Lily's Life: Great joy!!

Can you believe Christmas has come and gone....already!? I hope this season brought our friends and family much JOY as we celebrated our Savior's birth. Since this is our first time to be parents we are faced with all the decisions on how will we handle Santa Claus and presents and really asking ourselves "what will be our traditions for this time of the year?" So, the most important thing to us is to be focused on the real meaning of Christmas and with all the commercialism and "stuff" swirling around you have to make a conscious effort to stay focused on Jesus (the reason for the season :) ) So it was neat that we found an Advent scripture guide that listed different verses to read for every day of December. It was a blessing to our family. Each day I felt this growing anticipation not only Christmas Day (His first coming) but for the day He will return (Matthew 24:30). Many of the verses that we read were prophecies made in the old testament about Jesus being born and of His return the second time. Then our friend, Daisy, shared a great website that we will definitely use next year for daily reading as we celebrate the CHRISTmas season. Check it out here.

Since we traveled to visit Poppy for Thanksgiving we decided to spend Christmas at home this year. It is a Raley tradition to go to Maw Maw's house on Christmas Eve so we enjoyed time with them. Even though Joe's brother lives in Foley we don't see them very often so Lily was loving her time with Jared and Coley (her cousins). She was the life of the party and kept us laughing. We played Dirty Santa and ate way too much food! Lily especially liked the ham. We ended our afternoon by Uncle Jeff reading the Christmas story and it was a great way to end our day together as a family.

On Christmas morning I woke up at 6 am and just laid there waiting to hear Lily's voice....I was so anxious for her to see her gifts. She FINALLY :) woke up around 7 and her normal routine is to go directly to the Christmas tree and see the lights. It was fun to see her expression when she first saw the gifts and she was a little uneasy about going any further than the kitchen. She just stood there frozen and peeking in to see all the new "stuff." Our friends, the Lawrence family, put together a huge box of toys for Lily so we had an over abundance. I think her favorite gift were the balls. Joe got her a bag of 100 balls to go in her little pool and she had a "ball" with that. We ate a delicious Christmas breakfast and then enjoyed our day together. We watched the Nativity Story when Lily went down for her nap and when she woke up we spent the afternoon playing outside in the sunshine.

Then to top off a great holiday we got a surprise visit from Poppy and Grami. They came down to see Lily the day after Christmas and we were so glad to see them! We went out to eat and they joined us for Church on Sunday. Here are some photos of our times of great joy :)

(Maw Maw, Papa, Jared, Coley, Aunt Tammy, Uncle Jeff, Lily, Mommy, Daddy)