Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope that you all had a great Christmas. We had loads of fun! It was nice to have a long weekend with Phil at home and him not working. The past couple weeks he has clocked over 60 hours. Too bad he's not hourly!!

Charlotte absolutely loved opening her presents. She knew exactly what to do when she got a present, but after a few presents she just wanted to play with her new toys. By the end of it, there were just presents left for her (she had like three times the number of presents than Phil and I had) and we were just opening them for her. I guess we could have waited but I think we both just wanted them open. Then she played and played and took a 3 hour nap!! (She normally sleeps for 2). I made a vegetarian meatloaf, cheesy potatoes (substituted milk and cream of celery for the cream of chicken), stuffing, salad, homemade bread (in my new breadmaker yay!) and we had some cookies Grandma sent us.

I got some great gifts too! The breadmaker is amazing! Its West Bend and makes a normal sized bread loaf, not one of those weird square ones. So now I can actually cut the bread and have easy sandwiches and such. I think I'll go back to making almost all of our bread now that we have this machine. :-D. I have already made a white loaf, raisen loaf (though I had crater bread, lol) and a chocolate loaf of bread--delicious with cream cheese! I got some cookbooks (bread for the breadmaker, vegetarian crockpot, and a big vegan one). Plus a fruit dehydrator (which has been on non-stop since Christmas afternoon, a pearl necklace, icing tips (already put to use), clothes, and the list goes on! This year for Christmas we got Charlotte mostly toys that didn't require batteries, which ended up being a lot of wood toys. I found some nice Melissa & Doug wooden toys at TJ Maxx so Great Grandma and Grandpa L got those for her :). Plus we found some great toys at IKEA. She got a set of metal pots and pans (small, for her play kitchen) and when she opened them she walked right on over to the real stove and wanted them up there (all from Grandma and Grandpa L). It was very cute, she must have assumed metal pans belong on the real stove! They make this ball thing that shoots balls out the top and she has always adored it. So Grandma and Grandpa K got it for her (as well as plenty of other toys) and they even found her a healthy pretend food set. And of course she got lots of books, which she spends at least a couple hours reading everyday. Phil got some great gifts, but I'm thinking that if you got this far you probably don't want to read about everything he got as well! Though I must highlight an electric razor, video games, gift card, etc.

Phil is back at work today for a couple more days and then we are headed to St. Louis EARLY Wednesday morning. I'm really hoping the baby.... I guess toddler now, sleeps for at least one plane ride, but I'm not expecting it. I'm just really hoping she'll sleep great at my in-laws. She did pretty well at my parents but if I can get her to sleep well (and take naps) the whole trip will be so so so much easier! We're also going to a wedding on Saturday so hopefully we will see some friends! But I'm excited to see family again :-).

I am going to upload some pictures while the baby is napping. Maybe I'll have a few to post here too. :-D