Adios, December.

I am really, really happy that December is over. Rick was working nights all month (like sometimes 16 hour long nights), so we really didn't see him except for a few minutes each day. And usually those few minutes of together-ness ended up like this:

Spending some quality time snoozing together.

I had an awful time keeping Faye out of our room while Rick caught a few hours of sleep during the day. Sometimes she would be in there jumping all over him, and other times she would snatch her "paci and lovey" from her crib and go take her nap with him. A lot of times he slept right through it, but there were definitely days when I had to drag her out of there kicking and screaming.

Our month of December also involved a week where we all traded around the flu, and Isla suddenly deciding to wake up every hour at night for a while. Definitely some major sleep deprivation here! So, just a couple of days after Christmas I went nuts taking down all the Christmas decorations and ridding our house of all signs of December. I am happy to report that after just a couple of days in January, we are all feeling healthy and much more well rested. (And Isla is now sleeping more like 8-10 hours a night! Hooray! Turns out that girl needs to be swaddled tightly in TWO blankets.) So now that it's all gone, here are the decorations I had managed to pull together for Christmas. It will be fun to add to this each year we live in this house.

I LOVE these amazing, hand-knit stockings. They were definitely made with love! This is also a different version of the nativity I played with when I was young. For my birthday a couple of years ago, my mom cut out all the felt for me, and my dad cut the blocks so I could glue them on.

Fakey tree. Real ones are just not worth it for me.

Credit goes to my sister Reagan for wrapping all the yarn around the J-O-Y letters. I had started working on it before she came to visit, but she really picked up the pace!

I filled the frames on the gallery wall with anything Christmas-y I could find (ribbon, an ornament, whatever) and cut some vinyl images for any remaining frames.

Trees I've collected over the last few years. (One is from my favorite store in Winston-Salem, Re-Tale. I miss that place!)

I drew this on the side of the fridge at like 1 a.m. one night. I know, I'm a total party animal.

Christmas cards on the art wall. Sadly, we lost our mail key and I don't want to pay 25 bucks to replace it. The mail lady knows us, obviously, since probably no one else has a crew of barefoot children running down the sidewalk to get the mail, so she is kind enough to hand it over every few days. I got the mail from her just a couple of days ago and was sad that a ton more cards had been sitting in the mailbox that I could have been admiring!

So the Christmas season was a little different for us this year, with Rick out of the picture most of December. The warm weather also made it hard to feel like it was Christmas time. (Although now it is finally cold! Yay!) But there is a lot to be grateful for now that we are all healthy, sleeping regularly, and seeing Daddy a little more often. I am super behind in blogging (like, I'll start with Thanksgiving) so lots more posts to come.