Life's Moments: Christmas 2011

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Christmas 2011

Brian started his vacation for the rest of the year this past Thursday. Yay! We have been enjoying the family time together! On Wednesday night, Clara's "Angelcare Monitor" went off. This is a baby monitor that you can put underneath the crib mattress that detects movements. If the baby doesn't move within 20 seconds, the alarm goes off. It's supposed to help prevent SIDS or at least get you to your baby faster if he/she stops breathing. Once the alarm went off, it lasted for 2-3 seconds before going back to normal. Brian checked on her and found her still breathing, but I stayed awake for the next hour wondering if she had actually stopped breathing for that time period. We never moved her from that spot after the alarm went off and the alarm never went off again, so it couldn't have been that she had moved off of the monitor's sensor. It still makes me wonder to this day. We took her to the doctor on Thursday just to check her out and make sure everything was okay. We are actually taking both girls today to get EKG's done (Hailey's updated and Clara's baseline). So, if there is anything wrong with her heart, it should be picked up there. I'm not anticipating there to be anything wrong and the monitor has not gone off again since that night. It was just a scary moment! If it did actually prevent her from not breathing that night, then it was the best $70 we spent!

On Christmas Eve, we made rolled sugar cookies in the morning after spending an hour looking for the pink candle to our Advent wreath that Hailey took out of the wreath some time between then and the previous Sunday. We never did find the candle and I'm sure it will turn up one day in the future. Thankfully I know where they sell more candles so we can get one to replace it for now. We then went to the 4:00 family candlelight service at our church. After church, we went to my parents' house for dinner and a Christmas pageant with Hailey, Clara, the twins and my sister's two nephews. When we got home, we read "The Night Before Christmas" and went to bed...totally forgetting to set out cookies and milk for Santa. Thankfully he still left presents for the girls! :-)

Clara was the first to awaken on Christmas morning. Ha! 6 am. We woke up Hailey shortly after and went downstairs to see what Santa had left and to open presents from Brian and me. We usually then go over to my parents' house after getting cleaned up, but this time my parents decided to do their Christmas celebration in the afternoon. So, we got to eat a breakfast casserole (we had made the night before and popped into the oven while opening gifts) and Hailey got to enjoy some of her toys from Santa. We got to my parents' house at 2:00 pm and started opening gifts around 2:45. My brother and sister-in-law were celebrating this year in Minnesota, so we will have Christmas with them on New Year's weekend. My parents got Brian and I a Kindle Fire. It's so awesome! We really like it, and it is more than half the cost of an iPad! There were also lots of little kids gifts opened this Christmas as we added three new babies to the family in 2011. It's such fun experiencing Christmas through children.

Yesterday we did some after-Christmas shopping. We found some great deals that we couldn't pass up, including a new DSLR camera for my birthday (which isn't actually until tomorrow). We somewhat fabricated the truth about Best Buy's sale when negotiating the camera at a new electronics store, hhgregg (Best Buy's biggest competitor in the area), but got a great bundle deal out of it. Camera, additional lense, SD card, and camera bag. It's a Nikon D3100. I haven't even opened it yet, but I'm sure you'll see a future blog post when I do! :-)