Christmas Eve

Merry Christmas Everyone! We are celebrating our Christmas Miracle this year! Last year at this time, we had NO IDEA that we would have our second child by this Christmas. In fact, we thought we had at least two more years to wait (after waiting 4 years already).

We started out the day making Christmas Cookies! :) We all got on our aprons and made butter cookie dough.

 

This is one of the Angel Cookie's Catherine made:

 Teagan is pointing to the advent calendar here. She wants to open more slots. Her Aunt Deidre made the girls 12 days of Christmas Calendars too, and she has wanted to open all this every day.

We told the girls they could open one gift before church......

 Catherine was VERY excited to get Julie, from American Girl from her Grandparents.

Teagan enjoys opening gifts, more than the gifts I think! She got a new gift to try to open after opening her first one.

Teagan also opened a doll. 

 

 Before church, Catherine suggested a "photo shoot"  for our Chinese New Year card.

Love this one!

We are pointing at the advent calendar here which Teagan was very fascinated by.

 70s style photo here.

The children's service was beautiful  standing room (barely!) only. Next year, we'd need to arrive about an hour early. Jason and Teagan spent most of the service in a kitchen, Catherine and I could see through this doorway.

Next stop - Rainbow where we met the Rooney Family for Dinner. Dan and Susan go there every Christmas Eve as part of their tradition and invited us to join them this year.

Ok, yeah, those were not the best photos of the moment, but it was a great evening and fun to catch up with Dan's family.

We do "family gifts" (grandparents etc.) on Christmas Eve and "Santa Gifts" on Christmas.  I didn't get photos of everything, but here is a random sample of the one's I did capture:

Rock Star Game from Grandma Shaw - Rock on!

The Garage and First Purse from Grandma Jackie and Grady and Grandpa Chuck

After that, it was time for bed! Teagan had be physically separated from her garage. I let her sleep with the cars. I don't think she understood it would be there in the morning still based on the full body wrap she did around it.

Christmas Day to come!

Photos and stuff

Catherine wanted to give Teagan her bottle the other day.

Here are the girls on Thanksgiving Day. 

They are in matching boots in the above two photos - Catherine is wearing mine, and DouDou is wearing Cat's.

Some more fort building...

Some updates: Teagan started speech therapy last week.  She is working with a great speech therapist at the U. The technique is to bombard the child with sounds like B and P. Like really bombard. Like "B B B B B BARN! CAN YOU SAY BARN?! " Strangely (to me), it seemed to work.  Although, one of her first new words was "MO" as in "NO."

We go back to the ENT tomorrow. It appears as if her ear infection is back in that right ear and she ha the cough again. :( The antibiotics did work - for about a week. But, slowly that night cough is coming back and she is not sleeping. No one is! I am not sure what the options are here - I guess we will find out tomorrow.

This backpack is a source of fascination for Teagan. In fact, all bags are. She regularly moves all her sippy cups out of their cupboard and into whatever bag she can find  - including the trash!