Our Merry Little Christmas

This Christmas marked our 4th and last as a family of three. Out of those 4, 3 of them have been spent just the three of us, without any family (much to my dismay). Nate doesn't mind because he's not big on Christmas (although he's getting into it more and more every year), but since I come from a large family, it's not ideal to me.

Several months ago we thought we might try to travel to West Yellowstone to spend Christmas with Nate's parents, but since the roads between here and there can be terrible or even closed we weren't sure we wanted to chance it. The final decision was made when Santa decided to bring Bridget a play kitchen for Christmas and didn't want to haul it all over the place. At that point we invited Nate's parents to come spend Christmas with us, but they decided to stay at home. We tried to make the best of our little celebration, but I was really missing family and shed a few tears several times over the course of those couple of days (hey, it doesn't take much to make me cry when I'm pregnant).

It didn't help that Bridget was sick with a cold and fever again (she was on Thanksgiving and her birthday too). I went ahead and made a nice dinner on Christmas Eve - turkey, twice baked potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, and homemade rolls because that's what my family always does. Bridget didn't have much of an appetite and spent most of her time at the dinner table whining and crying. Because she wasn't feeling great or in the best of moods, we opted not to go look at Christmas lights after dinner like we'd planned, so it wasn't as special of an evening as I wanted it to be.

We did let her open one present before bed - new Dora PJs from her cousins Charlotte and Elaine. We thought she's go right to bed as terrible as she was feeling, but she was so excited for Santa to come that she got out of bed about 3 different times and didn't finally settle down for the night until around 10pm.
Luckily, she seemed to be feeling better Christmas morning and had a great time opening presents. At first she'd open something, play with it for several minutes, and then move onto the next item. But soon the excitement took over and it was hard to keep up with her hence the lack of pictures. She loved the play kitchen Santa brought, and the other pictures are of her playing with the doctor kit Nate and I got her. She thought it was pretty fun to give Daddy a shot and take his blood pressure.
Even though we missed our families, it was nice to be able to talk to some of them on web cam which helped a little. Hopefully we'll be able to spend next Christmas with a larger group.