It has been a busy couple of weeks for us. We moved on the 18th, and then Christmas the next weekend. I haven’t found myself with much time for blogging. We’ve been enjoying being in our new house though. Oddly, it doesn’t feel all that different to me. Our friends we spend the most time with have been out of town though; I’m betting the differences will sink it once they’re back later this week. I don’t really want to do a whole bunch of posts, so I’m just going to do one big long summary post. Click the pictures for bigger versions.
Moving went off pretty uneventfully. We got everything into the truck, to the new place, and unloaded in about 5 hours. Meredith had no problem watching all her stuff being packed up and moved into the truck. In fact, she was even helping.
Now that we’re here, everyone seems to be adjusting well. The cats took a day or two to get comfortable, with Sebastian taking a little longer than Casper. He’s spent the last week or so exploring to see just how high up he can get. The kitchen cupboards seem to have won out. We are watching a friend’s dog for the holidays, and she is obsessed with Casper for some reason, but is pretty good about stopping when we catch her.
So far, Meredith is taking everything pretty well. She asks about her friends back at the co-op a lot, but so far hasn’t been upset when we’ve told her we can’t just go and see them whenever we want anymore. She has asked when they will come visit us. She really seems to love this new house though. She loves that her room has a little play area, and she loves the trampoline.
We went to a Solstice celebration with some local home schoolers. It was neat to meet them and put faces to names that I so far have only chatted with online. Part of the celebration was singing songs and adding lanterns to a spiral nearby.
Celebrating the Solstice is something I want to spend more effort doing with the kids in the future. In fact, I’d like to make some changes to the way we celebrate the holidays in general. I’d rather it not be so much about one day of presents that’s over faster than it came. I love ideas I’ve read on other blogs this year about stretching it out (either 12 days of Christmas or advent), starting some new traditions, inviting the kids to participate more in choosing and making gifts for others, etc. This Christmas I made Amazon wish lists for the girls, and most of our family did follow it. Meaning we got a lot of useful things we will actually use (an art easel, books, some indoor physical play toys, etc.) We also got some beautiful handmade gifts which I always love.
Christmas morning Fiona started taking a lot more steps. Still only one at a time but she was doing it frequently. Yesterday she started taking more than one at a time.
Here are some more holiday pictures:
Decorating the tree. All the ornaments Meredith put up ended up in the same spot.
Christmas Eve presents
Opening stockings Christmas morning
Some Christmas day shots:
Playing Pretty Pretty Princess, a game we used to love as kids. It was a bit of an inside joke in my family because my dad often won (and we have pictures to prove it!). He bought it for us and addressed it to Kris and I with a note to “have fun”.
Our main gift to Meredith was supposed to be a puppet theatre with puppets (inspired by Sarah). Meredith loves puppets, so when I saw Sarah’s post I knew it was perfect for her. Unfortunately, the cloth I bought for the actual theatre is packed and we don’t know where. We found all the puppets we had bought (some nice soft ones for Fiona and some wooden ones for Meredith), so we had fun anyway. Here is Kris showing Meredith how they work.
We also did lots of house maintenance, exploring, swinging, gardening, walking, driving, planning, and so much more. I hope everyone reading had as good a time as we did. 
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Looks like you guys had a great holiday. I imagine it was challenging with the move going on around the same time. Wishing you a very Happy New Year. xo