Sorry!

My apologies for not posting sooner. As you can well imagine, Christmas has been very hectic around here. We never reached that point of "whew...we're done"...we were wrapping presents until 2 AM Christmas morning. We had a very abbreviated display this year. We are normally a 2-tree family with the tree in the family room being the "family" tree and the onle in the living room being the "formal" tree. We only got the family room tree up and didn't even get the LGB up and running this year. Simply too many unknowns with how Anyssa would react and we also did not want to overwhelm her any more than she already was.

We all went to church at 5:00 for the family service. Anyssa wore her first dress (probably EVER). I dressed her and when mommy saw her, she (mommy) cried. She is a beautiful little girl. She did well at the service and when we got home we got jammies on and got ready for bed.

Anyssa's kindergarten teacher gave her some "reindeer food" in a little plastic ziploc bag...basically some Quaker Oats and she put some glitter in too. You're supposed to sprinkle it on your front porch so Santa will know to stop at your house. Again, we had no idea what her thinking on all this was. So...we decided to see how far she would go. We sat her down and explained slowly that tonight, Santa would be coming and would deliver her a present. She got kinda puzzled looking as if to say "here?". Yes, I said...I told her that I let Santa know that Anyssa lived here and to please bring her something because she was very good. I wish I would have had the camera ready because she looked like the Home Alone kid. We got her! She was in for the whole routine. We took her to the computer and went to the NORAD Santa-tracking website and watched him bounce around Michigan into Canada. I showed her on the map where we lived and that he had not been here yet. We went downstairs and put the magic reindeer food out, wrote a note to Santa and left out some cookies. I told her that if she wasn't asleep when he got here, he might not stop. Needless to say, going to bed was pretty easy on Christmas eve.

On Christmas morning, she was up at about 8 which normally would be good except for us still wrapping the presents at 2 AM. No problem...we all went downstairs and would you believe it? Santa had indeed stopped and left her some gifts. He even knew that Dora the Explorer was her favorite character because all of the toosy-fromsies were Dora themed. Wow! She got a toy cell phone (so she could leave ours alone) and some markers and coloring stuff...basic stuff that most kids might turn their noses up at but because it was new to her, it was great. She also got a game for the Wii (which we just got but have not yet hooked up.)

Here is our family picture from church. I'll post more shortly!