Merry Christmas!

What a fun holiday we had this year!  Willa doesn't seem to yet understand Christmas enough to anticipate it and get excited, but she did like to tell any one that asked her that she would be asking for "Daniel Tiger toys!"  She didn't want to sit on Santa's lap yet, and in fact it took me 45 minutes to get her close enough to Santa to have her smiling in the same frame as him.  I brought all of my tricks, snacks, YouTube videos, Elmo toys, you name it.  Still she didn't want to do it.  I have the feeling that if I had just walked her in and said nothing she would have made her way over on her own, but the moment I asked her to and all three adults in the room were watching, it was too intense and she didn't want to.  Ah well.  This is the result, and lucky me, it's still very cute!

My parents and brother came to visit this year, and we had lots of fun with them in the days leading up to Christmas.  She helped Daddy and Papa make/decorate cookies, charmed everyone at church, and couldn't get enough of our tree.  I'm very proud of how gentle and careful she was with the tree, we were able to leave all the ornaments on it and she never got close to knocking it down.  No gates necessary, phew!

On Christmas morning she got right into the unwrapping process.  Santa probably should have taken the toys out of their boxes because we lost a lot of time in the dismantling of packaging process.  Lesson learned!  Here are the three videos we took that morning.  I love her reaction to seeing the toys in her stocking (ohhh!!!) as well as how quickly she thanked people for her gifts.  She truly is a kind hearted girl, how proud we are!

Overall we had a lovely time, and I'm sad to see the season pass.  Next up, Willa's birthday!