What a year 2020 has been for us and everyone else. For most of December,  we’ve been celebrating “Christmas Month” a term coined from the prior “Halloween Month” by Ember. The excitement of counting the days until Christmas using our Fisher Price Little People Advent Calendar certainly helped (“Daddy! Can we open a door today?!”)

We have been spending time inside as the weather has been yucky, but have had a chance to take a few walks.  Zora isn’t great at keeping on hats, so we can’t go out when it’s too cold.

Daddy has been able to take off the entire week after Christmas which means we’ve been having a blast all together at the house.

Christmas Eve was exciting as we had a masked visit with Gigi to open gifts.  It was the first time we’ve been able to give hugs in a few months and everyone was happy about it.

We had Zoom calls with family to open gifts and catch up with friends and kept Christmas pretty calm otherwise. Ember moved much faster this Christmas.  Last year we were still opening gifts days later as she would take them one at a time. This year “let’s open another present!” was heard more often.

We had a fun time opening our gifts including a BIG blanket that Daddy had made for Mommy – he is thoroughly embarrassed at how big the blanket made the photos of his face, but the kids and mom think it’s fantastic.

We both took off the week after Christmas which means we have all been home together for 11 days in a row without work. It’s been a calm fun time.

Zora loves the cats and makes them a little crazy most of the time. Marvin is a pretty good sport.

Zora is doing a lot of mimicking and often at dinner we will all break out into a game of copying what she does. Usually that goes between clapping our hands with her and then putting hands on the sides of our faces in an “oh no!” gesture. She thinks it’s hilarious and so do we. She’s busy exploring everything and walking everywhere. Her incisors just came in on the bottom so now she has 6 teeth on top and bottom. The girls spend about half of their time playing together even if it ends in yelling some of that time. I am hopeful that they will continue to be buddies for a long time.

We decided to celebrate “Noon Years” on New Years Eve, which meant at lunch we did our count down with Ember and Zora, shook noise makers and had a ginger ale “cheers” as we watched the count down in New Zealand and enjoyed the fireworks. It was a fun tradition that I hope we keep.

We, and almost everyone else in the world, are looking forward to a new year of hope in 2021. I’ve had a blast being home with the girls but getting back to some sense of “normal” is something we are all ready for. Vaccines have started being distributed in town and we are hopeful to get ours in the near future. We are so lucky not to have lost anyone this year, but it would be nice to feel comfortable going to the beach with our family this summer and visiting in person with family and friends. Hello, 2021.