Ornaments

One Christmas tradition we took from Jason's mom is to buy an ornament for each person in the family each year. We went shopping the day after Christmas (to get all the ornaments on sale) and picked ours out. Jason picked out an overalls ornament to celebrate the birth of his baby boy, I got a pearl snowflake (because who doesn't love pearls!), and we picked out a music symbol ornament for Margaret Mary. We were going to let MM pick our her own ornament, but within two minutes, she had about 15 ornaments dangling from her wrist like bracelets! For Henry, we used a sweet ornament that a friend gave us around the time of Henry's birth that said "baby's first Christmas."



When we got home and were going through all of the old ornaments Jason's mom had gotten him each Christmas, Margaret Mary was mesmorized. As we unwrapped each ornament, she would ohhh and ahhh. It was really sweet and I was so happy that I got to catch her excitement on video.



Since then, it has been a fight to keep Margaret Mary from taking the ornaments off of the tree to play with them. She is in this stage where she is constantly testing her boundaries and Jason and I are still unsure about what her bounderies are! For example, we will tell her not to take the ornament off of the tree, so she will start swinging the ornament all around on the tree. We tell her to stop swinging the ornament, and she startes kissing the ornament and putting her tongue on it. We tell her to stop licking the ornament, that they are for touching gently. We want her to be able to touch the ornaments because many of them have doors that open, etc. She then starts banging two ornaments that are close to eachother together, to which we tell her to stop. She is good about obeying, but she always finds ways to do something else slightly outside the boundary that we just set for her. After five minutes of saying no to all the other ways she has found to play with the ornaments, while keeping them on the tree, while not banging them, etc, Jason and I are left exhausted wondering what IS okay for her to do and how much playing the ornmanets can take. Having kids is very challenging!