Christmas Day Baby

Lillian was not digging my extra excitement on Christmas morning – she just wanted her oatmeal and fruit, and she wanted it NOW! While I am usually the reigning champion for most gifts on Christmas morning – Lillian stole the show this year! I suppose she will be getting the trophy for years to come! Again, she really wanted to eat the paper, but ended up paying a little more attention to the gifts this time! The toys are pretty advanced, and she loves turning the light on and off on her Fisher Price Laugh & Learn Learning Farm.

Later on that day, we traveled over to celebrate with Grandpa Mark’s side of the family. And yes, I put her in a tutu. It was the cutest thing I have ever seen!


After receiving lots of love from all of her family members, it was time to head home to bed. She fell asleep immediately once the car started moving and slept peacefully through the night. Merry Christmas Miss Lillian!

Christmas Eve Baby

Lillian spent Christmas Eve celebrating with Grandma and Grandpa MacDonald. But, really, she celebrated Christmas Eve Day since she goes to bed around 6pm.  Anyway, she opened her first present on this night. Move over Christmas ham, all she wanted to do was eat the wrapping paper. And, as you can see from this picture, she doesn’t know yet that there are treats inside of stockings! She received lots of fun toys like the Fisher Price Stack ‘n Surprise Sillytown, and classics like the Fisher Price Rock-a-Stack. Lillian also received a lot of attention due to the super cute Christmas outfit that Grandma Mary Ellen bought her! Later that evening, I read her ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas and sang Silent Night to her before putting her down to sleep. I’m looking forward to the Christmas Eve’s to come when she lays in bed listening for Santa and his reindeer!

Cincinnati Christmas Baby

Now that you all are relaxed and cleaned up from your own Christmas celebrations, I will update you on Lillian’s first Christmas! I always have mixed emotions about making our house in Cincinnati ‘holiday ready’. Call me Scrooge, but all of the decorating and what not seems more hassle than it is worth since we are always visiting family during the week of Christmas. Even so, given that it was Lillian’s first Christmas, I felt that we had to do something. So I set out my minimal decorations, we bought a fake tree (it was so nice not having to deal with the watering, sap, and fallen needles!), lit some pine scented candles and called it a day. I did take the extra effort to write Lillian’s name in silver sparkle puff paint on a stocking to match mine, Brian, and the pets. That was about as exciting as we got down here in Cincinnati! We didn’t buy Lillian any presents because we were well aware that the Grandparents were already abuzz with buying gifts for her. And let’s be honest, she is 7 months old, how many toys does she really need? So here she is seated before our fake tree, no presents and all!

Butter Baby

Lillian smells like toast today.

Happy New Year

So…that was an extended vacation! We spent lots and lots of time in northwest Ohio this holiday season and it was wonderful! I’m sure that our family and friends that we got to spend so much time with are not protesting the lack of information on this lovely website! Don’t worry, there are lots of documented events from the holidays, but I thought that I would give you a dose of super cute baby pictures that we had taken (gasp!) before Thanksgiving. We had good intentions of making one of these into a our 2009 holiday card, but reruns of Elf, Christmas Vacation, and Love Actually took precedent!

All of these pictures were taken by our good friend, Michelle Savage. She is accepting new clients so if you’d like to book a shoot with her in the Cincinnati area, let me know and I’ll pass on her contact information!

Christmas Vacation

‘Tis the season to spend time with family and friends, and reflect on the past year and all of the blessings in your life. What better way to do that than with some time off? macdonaldbaby.com enjoys vacations too, so we wish you a very merry Christmas and happy new year. Join us in 2010 for more fun stories and super
cute pictures!

Baby Hair Ties

I had bought two multi-packs of baby hair ties some time ago considering Lillian’s massive amount of hair! When I first tried them out, they were super tricky and I was so worried about pulling Lillian’s hair too hard and then they would immediately fall out, boo. I got some Christmas hope this morning and tried again, and, BAM! Cutest pigtails ever! Brian thinks she looks like a Dr. Seuss character, I think she looks like a cute little bug with antennae!

Joyful Baby

With a face like this, how can you not be happy? I could be having the worst day ever, and all that I have to do is hang out with my daughter for a few seconds and her joy is contagious! These days, all I have to do is catch her eye from across the room and she flashes this huge smile. The good thing is that it seems that as she gets older, she gets more joyful! I have a pretty cool kid!

Wordless Wednesday

Mimic

We always thought that Stanley, our African Grey parrot, would mimic the sound of a baby crying once we had Lillian. Thankfully, Lillian is a pretty good baby and doesn’t cry too often. However I noticed tonight that Stanley has picked up something from her – the fart noise that she makes! He was doing it over and over again tonight! Unfortunately, I don’t have a video of it because he doesn’t like to ‘perform’ so you will have to take my word for it. Just know that if you ever visit the MacDonald household, the questionable noises you may hear are not always what they seem!