Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Well it has been two weeks off of work and a whirlwind of activity. We actually completed Christmas shopping, cards, and had all the gifts in the appropriate places before Christmas Eve. This was nothing short of a miracle. We have been house tied with Miss Lily, only going to Doctors offices, which made shopping difficult. Even online shopping is difficult when one hand is holding onto a small behind, so that she would sleep. Lily's early christmas present to Mommy was sleeping for four hours in her basinet. Up until this point she would only sleep for extended periods on Mommy. This was a step in the right direction, thank you Dr. Fearing for suggesting adding rice to the night time bottles.

On Christmas Eve, Grandma, Papa, Aunt Anna, Taylor and Uncle Jason came over for dinner and Christmas cookie baking for Santa, plus that whole not leave the house thing. We had a great evening until it came time for Grace to say goodbye to the Elf Kirsten that Santa let visit us for a month. Kirsten had caused a lot of mischeif in our house, playing with Grace's toys at night while she was sleeping, even playing on the computer and leaving Grace a message. When it came time to say goodnight, Grace cried so much that Kirsten got to go to bed with Grace until Mommy and Daddy went to bed. Grace can't wait for next Christmas when she can come back.

Christmas morning Grace and Lily woke up to a tree full of presents. Kirsten had even told Santa of a late addition to Grace's list of a cupcake maker. Lily was excited to watch the hour unfold as Grace unwrapped her and Lily's presents. We then had some tasty monkey bread and formula for Lily. Then it was time to get ready to go to Grandma's house. In the meantime, Lily put on her second Christmas outfit and an hour later as we were preparing to depart threw up all over herself and Daddy. I didn't even get to take one picture of her in it! Oh, well. We then drove with Lily screaming to Grandma's house. (It seems our youngest daughter only gets in the car to go to the doctor and doesn't like it. We had tried a few nights earlier driving around the neighborhood to look at lights, after 10 minutes Lily and I were at home while Grace and Daddy drove around.) We had fun at Grandma's house, eating, opening more presents and conversing with our family. Grace and Taylor enjoyed playing together with all the new toys, mostly what the other one got, but you know. The best was seeing Taylor bounce around the house on the bouncy ball that we bought him and blew up so that he could play with it immediately. He went around the house saying "Taylor's ball"

The next day we set up the brand new TV 40 inch flat screen, not my idea, but a good deal none the less. However in order to do this we had to purchase and put together a new tv stand, move the old one and tv upstairs, try not to kill Papa and the neighbor helping us while moving and buy a HDMI cord. After setting all this up we could then set up the Wii permanently for our amusement. It seems a five year old cannot play the Wii without extreme amounts of jumping, running and falling down on the ground. She has gotten better as the days pass, but it is extremely amusing. Her favorite games so far are the Disney Princess game and the Barbie Island Princess game - notice the trend. One evening she was showing her grandparents a game, she was squealing, Tom and I were trying to help her and Lily was loudly cheering her on.

As for the rest of the holiday break, we have spent it, trying to sleep, cleaning up vomit, doing the laundry (vomit is hard to catch in an easy clean up place.) and watching Lily grow. Grace has always been very verbal, she came out trying to talk. Lately Lily has come into her own. She enjoys talking to you when you are on the phone talking to someone else, talking to the tv especially the Imagination Movers or any red jersey football team(by the way she really likes the vibrancy of the new HD TV) and her sister and daddy. It all ends tonight, back to the grind tomorrow for daddy and mommy. School starts on Tuesday. We have a little more than a week to the MRI and then we will hopefully know more from there. We will try to keep you posted but time keeps moving and I find less and less of it at the computer as Lily is over 12 pounds and not as still as she once was.