Christmas 2011

Happy New Year, Blog Readers! Well, our holiday season was a bit interesting this year....Olivia was carrying some type of stomach flu and it hit her, me (Abby) and my mom. We were almost 2 hours into our drive from MN to IN when all of a sudden, Olivia started vomiting! She's never done that and it really shocked me and Duane. She was covered in vomit and so was her car seat....we pulled over at a gas station and tried to clean up everything we could. About 30 minutes later, she got sick again. She stayed sleeping so we kept driving.... We rolled into Ferdinand about 12 hours after leaving Saint Paul - 12 hours later I got sick and then 12 hours after that, my mom got sick. Christmas Eve was cancelled at my mom's house as we recuperated. We spent Christmas in our pj's and I didn't have the effort to get Olivia dressed in the outfit I had picked out for the day. We all received excellent gifts and ended up feeling better by Christmas night. Here are a couple pictures of Olivia opening gifts. She wasn't really into it -she would pull a strip of paper and then walk away. Haha!

Olivia got her first dollhouse!

Christmas morning pj's - complete with a tutu

The rest of our stay in Ferdinand was illness-free and a lot of fun! Olivia visited with family and played outside quite a bit. On December 30, Duane hosted his Dezemberfest and I celebrated my 30th birthday. We were supposed to drive back New Year's Eve night but about 2 hours before we left, I decided to check the weather and we made a last minute decision not to leave. The weather in MN was looking iffy so we left Sunday morning. Olivia was such a trooper and did really well on the drive during the day, considering she spent 13 hours in her car seat!

Today was a flurry of unpacking, grocery shopping and laundry. Olivia kept pointing outside so we packed her into her snowsuit and she walked around with Duane.

"Moon!" Olivia LOVES to point out the moon!

Tomorrow it's back to the real world and poor Olivia will go back to daycare. She's definitely not going to get the level of attention she's been spoiled with for the past couple of weeks. To top that off - she'll be soon moving to the toddler room at daycare. Lots of changes coming so stay tuned!