for a very long time.  I think this was the first year in a very long time that I didn’t already know what my mom had gotten me for Christmas and it was a very nice surprise.  I was secretly hoping that she had gotten it for me but I didn’t actually expect to see it when I opened my gift.

After our gift exchange we had dinner together, watched a couple more Grey’s Anatomy episodes (can you tell we’re a bit obsessed?) and then headed home.

Tuesday I got to stay home with Zach, but instead of playing with my new toy, I spent most of the day doing laundry, dishes, and cleaning up Zach’s toys about 10 million times.  I would have liked to have just left his toys strung all over the place, but Izzy likes to claim them for herself and chew on them if I do that.

Today I had to go back to work and it just plain sucked.  There is so much that I have to do in the next few days and all I want to do is stay home with my baby.  He’s still not feeling well and was very clingy when I dropped him off at day care this morning.  Fortunately, I was busy enough today that I didn’t think too much about it but I was really happy to pick him up after work.

For more Christmas photos, go on over to Flickr.  For some reason I got very few photos at my mom’s house and Elmo was not well represented but I’m hoping my mom and sis will share some of their pics.