The year of the horse.

*Photo heavy and a little wordy*
At least it was at our house. Besides the two outfits I bought her, and the new kitchen set Santa brought her, all Megan got for Christmas was horses. Thank goodness she likes them! LOL! I'm not joking, It think the grand total was something like 20. I'll have to line them all up and take a picture. I did end up getting Jake a bow, though not the one we originally wanted. We decided to go ahead with the bigger, more expensive one because 1) it's all they had and 2) we figured he could grow into it and 3) it would be better to have something rather than nothing under the tree. Oh yeah! And remember in the video (below) how Jake was asking for diamonds?? Well that went on for days after I recorded that video. Then he kept saying that Santa was bringing him a treasure chest with diamonds. Santa was really starting to stress out. :P Tuesday night I went out to Michael's to pick up a gift card for Pete's mom and I found a little wooden box with a lid on it and they just happened to have a package of "diamonds". So I filled the box with the diamonds and wrapped up and put it under the tree. Seriously.....that's his favorite gift. Go figure.
Pete and I decided not to exchange gifts this year. It was kind of a bummer, but good on funds. He always gets what he wants when he wants it anyway, so he makes it hard to surprise him. What I found so interesting was that after all the gifts were opened Thursday morning, Jake said to me...."mommy, you and daddy didn't get very much. You guys really didn't have any presents". He was very sincere and kind of sad about it. I was surprised that he even noticed. But glad that he did. I'm glad he doesn't think Christmas is all about him.

Here's a little run down of all our Christmas celebrations in pictures:
Horsie #1 from my mom:


Blurry:

Gift exchange at my Dad's:

Megan totally excited about horse #2:

Christmas Eve at our house:

This is my nephew, Blake. His mom got this red robe as a gift and he immediately took it over. And for some reason he took his shirt off. I don't know why. But he looked so funny with this huge robe and then his gold chain. LOL!! We kept calling him Red Robe Man.

Christmas morning:



Christmas day was pretty uneventful after the present opening. It was nice to be home, but also felt kind of weird that we had no where to go and nothing to do....I didn't even have any big dinner planned. I guess I thought we'd have left overs from Wednesday night...but um...they didn't leave me any!
Thursday afternoon I also got the wild idea to start potty training Megan. Instead of waiting till after the holidays. We've had some success and a lot of failure. It's like she IS getting it, but for some reason there's still something not getting through. I'm not sure if I should just let it go for now or persevere through it. I could go on and on about it, but you all don't want to know about potty training, right?
Today: I'm hoping to get some of those residual piles of Christmas stuff finally put away. You know what I'm talking about right? The little piles of new games and toys and socks that have yet to find a home? That's always kind of my least favorite thing about Christmas. That and putting away the Christmas tree. It's such a chore, but I'm eager to get on with the regularly scheduled programing.
I'm looking forward to the new year. 2008 has been tough. Good, but tough. And I expect that '09 will still hang on to some of the residue from '08. But I'm looking forward to resolving a few things and getting on with life.
Have you thought of your Word for '09 yet? Any New Year Resolutions?