It's almost Christmas. That is so crazy to me. This BY FAR has been the FASTEST December of my whole life!!! We are trying to take a deep breathe and enjoy this week has much as possible. Ellington and I don't have school this week and next week so we actually get to spend time with Robert ever day. It's such a small, simple blessing. This morning we had a few errands to run and one of the errands was to drop a bill off at the hospital (still paying for our sweet little girl!). And ya'll...we had the best time doing that errand! Ha! They had two BEAUTIFUL Christmas trees that we enjoyed looking at and the sweet older man at the front desk gave Ellington a Santa sicker and he thought she was just precious! Ellington loved her "Nanta" sticker! Then we looked at this cool snowglobe thing that Ellington enjoyed and stopped by the TINY gift shop where Ellington stared at balloons. :) Everyone that we ran into was SO friendly and on our way out an older gentleman met us with a golf cart to drive us to our car! (If you've ever been in the parking lot at OCH you know how funny this is because it's a very small parking lot and even smaller now that they are doing construction!) He too thought Ellington was just the cutest thing ever and he gave her a peppermint (which of course she can't have but I didn't tell him that). It was for real fun and Robert and I decided maybe we should hang there more often. Ha! There is really no point to that story other than to record it for my memory and encourage everyone to enjoy little moments of the day. Robert could have easily left us at home and ran in and out very quickly, but we were able to take the time to just enjoy being together.
This week we're busy getting all sorts of last minute things done (baking, laundry, packing, etc.). Thankfully all of our gifts are bought and wrapped! We do very little Christmas shopping so the task isn't too big and overwhelming. I am so torn about how I feel when it comes to gift buying and receiving. I want Ellington to know that Jesus is ALL that matters at Christmas, but I think that's nearly IMPOSSIBLE to do when they (children) are getting lots of great gifts. But....getting gifts at Christmas is so special and magical as a child. I don't know...I guess I have another 11 months or so to ponder this some more! And Santa??!! Don't even get me started on my torn feelings about Santa! Luckily Ellington is still really young so I don't have to decide anything about that right now either.
I will leave you with a few pictures of Ellington playing one morning with an advent calendar she got in the mail from our church.
What could be better for Ellington than all of those flaps on the Advent calendar. Whoever decided to send that had no idea how happy they would make our E. Glad you had some good experiences at OCH since last October's weren't so great. See you tomorrow.
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