December 26

Chris and I have often lamented that Sunday holidays are the worst, because you have to go right back to work the next day. Thankfully, they got it right this Christmas: today was a bank holiday! We spent the day packing up Christmas and beginning to pack up the house. Now that Christmas is over with, our new focus is getting moved into the new house. I can have a whole house packed by Saturday, right? I just need some boxes...

The kids were especially cheerful and cooperative today; they took nice long naps and played happily with their new toys.

Daisy loved the Santa balloon from Grandmother.

"Watch this, ma!"

I love that impish grin.

She was so proud of herself when she finally got Santa down to her level!

Rain boots and a guitar.

Caleb kept busy pretending to be James Taylor. I got the guitar to the point of being almost-tuned, so he sounded much more like James Taylor today than he did yesterday.

Also, Jesus arrived at our house a day late. 

I finally finished my nativity advent calendar. Buying a house + Christmas chaos + burning my thumb, index, and middle fingers on a hot pan Christmas morning meant that I wasn't able to finish making Baby Jesus in time for his Christmas arrival. But He came today, and something tells me that Caleb will never remember that He was late. It was a lot of work to make this felt advent calendar, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. My favorite part is the wise men. One is holding real gold beads, and the other two have little boxes I crafted out of foil. Inside one box is real frankincense, and the other box has a cotton ball scented with myrrh essential oil.

(The calendar totally wasn't my idea; Amber told me about this blog featuring the original idea, and then I found this blog with handy printable templates. Nice. But the dove on the stable was my own design - I was short one piece, and figured the Holy Spirit should be present, too.)

And now I am listening to Caleb on the monitor as he sings himself to sleep: "Jericho, Jericho, JERICHOOOOO!" Love it.