We hope you had a Merry Christmas!

Well, we just had our first official "family" Christmas and it was great! This was the first time we were not able to be with either of our families on Christmas day. We were sad about it, but tried to make the best of it. We figured since it was our first Christmas with Maddox, it was only fitting. Well, he made it so much fun that the day flew by before we had a chance to get too sad about being away. We really had a great day even though he had no clue what was going on.

Maddox meets Santa for the first time. They had a good talk.

Waiting for Santa on Christmas Eve.

Is it time to open presents yet?

Maddox opens his first Christmas present

Playing with his new building blocks

He is facinated by his new dragon!

This ball has some really crazy bright lights and music. He was enthralled!

Our best Christmas present. He had a lot of fun sitting in the box and tearing off the paper.

He has also reached or is about to reach several milestones. His teeth are going to break through any day now, he can now sit up on his own (for short periods) and he gets up on all fours and rocks back and forth, so crawling is just around the corner. Which also means I have been working on baby proofing the house!! He is actually pretty good at getting around by rolling or pushing himself backwards. When he starts rocking he doesn't know to move his arms so he ends up just pushing himself back. He knows how to put his pacifier in his mouth all by himself....Ok, I know this isn't technically a "milestone", but I think most parents would agree is needs to be added to the list. It has greatly cut down on the number of times he wakes up during the night. In fact - last night my total number of trips to Maddox's crib......DRUMROLL Please.......ZERO! Can you tell I am excited about that? He also taught himself how to spin the rainbow wheel on the jumparoo the other day. I know it doesn't sound like much, but he has always been interested in it and I would always spin it for him, then he would reach for it and it would stop. It was amazing to watch him as he figured out how to spin it himself and let go so it would keep spinning. I wasn't even helping him, he just all the sudden figured out what to do. It was really awesome to be able to watch that. Here are some more pictures:

His first meal in the high chair

Rolling around and slobbering on his feet

Helping put up the Christmas lights (providing comic relief at least!)

Sitting up all by himself!! We still have to sit close and watch out for the occasional face plant!

Maddox also got to meet our friends Ben and Crystal for the first time. He LOVED Crystal and wanted to talk to her all weekend. He is a flirt already. We are SO excited that Ben and Crystal will be moving back to Charleston in April!!!! We had so much fun visiting with them...now it is time to get busy house hunting for them!

Well, I was also wanting to post some videos with the other presents he opened, but it is getting late, so that will have to be the next post. We tried to get pics with everyone's presents, but we ended up with video of most of them. So I will put that together and get it up in the next few days. Thanks for checking in with us. We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.