Our 2013 special ornament

So far, we've managed to continue our little family tradition of having a special annual Christmas ornament to commemorate the year... This marks our eighth year of doing this!  Pretty soon, I'll have to find a different way to display these ornaments...  :)

2013 was a big year of change and growth for our family.  Both David and I have had exciting new challenges professionally -- me with my new job ventures, David with his ever-evolving responsibilities in campus ministry.  Sophia continues to grow and change in leaps and bounds every day, adding new words and new motor skills seemingly by the minute.

But perhaps the biggest, most obvious change to our family rhythms this year was the introduction of formal school for Joshua.  Starting preschool has brought so many exciting and wonderful changes in our little guy's life.  He's grown so much in vocabulary and art skills and other immediately obvious "learning" skills.  But it's also been amazing to watch him grow in understanding in so many different ways -- from complex sentence structures, to empathy for other children, to remembering what he's done during the day and being excited to relate extended stories about what he did, it's all been such a joy to watch!

And having Joshua in school three mornings a week has opened up a lot of time for the rest of us.  It *is* a bit of a scramble on school mornings to get Joshua fed, dressed, and out the door by 8:15.  But once he's there, I've had some really sweet one-on-one times with Sophia.  And when she's taking her morning nap, I suddenly have decent stretches of time to catch up on life.  :)

So we thought that it would be fitting to get a little school-themed ornament this year, to remember the beginning of this new season in our family's life.  We're so thankful that Joshua's first experiences of school have been predominantly positive, and we pray that he'll continue to enjoy his time learning and exploring and growing through his entire school career!

This year's Christmas ornament

In case you couldn't tell, I really love traditions of all kinds.  :)  And one of my favorites of the little traditions we've created as a family is the annual Christmas ornament.  Each year, we pick or make an ornament that represents one of the milestones of the year.  Now that we're finally living in a home with a staircase, I decided to put them all up together in a pretty little display:


Starting from the top, we have our 2006 bride and groom, 2007 NYU Law ornament, 2008 Fitz-Randolph gates, 2009 stork, 2010 Joshua ornament, 2011 Joshua handprint, and then this year's ornament:


A lovely embroidered ornament commemorating our little Sophia's first Christmas!  As our 2010 Joshua ornament was an Etsy find, I figured it was appropriate to look for another handmade Etsy item for Sophia, and as soon as I saw the embroidered work in this particular Etsy shop, I knew this was going to be this year's ornament!

I love that both of our kiddos have a lovely handmade ornament celebrating the year in which they were born.  And one of these days, if I'm ever on top of my game enough, they'll have ornaments that are actually hand-crafted by *me*.  ;)  But until that day comes, I'm thankful for all the pretties that can be found on Etsy!

And it goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway -- we are all so thankful for our dear little Sophia.  2012 is the year David and I became parents to a daughter, and Joshua became a big brother, and this sweet little ornament is a fitting milestone marker for this year!

Christmas craftiness

One more post for tonight's blog burst...  I think it's okay to go ahead and post this since the grandparents who regularly read this blog have already received their Christmas present from Joshua, and the other, less tech-savvy grandparents will be getting theirs on Sunday.  :)

In a fit of craftiness on a rare weekend off, I decided to actually DO some of the many fun ideas I've pinned on Pinterest over the last year.  (Side bar: have you gotten hooked on Pinterest yet?  It's such a fun place to dream about the many fun ideas that I would, of course, perfectly execute, if I only had the time...)

The first project I took on was a fingerpainting canvas, adapted from the idea originally found here.  I got enough white letter stickers to spell out Joshua's name twice (the white blended in with the blank canvas, which I think helped prevent the wee maestro from getting distracted and trying to pick off the letters), then set up a little paint station for him.  This was his first time playing with paint, and I think at first he was very distressed at how messy his hands got.  I would dip them in the paint and try to show him how to smear it on the canvas, but he would immediately lift his hands up to me and complain until I wiped the paint off.  So the first try was a bit of a fail.

Then I gave him a paintbrush to play with, and all was right in his world.  :)  Of course, because he was sitting in his booster seat, and because I'd squeezed the paint onto plastic plates, he apparently thought I was giving him a new utensil to try eating a new snack... It's a good thing the paint is nontoxic!  But I eventually convinced him that paint =/= food, and we started getting somewhere with the project.




Once the paint set, I peeled off the letter stickers, and was pleasantly surprised at how the canvases turned out!


After the paint project, I tried to take Joshua out of his "smock" (a large t-shirt that I never wear), but he kept running back to it and asking for the shirt, so I relented and let him run around the house with it on for a while.  What an adorable little artist!




Then, later that weekend, I tried my hand at another Pinterest project.  Or perhaps I should say, I tried Joshua's hand at it...  ;)  We have a yearly tradition of choosing an ornament that somehow epitomizes the past year for our family.  You can find blog posts describing past years' ornaments here.  This year, we decided an ornament made by Joshua would be a fun addition to our family collection.  So I decided to try replicating this super-cute idea...


