Olivia's Second Christmas!

Merry Christmas! We're just recovering form Olivia's second Christmas. It was great, and very different from a year ago! Olivia has been interested in, and a little frightened of, the tree that came into our house just before Christmas. How amazing, then, for her to come downstairs on Christmas day to find that it had laid a whole pile of Christmas presents, most of them for her!

We had a fairly quiet Christmas at home, starting with just the three of us. We had Grandboo's Christmas coffee cake (a longstanding Hawley tradition) and opened some presents before we invited our neighbors Joanne and Cathy over for brunch. It was great. These pictures represent only a few of what we took, take a look at our flickr photo page for more.


Olivia had a great time opening presents. She couldn't always get the tape off, but she was great with the paper! Sorry Dad, we weren't able to save much of the paper for next year :) She also had a good time deciding which presents to open. The whole present-fest ended up taking a long time, since she would pick a present, open it, and then proceed to play withh it for a while (no matter who the intended recipient was!), before deciding it was time to get another present to open.


But we made it through the pile in the end. Thanks everyone for the great things you gave Olivia, and for the nice cards! We were able to get out on our traditional Christmas day walk, but saw few people, and no Chinese Water Deer, of which we saw one on last year's Christmas walk, which was a treat. Dinner capped off the day with a (traditional?) meal of Butternut squash soup, from a recipe that Ingrid gave us after she so kindly brought it to us while we were still in the hospital with Olivia. And then to bed after a very busy day for all, especially the little girl who was probably aware of Christmas for the first time!