The Smith Family: Emily's first Christmas

So much for updating weekly! Time just got away from me last week with the holiday busy-ness.

Even though she had no idea what day it was, Emily had a big Christmas visiting with family.

On the Sunday before Christmas, we drove to Bowling Green to meet Michelle, Sam and Ryah for lunch (or is it dinner - which meal starts at 3pm?! :))

Emily wore her Santa pants that my brother in law, Tyler's, mom sent to her. Though her outfit was adorable, her attitude was not! She cried all through the meal and Mikey and I took turned scarfing down our food and then walking her around trying to comfort her. I must say, Cracker Barrel was the place to be with a screaming baby - everyone was very nice to us and to her!

On Christmas Eve we went to my parents house.

Hanging with Grandpa and Grandma.

We had our traditional Christmas Eve meal of appetizers and junk food - awesome as always. Leslie, Paul and Shannon came over and Emily was given the sassiest pair of boots I have ever seen.

Leopard, feathers and sparkle - oh my!

She also got some other cute clothes,and a picture for her room. We decided that we would begin a tradition of getting her one of the same present each year and we decided it would be snow globes. So we got her a pretty little globe with a Christmas tree in it and we are going to have it engraved with the date. She may not care about her snow globe collection for many years (kids probably don't get too jazzed about that sort of thing) but someday she will.

Mikey and I didn't really get her anything else this year - for one thing, everything in her life is brand new in the past month! - and also, it is really important to us to find ways to teach her gratitude for what she has (not yet, obviously - we just want to teach her to sleep more than 3 hours right now, but we are building on future holiday traditions!). We have talked about future Christmases and how we want to handle giving her gifts - knowing that she will get tons of presents from family members, and not wanting her to be spoiled or over come with "stuff". I saw something recently that suggested getting your kids "1 thing they want, 1 thing they need, 1 thing to wear and 1 thing to read". That sounds like a good idea to me! We will see how it goes - I may look back on this post next year from behind a mountain of plastic joys and junk and laugh at myself!

On Christmas Day, we headed to my Grandaddy's house to see the rest of the family (and we were about 2 hours late thanks to a start time miscommunication). Everyone was excited to see Emily - I walked in first without her and I might as well have been a ghost! :)

She started the party off right by having a major diaper blow out all over her Great Aunt Laurie. Whoops!

Hanging out with Great Aunt Susie.

We made a project that I saw on Pinterest and thought would be a cute memento of her first holiday season. I kind of messed up the first attempt at stamping the words (I used a lower case j instead of an i - oops) and had to paint the bottom green, so it wasn't exactly like I wanted it to look, but still cute I think. Her toenails still have traces of green paint on them.