Christmas Already!

The day after Thanksgiving, we took out our tree and other Christmas decorations and started decorating the house in anticipation of Christ's birth. Papa and I have been purchasing one ornament together with some special meaning (usually from places we traveled to) since we started dating so we have ornaments dating back to 1994 with one year missing, 1998, the year of the longest break-up. Papa doesn't like to be reminded of his foolhardy days, but it will definitely tell a story in years to come when we go in order as we decorate our tree and our kiddos wonder what's up with the missing year.

Even though we didn't get around buying our ornaments for 2007 yet, Mia enjoyed putting up our existing collection. Some actually made it up on the tree by her hands alone. We finally had time to take Mia ornament shopping today. We learned from the shoe incident a the rack and had her take an initial look at all the ornaments at the shop we went to. There were a TON, it was a massive Hallmark store. We really thought Mia would like a fire truck, but she wasn't interested. We had her look at the entire display for a few minutes. After Mia got the lay of the land, we picked out a few that we thought she would enjoy, then we lined them up and told her to choose ONE! Like the shoe incident, she kept repeating the word one as she reviewed her options. The line up included, two different ornaments from the Pixar Cars movie, an Eskimo girl with a bear, a Chinese girl and pagoda, a Christmas tree shape made with cell phones, and a blonde doll figure. Mia squatted there in front of the boxes and thought about it. She kept going back to a blue car from the Cars movie. I so wish I brought my camera to this event. Anyhow, then she put it back and picked up another ornament that was a doll, a blonde doll. Thankfully she put that one down, and picked up the other Cars ornament. Back down that one went. In the end she choose the blue car, I think it's Lightning McQueen or something like that. Have not seen the movie myself.

At the store Mia was also found of a wreath MP3 ornament (sign of our times huh) that played music. She kept asking for the music so I must have pressed the button on it a dozen times while we were there. We did a second line up to confirm that the car was really it. We included the MP3 wreath in the line up, but Mia went back to the blue car. We looked around some more, but when Mia said, "Mama, hold it" and gave me the ornament box, we knew that it was a keeper for her. Now if Mia said, "Mama, want it" it would have meant she didn't want it. Mia uses that phrase when she tries to give us food she does not want to eat.

We also bought her first Christmas present at a toy shop in Los Altos today. It's a basket to go on the handlebars of her Kettler bike. We know she'll enjoy putting mail in it when we go check out box. I can't wait until Christmas to give it to her. We are also contemplating a pink kitchen set that we saw on Costco.com, but we are not sure we want such a big toy in our house. We decided to do the whole Santa thing. It's part of the wonderment of being a kid and I really want Mia to have that experience along with learning about Christ's humble birth. I've been talking to Mia about Santa and hope that she will cooperate when we go take pictures with Santa. She was great last year, but she was also not really aware of much.