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| Love my Minnie! |
Happy New Year Everyone! December flew by so fast that I didn't get a chance to post any updates but all is well and we survived another Christmas. Aside from a persistent cough, Mallory held up really well over the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day festivities. We went to church with Papa and Nana Merriman on Christmas Eve and then spent Christmas morning at the house before heading over to our respective families. In the morning we let Mallory open gifts and had a nice big breakfast. The big hit of the gifts was the pop-up Princess Castle! Whenever she is at Grandma/Grandpa Astriab's house, she loves playing in their pop-up castle, so that was definitely at the top of the list for Santa.
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| The Merriman Christmas Tree! |
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| Love my Castle! |
So we packed everything up and headed over to the Merrimans for the first half of the day and then the Astriabs for the second half. Mallory made it all the to the end of the day with little fuss and seemed to really started to enjoy the gift opening process. All of this without one ounce of nap! We're really looking forward to seeing how different she will be next year with the whole Santa concept and gift opening. Unfortunately, one of the things we were not able to time right was getting a picture with Santa. To our surprise, one of the gifts from Papa and Nana Merriman was a framed picture of Mallory with Santa at the mall. Somehow Mallory remained still and didn't get scared by the big guy!
After the Christmas dust settled, Michol and I picked up a new camera (our gift for each other). It's a really nice Nikon model and will take a little time to figure out, but we hope we can start really taking some nice pictures of Mallory. Right now we seem to be using our phones more than our old traditional camera and the quality of the pictures are not always the best. Here's a sample of some test shots I took while playing around with the camera:
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| My "Pony" from Aunt Duffy! |
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| Floor shot of Oscar |
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| Somebody has a shadow... |
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| Close-up of Laila |
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| Ariel shot of the backyard |
So as we head into this new year, we wish everyone the best and look forward to sharing our new 2014 tales!
