It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

I'll start with the biggest news.  Lydia is walking.  She had been making efforts for a while now.  A step here, two steps there, but never more than 4 steps, and if they occurred, they were rare.  On Thursday, however, during her day with Don, she began to walk like a crazy lady, and she hasn't stopped since.  She can walk several feet before falling down now, and she loves to show off her new skill.  I think she really gets a kick out of being so much higher up and so much more mobile.  It's great fun to watch her, but it's also much more terrifying.  Everywhere I see things that she might bump into if she were to teeter in one direction or the other.  Yikes!

Yesterday Detroit got hit with a huge amount of snow, but I headed to work as usual.  My patients, however...not so much.  This was expected, but it made for a slower day than usual.  My colleague and I expected 30 patients for the morning and ended up seeing only eleven.  I'm impressed that so many patients actually made it in.  It was messy weather.  My parents drove down to Detroit a day early in anticipation of their flight to Morocco for the Christmas holiday.  They were able to make it out on time, and Nat was able to meet them at the airport, despite the delay of his flight from Pittsburgh to Detroit.  I'm sure they'll have a great holiday.  I'll miss them, though.  I've only spent one Christmas away from my family (two years ago), and it's just not quite the same.  

Don and I are starting our own holiday traditions, though.  We have been very excited about Christmas thus far.  We purchased lots of new decorations for the house and tree.  We put up our faux tree over 2 weeks ago and did a lot of decorating.  Last weekend we went to a tree farm and picked out a live tree.  That was a lot of fun; I'm sure it will become even more fun as Lydia and her future siblings get older.  Our tree is lovely--a tall and fairly narrow Douglas fir.  I don't know if Lydia understands everything we're doing, but we've certainly been motivated, for her sake, to make this a great Christmas.

Today I headed to the mall to finish my Christmas shopping.  It's always such an exhausting endeavor.  Because we exchanged presents with my family at Thanksgiving, it was a little easier, but I had to purchase presents for everyone at work.  I buy lots of the same thing for all the nurses, but it's always hard to purchase something inexpensive but nice.  It's hard to know how many people to purchase for, as well.  I think my shopping is done (fingers crossed)

OK, got to run, but I wanted to update quickly.  Happy Holidays!