Christmas

It's been busy. It's been hectic. It's been scary. It's been wonderful. It's been...life, mixed in with the holidays.

Remember the seizure? Well, my friends, that was just the beginning. I'm not going to follow up my last post with another depressing account of our recent reality-check brought about by Addison, but I will let you know that after we got home from the ER after the seizure, my baby girl got worse. A few days afterward (and the week of Christmas), I took her in and the pediatrician got kind of frantic, saying we needed to rush her to the hospital because she had acute bacterial pneumonia in both lungs and that she could go "downhill" at any moment, which scared the bejeebers out of me. So we spent a couple days at the hospital by her side (how painful is it to watch your child hooked up to an IV and a bunch of other strange wires?). Thanks to the extreme generosity of our friends, neighbors, and both Visiting and Home Teachers, our load was lightened immensely and we got through everything unscathed. But scary, nonetheless.

And on to the busy...
Cupcakes for Makenna's preschool party (thank you Pinterest)


Stocking Stuffers for Makenna (we call them SS's in our house- we like to be cool and talk code sometimes) Play make-up made out of nail polish (again, thank you Pinterest)
(BTW, Christmas morning with the make-up was a hit)

Gingerbread houses with our friends. These kids did an awesome job decorating their houses- I was impressed 100%.

Bull Run Festival of Lights in Manassas- incredible! We meant to do this last year but never got around to it. It's a driving light tour through the Bull Run Battlefield.

And the little carnival they had at the end of it-
The Botanical Gardens downtown and their amazing train display (jaw-dropping artistry, I'm telling you) with our friends.


Christmas baking and my helpers:

Daddy-daughter time (I don't know how we got so lucky, but because of the whole pneumonia scare/hospital stay, Drew ended up taking off 2 whole weeks from work- we were in heaven):
Christmas morning:


My mom coming for 10 STRAIGHT DAYS, which was heaven, and so much fun.


(Please, oh please, don't disown me Mom for posting this. It just proves how AWESOME of a grandma you are:)

And last but not least, the little taste of snow we got this week. Beautiful, but a little lacking in amount.

What a fabulous Christmas we had here in Virginia, sans family, which I was weepy at first about, but later came to grips with and embraced.

The End of a ridiculous amount of family pictures.