The Holidays

Our holiday season (Halloween to Easter) was actually pretty great this (and last) year. Starting with Halloween. Jack was a cow again because I could still squeeze him into the costume. We went real trick-or-treating in a friend’s neighborhood. Jack had a blast. He loved looking into people’s homes and looking at his candy. We only let him have one piece of candy on Halloween night, and then it went up to a piece of candy after every meal, when he remembered. He played with that candy so much though, so it was a welcome gift.

Thanksgiving was awesome. I was expecting to have had a baby by then, and some friends graciously said they would bring us part of their thanksgiving dinner. But when the day came and baby was being stubborn we joined our friends for the meal. I felt guilty that I didn’t help prepare any of it, but it was nice just to go and eat good food and hang out with good friends. This was the first time too where we could let Jack go and play without needing to keep checking on him to see if he was ok; he could be independent and play nicely with friends and we could be with ours. It was lovely.

Christmas was pretty great as well. Actually, it was probably my favorite Christmas ever, for so many reasons. It was our first Christmas in our own home with our own little family. Juliet was just 3.5 weeks old and having a newborn during the Christmas season just helped make Christmas a little more real. I was still celebrating no longer being pregnant and was feeling so much better, even though I wasn’t sleeping much, I handle the fatigue far better than the nausea. Someone (we still don’t know who) was so incredibly kind by leaving us gifts, GOOD gifts, on our doorstep every night for the twelve days leading up to Christmas. Each day was based on 12 days of Christmas song. They were so clever and so generous, we felt guilty again accepting these gifts, but it also made us feel like little kids again by being excited to see what surprises were in store. We were so grateful for their gifts, and for all the gifts from our family for filling up our tree. We didn’t buy any gifts for ourselves because it’s just not in the budget so we were so incredibly blessed with what we received. Thank you everyone! After gifts on Christmas morning we went to the church and had a marshmallow gun fight with some friends from the ward and the missionaries, because why not? It was a lot more fun than I was expecting. That night we ended up going to a friend’s house for dinner and again had such a lovely meal in which I didn’t contribute a single thing toward (but totally would have-thanks so much Emily!) Jack had a blast playing with all of the triplet’s toys by himself, and stayed up to 11pm without a nap, and then we came home to sleep.

New Years eve was completely unremarkable because we had a newborn. We went to sleep. I was not going to keep myself awake until midnight if the baby was sleeping because she’d be waking me up enough later.

Easter was nice, Chris didn’t have any meetings so we would all wake up and go to church together. We haven’t done that in a while. We didn’t do anything too fancy except a little Easter egg hunt in the backyard. After church we again went to a friend’s for dinner except this time I did help with the food.

So, now we are caught up on the holidays.