Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

When Julian was born and we were having those many sleepless and frantic nights trying to figure everything out, I remember having a calm moment and Thad saying, "I am really looking forward to the holidays. Julian will be older, hopefully we'll be more settled by then, and we'll be celebrating our first Christmas with him." It seemed then that the time would never come, but low and behold, time has that very tricky habit of flying by and we rapidly fell upon Julian's first holiday season.

We never made it to see Santa (our attempts were repeatedly smashed) so we'll attempt again next season. He did love the lights of the Christmas tree and wanted to grab all the ornaments that he could. I have a feeling next year we'll have a gate or something around the tree to hold back curious 17-month olds. My friend, Amanda, came over with her daughter, Bryce, to take some Christmas shots of Julian. Here are a couple of my favorites:


We had Christmas Eve dinner at my mom's house as is the tradition and then had Christmas morning at our house, complete with monkey bread and mimosas. Julian loved tearing the wrapping paper (even unwrapped one of his gifts) and sitting in the empty boxes. At dinner we discovered Julian will say "mmmm" if he eats something yummy (in this case, it was a taste of whipped cream that got him). He's such a ham, he did it every time and we laughed! As long as we responded, boy did he work the crowd. :)

New Year's Eve was spent here at home with Brian and our friend, Melisa, who came down from New York (she says she came to see us but I think it was to escape the crowds!) and we had a big, nice dinner, watched a movie, and actually stayed up until the ball dropped! Granted, we forgot about the bubbly in the fridge, but the three bottles of wine before it was probably plenty enough.....Julian went to bed around 8 PM and we were able to celebrate like adults. Woo!

Here's the album of the Christmas festivities. Enjoy! We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and hope 2009 will be just as exciting and fun as 2008!

Julian's First Christmas