And, okay, by "replicate," I mean "copy exactly."  But look!  It's Joshua's hand!  And super-cute little snowmen!  He was very curious about just what exactly I was pressing his hand into, so he actually held still and just watched while I placed and pressed his hand.  Then after 24 hours for it to dry, I got to bust out our fine-point Sharpies and play artist myself for a bit.  And I'm really happy with our little homemade ornament -- the first of hopefully many homemade additions Joshua will make to our collection!

Christmas traditions: This year's ornament

One of my favorite personal Christmas traditions is picking out an ornament to commemorate the year that has passed.  We started out with a bride and groom in 2006, and added an NYU Law ornament in 2007, Princeton's Fitz-Randolph Gates in 2008, and a "parents-to-be" stork in 2009.

So it's only fitting that this year's ornament be dedicated to the birth of our first child.  I found these super cute personalizable ornaments on Etsy, and knew immediately that this was this year's ornament:


How adorable is this little ornament?  And yes, I fully plan to get something similar for each of our putative future children.  :)

2010: the year we became parents.  We're so thankful for all of the amazing ways God blessed our family this year!

Christmas Traditions Roundup: This Year's Ornament and Card

I have to confess: we didn't really go all out with the Christmas decorations this year. What with the normal busyness of the season, plus all manner of baby-related distractions, and wanting to really savor our downtime alone together, we didn't even pull our little Charlie Brown tree out from storage...

But! We did manage to stay on top of at least two of our family Christmas traditions. As I mentioned last year in this post, one of our favorite family traditions is to choose a special Christmas ornament to somehow commemorate the year. We've done this every year since we've been married, so this is our fourth annual ornament.

Joining our 2006 bride and groom, our 2007 NYU ball, and our 2008 FitzRandolph gates is this cute little guy:


A 2009 stork! The neck of the stork has "Parents to Be" written on it, and the little bundle is marked "2009" and bears the inscription "Tiny little package, Great big love." How cute is this? And, of course, totally appropriate for the year we first got pregnant -- a year where we eagerly anticipated meeting our little son and becoming parents.

The other family tradition we managed to keep up with was our Christmas card. Last year, due to circumstances (mostly) outside of our control, we ended up sending out simple photo cards rather than a family newsletter. This year, we decided to continue with the photo card idea, directing people here to this blog if they want a more comprehensive update on our lives. And we had the beautiful pictures that Angel Beeson took of us at our maternity shoot, which were perfect Christmas card material!

So without further ado, the 2009 Keddie family Christmas card:


Wishing all of you a very merry Christmas!

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
--John 1:14

Christmas Traditions: Annual Ornaments

Another Christmas tradition we've started for our little family is getting one special ornament every year. So far, we've managed to find a meaningful ornament each year, which somehow encapsulates the happenings of that year.

For 2006, our first Christmas together, the year of our wedding, the choice was obvious. And when I saw this beautiful little ornament at the Lenox outlet, for 25% off, I knew this was the one. The ornament that would be the start of our new family's annual Christmas tradition. And hey, it kind of looks like us, too! Or at least, it looks more like us than the only other bride and groom option available from Lenox -- which was blond.

For 2007, the year I graduated from law school, we celebrated the end of an era -- no more commuting to New York three days a week! No more getting further and further into law school debt! An NYU Law ornament seemed fitting to commemorate this new chapter in our lives together. David really did live through the law school years with me, driving me to and from the train station every day, being my sounding board for legal concepts I was trying to get my head around, listening to my Bar/Bri bar review iPod lectures with me -- so this ornament memorializes a joint effort!

This year, we didn't really have any huge, defining, milestone moments in our marriage. It was a year of settling into our jobs and continued, gradual growth in our lives together. We weren't sure what kind of ornament would best encapsulate this year of our marriage. And then we saw this guy, and knew this was it:

It's a little brass model of the FitzRandolph gates, the gates that stand in front of Nassau Hall. These are the gates that seniors walk through on graduation day, symbolizing their exit from the nurturing arms of Princeton out into the real world. Tradition holds that if an undergrad is so bold and foolish as to walk through these gates, he will not graduate from Princeton. (Yeah, so, I totally broke that tradition too many times to count, especially on Communiversity weekend...)

So yes, David and I are both Princeton graduates. But this particular piece of Princeton tradition is fitting for 2008. This year, we realized that we had settled down here in Princeton, and made this little town our home. It's easy to think of Princeton as a transient locale, especially since the average resident lives here less than four years. For the first couple years of our marriage, we'd assumed that we would live in Princeton for a little bit, and then move on -- to Philadelphia, for David to go to seminary, and then to some other distant land, wherever David received a call to a church. But we've come to realize this year that we've really put down roots here in town. David still plans to go to seminary, but he'll likely take classes on a part time basis while continuing to work for PEF. My job situation is also really ideal -- being in a branch office of a large firm means that I get interesting and challenging work, but a much more relaxed office culture. We've also been so blessed with a rich community of friends here.

So the FitzRandolph gates ornament will forever remind us of 2008 -- the year we became townies. :)