Month: January 2018

So it was the most wonderful time of the year. We were all hearing those sleigh bells ringing.  And we were def rocking around the Christmas tree.  But there were some differences this year.  None more so than our bambino being here of course.

We love Christmas. The lead up.  The big day.  The big dinner – which Zoe lovingly preps, cooks and slaves over during the day to make it my best dinner of the year.  Every year.  And once again this was immense!  And the magic of Christmas is something we can’t wait for O to experience and hopefully have the same warm fuzzy feelings we do about this festive period.

But that said it was all very different with Otts in our life this year.  In the lead up to Christmas, usually the nights are spent cuddling up on the sofa, drinking hot chocolates watching some kind of box set.  This year, everything was the same as it was every other night.  Dinner, bathing of our Babe and feeding to sleep.  Now I am not for one minute complaining about that, I love that’s the reason we changed it up, but it was the first difference in the lead up.

 

For the last few years Zoe has done Advent Bags for me. A small gift which I get to open each night before bed.  I have in previous years photographed these each night, with the same background, uploaded it to Insta etc.  This year I got as far as the first picture of the bags on the side.  By the time I’d get into bed at night, I didn’t have energy to go to those lengths.  I still loved the gifts and I even took some pics but definitely not 24 of them and I definitely did not get around to uploading them!

Advent calendars. Though it may seem like an over extravagance (it probably is) we do advent calendars most years.  We’ve done, amongst others, biscuits, playmobile, and good old traditional chocolates.  This year I had The Naked Marshmallow Company one and Zoe had T2.  We also had the Meri Meri woodland advent calendar where you get a little wooden part of a animal scene each day.  We are going to do this one every year and build it with O, a little tradition if you will.  The main difference this year was the windows were being opened in batches approximately every 5 days.  We would just forget that it needed doing. We were literally bingeing our advents.  No harm done of course except maybe 5, larger than your average, marshmallows at 8pm is a little much and Zoe was definitely not drinking 5 cups of tea after 8pm at night.

Christmas Eve was spent visiting family, O’s Nan and Grandad (Zoe’s Mum and Dad), which was all about O opening some of her first gifts and watching Grandad’s train ‘choo-choo’ around the Christmas tree.  We also went for a late lunch/dinner just us three, which we think we are going to do every year, you know instead of the typical take-away (I always had a chinese takeaway on Christmas Eve growing up).  Well at least until O is older when a takeaway may become easier – especially if they deliver.

Christmas morning.  This was quite chill.  We opened our gifts as usual, it just took a bit longer than before.  One of the fundamental differences this year was where we would have done all the running around, tidying up, cleaning etc. in the days leading up, this hadn’t happened.  So we were left doing this on Christmas morning.  Those of you with babies will know that these are the days when the babes just don’t want to play ball.  Where they won’t entertain themselves and you can’t get just 15 mins out of them to even get ready.  By the time my family arrived on the day, I had just about, like 2 mins before, managed to put some make-up on, and get us both dressed – by both I mean O and I.  Zoe is capable of dressing herself and I can confirm she was not prepping veggies in the nude!

The actual festivities on the day were pretty standard. Obviously once Nanny and Grandad arrived, they (aka Nanny) wanted to take O which meant we could get on with the little bits, like setting the table, wrapping the last few gifts (yes I was that unorganised I was doing it upstairs on our bed once our guests had arrived).  After that it was a pretty normal and pretty good Christmas in terms of the day with family etc.  O was a complete champ as well, well done Babe.  And every now and again I caught myself just thinking how lucky we were to have our family and now our babe here with us.

 

The last 3 Christmases have been so different. 2015 was the saddest time as we had just gone through the loss of our first babe and our hearts were really not in it.   2016 I was heavily pregnant, had massive swollen feet and legs and could hardly walk.  And then this year, here she is, here we are, our girlgang.

I am looking forward to so many more.  Making traditions, watching the excitement build.  I loved this year, but for different reasons I think Christmas 2018 will be the one – only 350ish days to go, lets start the countdown…