Today is Alethea’s 20 month birthday, but because I haven’t done any blogging about our Christmas celebrations, I thought maybe we’d save the Alethea update for later and instead let you know that A) we haven’t had a baby yet, and B) we had a very nice Christmas!

First the baby part… I think we’re officially ready.  Sure, there is more I could do, but I think we’ve got the main things covered – car seat pulled out of storage, hospital bag packed, baby book purchased.  Now we just need the kid to take some initiative.  I did do a purposely long ‘wondering the aisles’ trip to Target Sunday to see if I could get things moving, but no dice.  Plan for tomorrow: clean the house from top to bottom and see if that does anything.

The good part about not giving birth is that we were able to enjoy all of our various Christmas celebrations.  Christmas Eve we went to the service at church, which was just fantastic this year.  I can’t tell you how much it means to me to really feel like we have a whole ‘family’ in our church, people who love and support us and would do just about anything for us.  We are blessed to be a part of this church and celebrating Christmas together is just icing on the cake, so to speak.

After the service we enjoyed Chinese take-out (a long-standing tradition) with Peter’s family.  There is a story behind the tradition, but even if there weren’t, it’s an easy tradition to embrace because take-out means NO COOKING!

Christmas morning came around and Alethea headed down the stairs in her Christmas jammies:

First up, the stocking:

Alethea was most pleased with the Clifford DVD and the bubble bath:

Next thing was opening presents.  Alethea wasn’t very interested in the unwrapping process, but once she saw what was inside, she enjoyed her gifts.  Her favorite by far was the doll:

Alethea has been a very attentive and affectionate new mother.  We’re only just hoping that after months of telling her that a baby is going to come live with us, she doesn’t think this is it:

After our little family Christmas, we headed over to Peter’s parents’ house for more celebrating.  We had a delicious breakfast and a fabulous dinner with present opening and family time sandwiched in between.  Then today was Christmas with my family, also delightful and filled with good food and fantastic gifts.

We hope you enjoyed all of your Christmas festivities too!  And thanks in advance for your thoughts and prayers over the coming days.  This baby has got to come soon!  (Right??!?!)