Welcome, welcome, welcome to our family and friends! Not quite a Christmas picture, but taken New Year's Day so it's current as current can be.
December, as busy as it was, was a very good month for us this year. Somehow we found the proper balance between family time, Joe's travel, Joe's gigs at Sea World & Candlelight, and keeping up with day to day life. I consider it a great success that we were able to send Christmas cards this year - who knows how many people we surprised. :o) I had quite a few Christmas goals this year and managed to meet quite a few of them:
- Plan some advent calendar activities. We used the advent calendar I grew up with to track the days, and a newer one with little doors to plan holiday activities throughout the month. Almost all of the following were Advent calendar fun - Parker would open up the numbered little door each day and pull out a little slip of paper with something Christmas-y to do written on it. She loved it!
- Take Parker to see the Nutcracker Ballet for the first time.
- Go see Joe sing with Return to Zero at Sea World.
- Go see Joe sing with Voices of Liberty in the Candlelight processional at Epcot.
- Walk around the neighborhood to look at Christmas lights. As we walked around, we all sang Christmas carols together. Most definitely will keep this as a Lamy family Christmas tradition!
- Send Christmas cards (with a letter) this year. Also start an Excel spreadsheet this year to keep track.
- Take Parker to the Shrine Christmas concert.
- Go to the Holiday Traditions concert in Gainesville to see Grampa Gary conduct!
- Decorate for Christmas - kept it simple this year and it was perfect.
- Christmas craft activities.
- A picture with Santa out at Downtown Disney and all the fun Christmas things going on out there. Bonus was running into the Lee family where Parker had a great time running around with Hannah - especially the dancing and trying to catch fake snowflakes on her tongue.
- Drive around to look at Christmas lights. Saw some really neat displays this year including one synchronized to music thereby setting the bar for every other display. "I want to see the lights dancing to the music!"
- Get to the boy scout tree lot to get our tree this year.
- Midnight Mass
- Christmas Eve party at the George's in Cocoa Beach.
- Bake Christmas cookies with Parker
- Christmases #1 - Lamys/Wileys in Orlando on Dec 11; #2 - our own Christmas on Christmas Eve morning; #3 - Langfords in Gainesville Christmas Day afternoon; #4 - Andrews in Gainesville the day after Christmas. Christmas #1 was a neat, new idea to re-gift, #3 & #4 were both White Elephant gift exchanges with my brother as the elephant master at both making sure we followed the rules. :o) We were delighted to host Christmas #1 at our house this year!
- Read Christmas/Holiday/Winter books every day for quiet time and bedtime.
We did a very good job of spreading all these activities out over the month instead of trying to cram most every thing into the last 3 days before Christmas like we did last year! (Not that we tried to, it just ended up that way.)
Things we meant to do but ran out of time for (basically a starter list for next year!):
- Graham cracker "gingerbread" houses.
- ICE at Gaylord Palms.
- Sadly we missed BOTH Memories of Motherhood Christmas parties this year.
- Christmas Eve open house at the Donahue's.
- More crafts based on Christmas carols.
- Deliver Christmas cookies to the neighbors.
- Take a family Christmas photo - still waiting to get one in all of our Christmas shirts.
- Technically still need to celebrate Joe's birthday, one of these nights we'll have a nice dinner out the two of us.
Here is a link to a Flickr album of a photo project I did this month : Picture The Holidays. Keep your eyes peeled for a December 2010 album in general - I'll add a link here when I get those done as well.
As Parker started preschool this year we had the absolute joy of seeing her in her first Nativity Play! Each day at school the kids all rotated through each role so they'd have a chance to play each part. The day of the actual play, Parker was an angel. :o)
And, as promised, here is last year's Christmas picture! Just a snapshot in our Christmas PJs on Christmas morning.
Happy New Year everyone!
Love,
Jenny, Joe & Parker
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