Hannah's One!

Well as if the Christmas time isn't busy enough already adding a birthday in there doesn't make it any easier. As you can see from my belated post, it's been a crazy couple of weeks. Hopefully next year I will be a little more prepared. Hannah had a small party at our house. I think she had fun overall until we started singing Happy Birthday, something about the entire focus of attention on her singing...maybe not so in tune, directly at her was not her idea of fun. You can see from the video she literally wanted to crawl over the back of her highchair and leave.

It has been a crazy busy time of year but more importantly it's been a very happy and great time. Spending time with and seeing family and friends that we haven't seen in a while. I just love this time of year! I have taken some advice from people who have "close to Christmas birthdays" for Hannah such as no Christmas/Birthday combination presents and no wrapping birthday presents in Christmas wrapping paper, but it really is pretty special having a little one so close to Christmas. I found myself thinking of that a lot this Christmas. One night in particular I was rocking Hannah before bedtime and singing Silent Night to her. I found myself thinking of Mary and how she must have rocked Baby Jesus to sleep while singing when He was just one year old. I thought of the love I have for Hannah and how amazing it feels when she looks in my eyes when I'm holding and singing to her and then I thought of how that feeling must have even been multiplied for Mary. Can you imagine holding God's son in your arms and singing Him to sleep? It truly is an amazing gift!

Merry Christmas...

from our elfin' family http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1416312864

Our Santa Visit

We finally went to visit Santa last night. We didn't get to walk right up to Santa which is what I figured we'd be able to do on a cold Wednesday evening. There were several other children with their parents in line. I think we probably waited around 20 minutes or so. Sydney was nervous and pretending like she wasn't. I think she was going over in her head what she was going to ask for...which had already been coaxed by Corey and myself. So far she's young enough that we can talk her into what she should ask Santa for for Christmas. This year it is an art easel and art supplies. I love that you can see the space from her 2 missing bottom teeth in this picture.

Hannah was just fine with Santa right up until the moment Corey sat her on his lap and then she was not happy at all about seeing Santa so close up. She screamed and screamed until the girl taking the picture started ringing the bells to get her attention, which you can see in the video. She stopped screaming but as you can see from her blank expression in the picture she was still not happy. Once we were about 8 feet away from Santa and leaving she was completely fine with him again...waving bye-bye, blowing kisses and saying "ho ho" (just 2 and not 3).

My First Posting

Well finally my first posting. I think it's very obvious that this is a work in process, but I guess I need to start somewhere. Hannah's 1st birthday party is this Saturday. She will turn one on Dec. 18th but we are having the party this weekend. How does time past by so quickly?
We are having a Puppy themed birthday party because that was Hannah's first word. When she first started talking she called everything "puppy": me, Corey, Sydney, her doggies, thin air... I started thinking that maybe that's what she called her guardian angel - Puppy. She would point to nothing and say "Pup-pee". She says more words now but we thought it would be very fitting to have a Puppy party to always remember that first - not so standard first word.