So, Joshua is 10 weeks old and he experienced his first Christmas! He slept through most of it and was adorable and quiet and well-behaved. We have a bedtime routine now and life has a certain amount of rhythm but we need to get better at being flexible at nighttimes - we spent Christmas Eve away from home until midnight and Josh was awake the whole time, he just refused to sleep at all!
Still, we had a wonderful time. Alex put up the Christmas decoratioons and joshua eventually noticed the tree and was mesmerised by the lights. He also made two delicious stollen that we are still eating and we collected our hamper from the butcher on his first day off. We had a relaxing Christmas Eve mooching about in dressing gowns eating stollen. Bernadette came to visit and then we headed out to Jess and Graham's apartment in Edgbaston. She'd outdone herself and made masses of food and everything looked beautiful. We introduced Joshua and he sat on my knee looking interestedly at everything, wide-eyed. Then we drove to Nathan and Laura's. Apart from a 40 minute period of irritability on the part of Joshua the evening continued to be very pleasant. We dropped off our presents and picked up some new ones and saw Dave and Claire, wished Emma and Ben a happy Christmas and goodnight and then put Josh to bed. Bless him he spent about 40 minutes wide awake just staring up at the ceiling after we'd "put him to bed" until finally he'd had enough and he hollered and we went to get him..! But then until we left he sat contentedly on Al's knee looking around. We walked home and went to bed at about 1am. He fell asleep in his pushchair at last and bless him I took him out of his car seat, coat, hat annd pout him into his sleeping bag without waking him up - he slept soundly til 6.30am.
I've never gone to bed feeling so tired on Christmas Eve or woken up on Christmas day feeling less alert!!! Still, parenthood has its benefits and the main one is seeing Josh in the morning - he's so smiley on his changing mat. Tonight in fact he displayed his newest party trick - he laughed! Three times he laughed out loud and it made my heart explode with happiness to hear it. It was especially funny because he'd just done the biggest nastiest poo in days and seemed particularly happy about it!
Christmas was tiring but very enjoyable. We dressed him up in his santa suit and me mum and dad took him to church. He was definitely the cutest member of the congregation and slept through most of it too! When we got back home Al's parents and nan were home already and the meal was well under way. Alex cooked a delicious meal and afterwards we spent hours opening the many many presents, mostly Josh's; it was lovely. Finally we put him to bed and spent the night eating turkey sandwiched and watching the Goonies on telly, surrounded by the chaos of opened presents!
It's been lovely so far and there's still the new year to go!
