Last Hurrah of 2009

So it's a half hour til midnight on New Year's Eve, and for the last hour it's been a fight just to keep my eyes open. But then I realized I hadn't blogged for the entire month of December, and this was my last chance to do so! (Yes, my friends, that's just how dedicated I am to blogging!) The Christmas season was a fantastic whirlwind of activities for our family. Since Nate was born, every Christmas has been so different that this year I continually reminded myself just to "roll with it" and not set my expectations too high or plan for too much. I'm not sure I was so successful, but it was an awesome month anyways, filled with lots of Christmas traditions, both new and old. We took Nate to the Singing Christmas Tree at Broadway Church, which is a long-time seasonal staple growing up in my family. Nate tolerated about the first third of the program and then requested to go play in the nursery. Maybe next year he'll fully get on board! We also made a point of driving around several evenings to look at Christmas lights with the boys. We decided to take both Nate & Cody to Stanley Park to experience "Bright Nights" including a train ride (Nate has a slight fascination with trains) which turned out to be a huge hit. So much so that Nathan cried when it was over and didn't want to leave. We'll be making that one a tradition for our family's Christmas from now on.

We hosted Christmas Eve with Monte's family; they've always opened presents that night, and my family has always opened them Christmas morning, so every year Christmas with our two families is always the same. We decided, though, that we should have our own Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, just us four as a family. So on the night of the 23rd we pretended it was Christmas Eve and had the boys open one present each: matching Christmas jammies. We ordered pizza and had cake (to celebrate Jesus' birthday - candle, song and everything), drove around to look at lights, and had popcorn and hot chocolate while watching The Grinch before sending the boys off to bed. And then the next morning (the 24th) we gave Nate his stocking and opened the gifts we had for each other just between our little family. Monte and I agreed after giving this a try it actually worked out really well... Nate wasn't overwhelmed by too many presents, and it spread the Christmas festivities out over three days. Since it's our favourite time of year, that was a big plus. So we'll see if we can make it happen again next year.

And now I'm going to ring in the new year by putting my head down on my pillow. I've never been one for partying it up on New Year's Eve (it's seems overrated, in my opinion), and I've been getting very little sleep since Cody's come down with a nasty cold & cough this past week. Sleep sounds like the perfect way to begin 2010!