We were so excited for our first Christmas with Annie. In the week leading up to it, she started creeping, then crawling, then discovered a love for wrapping paper. Perfect! Christmas Eve my family came over for junk food dinner and sibling gifts, per tradition. We had yummy french bread pizza, chicken wing dip, marinated mozzarella, and lots and lots of desserts (cookies and monkey bread, YUM). Annie had a blast playing with her aunts and uncles and grandma and grandpa.
Christmas morning we woke up and opened our presents from Santa. She had a grand time helping rip the paper off. We made the rookie mistake of leaving her big gift in the box rather than assembling it before-hand, so we quickly put that together so she could check it out. A few weeks before Christmas I saw a commercial for a crawling/cruising/standing toy from Fisher Price. I had to have it, it was so damn cute. And she loves it, so yay! Paul stood her up to see the monkey at the top the first time she played with it, and within days she was crawling right over to pull herself up to play with him, and pulling herself up to stand on pretty much everything else too. We have a super baby, I'm telling you.
So after playing hard with her new toys, she promptly passed out and slept through present-opening at Grandma & Grandpa's. Luckily she woke up before my mom had to leave for work. She got lots of great presents from Grandma & Grandpa: a car/walker, a puzzle, a book about what snowmen do at night (one of Kev's old favorites), a stacker toy, her first baseball tee, a gloworm that she really loved and needed us to take it out of the package immediately, and her very favorite, a package of popping blocks. She hasn't let those out of her sight since! 
Christmas dinner was delicious as always, desserts were fabulous, and the game playing was so fun we ended up staying until 10! We played lots of Meg's Wii and lots of Apples to Apples, a gift from my parents. Annie took a mid-day nap for an hour or so (her Dad slept for 3 hours!!) and then took a 3-hour evening nap. We think she thought it was time for bed, because she doesn't usually sleep that late for evening nap.
Friday after Christmas Paul's Mom and Harvey came over for a spaghetti dinner and presents. Annie got more fun presents (a singing puppy, a top, a butterfly, a couple of outfits) and we had a yummy dinner and some grape pie for dessert. Annie had a great time visiting with her Grandma and ripping into some more wrapping paper. 
New Year's Eve turned into a celebration of our first year of being parents: instead of our usual wild parties (not really), Annie and Griffin had a play date and the parents and Uncle Kris had some yummy pizza and Apples to Apples (an easy game to play in the living room while corralling crawling and toddling babies). Fin lasted until 9:45, which amazed all of us! Kris stayed on and played some Texas Hold Em with us after Kelly, Mike, and Griffin left. We all had a great time, and it was a nice, relaxing way to ring in the New Year as a family.
Annie torturing poor Griffin, and then Fin telling her to just stay in that exersaucer already:
So now our baby is 7 months old and she is crawling and standing all over the place. I am amazed and proud at how strong she is and how quickly she is learning how to do these things, but at the same time I'm hoping it all starts to slow down just a little bit. I don't want her baby-hood to pass by too fast, I'm enjoying it way too much! But at the same time every time I see her do something new I get a flash of all of the great stuff still to come, and I am so excited to watch it all play out. 
Oh yeah, and in other news: our bathroom sink broke on Christmas Eve, so everyone had to wash their hands in the kitchen sink all night. This past Friday, Paul's muffler fell off in the intersection before our house on his way home from work. Then the same Friday night we came home from celebrating Paul & Kaggie's birthday and our furnace was not working. So there are our 3 things, that's enough for us, okay universe? Counting our blessings: Paul got a beautiful new bathroom sink installed in time for our New Year's Eve gathering, we were able to get a new furnace installed in just a few hours the day after it broke by some very nice men from Crossfield (who saw we had a baby and made sure we had heat again as soon as possible and for no payments/zero interest for 9 months, thank god), and Paul rarely drives his car, so it's not an emergency to get that fixed. But still, hopefully that will be the end of it for us for a while!
Videos of Annie opening and playing with her presents are here: http://www.vimeo.com/porkchopandpaul/videos
This one is my favorite:
Annie's New Crawl and Cruise from porkchop on Vimeo.
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