Michel and Julie: Christmas in Longview

Christmas for the Zoutendam family is seriously going to be a week long. Michel has to work at the ER clinic on Christmas Day, and the fire station on Dec. 26th. We had to really get creative as to how to celebrate Christmas with our families. My nephew's birthday is Dec. 28th, so we decided to celebrate with my family on the 27th and 28th (to incorporate Zane's b-day as well), and celebrate with Michel's family before Christmas. While it is disappointing that Michel won't be with us on Christmas Day, it's not the first time that this has happened and it won't be the last, so it really doesn't bother me anymore. I do love the fact that we get to spread Christmas out over the course of a week, too :)

Anyways, the morning of December 21st, Michel was coming home from work, and I had gotten up early to get myself ready, and then got Audrey up and fed her. Once she had eaten we packed up our car and headed out for her longest road trip thus far. Luckily, she is my child, and falls asleep very quickly in the car, and generally stays asleep. This time was no different. She was awake talking and singing (maybe she also loves Christmas carols like her mommy?) for about half an hour or so before falling asleep. She didn't wake up until 10:40, so she was asleep for most of our ride. By the time she woke up, we were only about 15 minutes away from Michel's parents' house, and she woke up happy, so she definitely makes our car rides easy and fun!

She got properly spoiled by her Grandma and Grandpa. In fact, aside from her Saturday 8am bottle, and her Sunday 8pm bottle, I never fed her the rest of the weekend! I'm not gonna lie...it was kinda nice. If you follow me on Pinterest, you'll see that I spent a lot of my time pinning recipes on Pinterest while Grandma and Grandpa were having fun playing with Audrey. She loved all the attention!

Can you tell that she's the only grandchild?? :)

After we got her fed and ate lunch ourselves, we headed over to the nursing home where Michel's grandpa lives. He had never met Audrey before. We were supposed to go see him the weekend before Thanksgiving, but that was the time where snow/ice were predicted, and we got freezing rain for about 10 minutes and that was all. Anyways, we didn't want to chance the 2 1/2 hour drive, so we decided to call off our trip, so we never made it at Thanksgiving. Michel's grandfather is a great-grandfather to 4 boys, but Audrey is his first great-granddaughter, so I think that made it especially exciting for him.

I think this picture is so sweet!!

I have discovered that Audrey does not sleep well away from her own bed. Mommy fail! I always put her in her crib to sleep, so being in a pack-and-play (pack 'n play??), and in a room that she's not used to resulted in many failed naps. She wasn't fussy, though, she was very happy, but I knew she was so tired that she was like punch-drunk happy. We decided to go ahead and open presents mid-afternoon while Audrey was still awake and happy because Mommy was going to get down to business and make her take a nap in the evening. Mommy's used to getting a full night's sleep every night, so I wanted to make sure this whole no-nap thing didn't cross over into the nighttime sleep. Anyways, while she was still awake and happy we exchanged gifts and took advantage of some picture ops. I asked Michel to take a picture of me with her because I'm always the one taking the pics, so I'm never in them.