Magical Christmas

Someone once said, "There are three stages to Christmas: you believe in Santa Claus, you don't believe in Santa Claus, you ARE Santa Claus."

This year, Graham and I entered the third stage of Christmas, and it was my favorite yet. Will loved Christmas. Granted, he has no idea what it's really about, and he doesn't understand the concept of getting and giving presents (although he did both), but he loved staring at the Christmas lights on the tree and playing with the jingle bell ornaments.

He got lots of presents (thanks to all the grandparents and aunts and uncles). Here he is opening his first present, although he was more interested in eating the wrapping paper and bows than in playing with the contents...no surprise there.

Just about every picture we have of him involves him chewing on some form of wrapping. See...

He wasn't quite sure what to do with this one...his biggest present by far. He has outgrown his infant seat, so we bought him a new car seat for Christmas. We'll see how he likes it!

This face made Christmas extra special this year. I can't believe he is seven months old, sitting up, and trying to crawl. I look forward to many more Christmases with this little guy and teaching him the true meaning of the holiday...other than eating bows, that is.

Settling In

We made it. November was an insane month between two plane trips (one to each coast) and trying to get everything ready to close on our house and move. I am happy to report, however, that we are now officially homeowners!

This is the view I see from our living room every morning:

There are no houses behind us, so we have a great view of the mountains. I'm loving our house, despite the stress it took to get us here.

We were scheduled to move on November 30, and we barely closed on the house the day before. Then, we ended up on the phone with the agent at 7:30 a.m. that morning trying to get keys to the house because it accidentally got locked by the cleaners the night before with our set of keys waiting inside for us. Oops. 

Still, we got access to the house and, thanks to our movers, by 12:00 p.m. we had all of our belongings inside and mostly even in the right room. One of them commented on the fact that I had color coded and labeled each box by room and put corresponding labels in the rooms of the house. Overly organized...maybe...but it made it really easy for them to know where to put everything. Now, I'll grant you that using a different font for each room's labels might have been going a bit too far. I couldn't help it.

The next day we had to go back to our apartment and clean the whole thing. Lesson: kitchens take a long time to clean. I cleaned the kitchen in the time Graham did the rest of the apartment. By Saturday night, we were exhausted and ready to enjoy our happy little home.

Two and half weeks later, we have most of the boxes put away, and we're trying to make a decorating plan. Anybody want to enter me in a home decor sweepstakes and guarantee that I'll win? 

While we're not ready for HGTV to tour our place yet, we've made some progress:

Day 1:

 Day 10:

Day 1:

Day 10:

 And, here's your token cute picture of the day...love these boys!