so this is christmas

I haven't looked at today's pictures yet, but yesterday alone I took about 250 of them (of which about 100 are uploading onto flickr right now). The weather's been pretty cold and crappy, so when we saw sun outside yesterday morning we tried to take advantage of it as much as possible-- we hung out in the front yard at Zach's parents' for a while, then spent part of the afternoon at the park where we even got to introduce D to sand (let him play in the big sand volleyball courts). Every year my family goes to the candlelight service on christmas eve, and I was looking forward to bringing D with us this year. He behaved really well in church, and I was able to sneak off and attempt a few pictures of the candle light part of the ceremony (everyone lights candles and sings Silent Night). It's long been one of my favorite moments of the entire christmas season so I'm glad to have it documented, even if poorly so.

This morning we started out at Zach's parents', had a big breakfast with them and Andrew and Jakki and then opened a few gifts. A little before noon we headed over to my parents' for our "second christmas." D was so cute, playing with his toys (and Daddy's keys) while the rest of us opened gifts. Among a few other things, he got a little set of mini bongos (they look baby-sized, though apparently they're legitimate instruments) and his own set of smaller drum sticks. And oh man, you shoulda seen his face light up when he saw the sticks! He loved them! Quite the music man, I tell ya. ;) D even opened up some of his own presents, too, pulling out tissue paper and tearing the giftwrap.

D spent the entire day in his special christmas pj's, and we just hung out and enjoyed our new stuff most of the day. Tomorrow my older sister will drive down again with her new hubby and we'll do our "third christmas" with Daddy in the afternoon.

Mom and Philip gave me a bit of "photography money," which I'm thinking of using to open up a Zenfolio.com account. I've heard lots of great things about the site, it seems to have pretty neat features, and it could potentially replace both snapfish and imagekind. It would come at a not-insignificant price, but then again sometimes you get what you pay for, right? I just recently found out that Snapfish requires you to make a purchase at least once a year or else they'll delete all your photos, something that I swear I checked on a few years ago and must've changed since then, and makes me question how much longer I want to use them (since I don't buy prints from them hardly ever anymore).

I'm waiting for the flickr upload to finish, but it's only 20% done and claims it might take a while longer to finish, and I need to get to bed as I feel a bit of a cold coming on, so pictures may need to wait till tomorrow to be posted.