

Some cute pictures of Elijah and daddy from this past month.
Eli still loves his Johnny Jump Up. :)

Opening gifts with cousin Chloe and Uncle Dana.

More presents from Grandpa Dave, Grandma Penny and cousin Joshua (couldn't be there in person, but sending his love from Wisconsin).
Elijah loved the bows and ribbons on the presents!
Oh, and have we told you that Elijah crawls everywhere, pulls up on anything a couple inches off the floor or higher, and likes to walk around his little table or around chairs while holding on! He definitely keeps us busy. :)



Another fun thing about Elijah's first Christmas is that he got to meet 6 of his cousins and 2 of his uncles for the first time. It was so fun seeing the kids together - Elijah loved all of the attention!
And, he really looked up to his Uncle David. ;-)
Of course, grandma and grandpa got to share in all of the fun as well.
Christmas Eve came and, after a nice family breakfast, we headed to the airport (5 hours before our flight, as was recommended in order to make it through the ticket counter and security line in time to board). We got to our gate a few hours early and were able to jump on an earlier flight to get to our first stop, Arkansas. Elijah had fun exploring our laps as well as looking out the window of the plane!
So, we made it to Arkansas in record time and found that it is an EXTREMELY small airport and it only services maybe 4 cities and only had one or two flights to each city per day. All that to say, we wouldn't be able to get out any earlier than our original flight. While hanging out in AK, Eli fell asleep and we decided to do our own version of a Christmas Eve service by reading the Christmas story out of the Bible and treating ourself to chocolate everytime we read "Jesus." Three hours later, the time for our departure arrived and we found out that the plane that's supposed to take us to our next stop, Chicago, was coming from Denver and was delayed (ironically enough, it was our original flight). The flight was delayed enough that we wouldn't be able to make our connection to Chicago and there weren't going to be any other flights out of Chicago that evening going anywhere on the east coast...
We would be spending the night in Chicago and hoped to fly out to VA on Christmas morning. Since the AK to Chicago flight wasn't very full, we were able to take Elijah's carseat on the flight and he slept the whole way. Of course, that meant that once we arrived in our hotel room, he was awake and ready to play. Daddy and Eli bounced around on the bed for awhile to get out some energy and then went to sleep for what was left of the night.
Here we are with our good friends, the Wittens, in our empty TX house.
And, here's our new house in CO in the midst of some pretty amazing snowfall (and some major renovations)! We made it out to CO just in time for the big snow and it just keeps coming. We actually love the snow, but it did make our holiday travel plans quite difficult.