On December 23rd we had deluxe grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner and spent the evening together to open gifts with our own family.
We told the kids they had to sit on the couch to get their presents and it was fun to see how they each displayed their anticipation in different ways.
Excited, but not squealing like his sister 😄
Who's great idea was it to buy them musical toys?!?!
...that would be me🙋...
We'll see how long before I regret such a purchase. 😝
Once the gifts were open they picked one toy for us all to play with together until William had to go to bed.
Foam blocks it was!
William figured it out right away without any directions
While Delilah needed a bit of a demonstration
William had a blast sticking pieces together
Delilah made a camera
Will made a robot
And I made some people
Later in the evening one of my daycare families kindly dropped off a box of chocolates!
Delilah wanted to bring one outside to Will since he was working in his shop. She carefully riffled through them all to find the perfect one for him.
A blue one of course, because that's his favourite colour. 😍
Notice the discard pile to her left?
And that was our own W. Vanspronsen Christmas for 2021!
~~~
You're welcome to stop here if you want to end on a high note. The following paragraphs will be me rambling on about my feelings. Not everyone's cup of tea, I'm aware. So you have my permission to quit here if you want. 😁
You all know that I'd hate for you to think our lives are blissful. I'm a huge advocate for sharing the real parts of life, not just the picture perfect moments.
So although we spent a wonderful evening as a family last night, I've been really struggling this year to feel Christmassy.
Maybe it's because I am feeling so tired this pregnancy.
Maybe it's because all our festivities are condensed into nine days, rather than spread over the month.
Maybe we need to play more Christmas music. Or maybe we need to do some baking?
Maybe it's because I've been working so much. Or maybe it's because Will's been working so much.
Whatever the case it just hasn't quite felt right this year.
And to make matters worse Will won't be at our traditional Christmas Eve celebration tonight because he has to work an event. We've known about this for two weeks now and at the time we each had a 'it is what it is' attitude about it. I agreed to take videos of the kids opening their gifts so he could watch them later, and on the bright side he'd be making a little extra money.
But truth be told, these last few days I've been quite bitter about him not being able to be with us. And I found out Will's feeling the same way too. While Christmas isn't a huge commercial event for us, we highly value family time and making memories together which is another big part of Christmas.
This isn't meant to be a woe-is-me post. It's just real life right now and real life is not always rainbows and butterflies.
I've gone back and forth in my mind several times over deciding whether or not to keep these ramblings of mine in this post. The main reason I keep a blog is so that I can document all these different stages in my life as it's rapidly changing. Today it's a big deal that Will won't be home for Christmas Eve, but in a month from now I'm sure it will be a distant memory.
For now, I know I need to work on my own attitude and keep in mind that the real reason for Christmas isn't about family time, but about remembering the birth of Christ.
My apologies if this ended the post with a bit of a downer. I haven't yet came out on the other side of my slump of feelings, and I don't have a full-picture, light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel story to share.
So in an un-cohesive way of concluding on a positive note, here's a meme I saw this morning which was exactly me last night with that box of chocolates:
😆😂😆
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