A Very Callie Christmas in Cali

Callie celebrated her very first Christmas today. We missed out on the snow in CT last night and instead had Christmas on a nice 65 degree day in sunny California. Hopefully next year when we are in CT we can have a white Christmas. I seem to have bad luck for missing the white Christmases.

Callie must have heard the reindeer on the roof as she was up ALOT last night. Either the reindeer or the excitement of Santa coming. That or the eczema flare up, or the constipation, or the new front tooth coming in. She sure has been fussy lately but who can blame her with all that going on. She was up at 5:30 AM and ready to go. Juan gave her some more prune juice after she got up to try to help get her poor belly moving again. Here they are on the floor drinking it up.

We held her off for an hour before we called CT to open gifts on facetime. Thanks to the excellent Christmas iPad gifts from my dad last year we are able to talk to them and see them all the time. Facetime is seriously a godsend for us so that Callie gets to interact and see her Grandparents even 3,000 miles away.  Anyways, back to the story, I planned in advance to make sure I had the video camera ready to go since I promised video and thought it would be a nice keepsake. Seemed all good so I left it by the tree. Then of course when I go to use it the battery is nearly dead and we only got less than 2 minutes of video in the morning. Oh well. Here she is calling GiGi, Grampa, GaGa, Ashley, Uncle Ed and Heather on facetime even though it gets cut off right away.

Then after the video went out we proceeded to open all the gifts Callie had. She opened a few herself before she got tired of ripping paper and was more interested in the actual toys, the ornaments, the tree, etc. So we opened the rest for her. We said bye to everyone in CT and had breakfast and a nap before heading over to the Chavez household. Here she is with all her morning present opening loot. And that's less than half the stuff she got all day. Spoiled much?

She happily rode over in the car with her new iPhone to keep her busy in the car seat. For those of you that don't know, the ride is a total of 4.5 miles, less than 10 minutes and yet she normally screams the entire way there and home. Jeez, what an impatient child. I am sure we are making it worse by giving her an iPhone to keep her occupied but my sanity wins out. You know when I used to say, I would never do that if I were that kid's parent!..... yea well I take it all back. Do as you feel you need to.
Once we arrived at the Chavez house we had a great breakfast with eggs, meat, chilaquiles, tamales, and more before opening gifts. Callie was wearing the very appropriate bib at breakfast that says "Who needs Santa when I have grandma".

 By now I had the video camera charged and we took some video of Callie opening her first 2 presents. It is rather long, like 15 minutes, my apologies. I am not into video editing, it just takes too much time and I cant bother. If you want to watch her, here it is. Otherwise skip forward. Or if you want to just see the good part with her opening gifts skip about 4 minutes 30 seconds in for the good part.

Callie almost made it through the nearly 1.5 hours of opening gifts.  By the end she was tired, hungry and grouchy. We packed up and took her home for a nap. Juan and I also took a nap since we had been up early and it was just an exhausting day.
Callie got a ton of great stuff, so much more than she asked for, hehe. A big thank you to all our family and friends who bought Callie gifts. It was so much more than she needed, but she has already shown she likes playing with all of them. Here is a short video of her playing with LOL Elmo and her new wood walker. Other highlights were the Elmo guitar (she learned from Bogar how to play yesterday) and the bead maze cube.

We also got a family gift from my parents of a BOB jogging stroller. We decided we should take it out for a test run, so we went for an afternoon stroll with the dogs. It works awesome, right over the curbs, bumps, no issues whatsoever. Callie also seemed to enjoy it as she can sit up a little more than in her regular stroller and also she can see right out, no tray stopping her from leaning forward or seeing. Thanks for the awesome stroller, we can't wait for GiGi and Gramps to get her in a little over a week so they can take her out walking in it. We missed having them here for Christmas but called them 3 times on Facetime today so we really got to see and talk to them.

All in all a very good Christmas. We are thankful to have all we have but mostly for all the love we have in our family and extended family. We hope you all had a Merry Christmas too!