Trimming the Tree

I've finally found the camera cord! So now it's time for the non-stop set of posts from the last 2 weeks of holiday celebration and new house settling. For tonight we'll just start with our first night in our new house, and re-trimming the tree in our new house.
I don't have any pictures of our first night in the house, but I can tell you all how our first night went. The day we got the keys to our house (we didn't close till 5 days later...much thanks to our Realtor for getting us the keys earlier!) there was a huge snow storm in our area. Because of the snow storm we only took with us what we could fit in one car load; us, Lily, a few toys for Lily, the lap top, a couple movies, some food and the air mattress. Then we basically just bunkered down for the rest of the night in our new home watching It's Christmas Charlie Brown and other favorite Christmas movies. That night I think we got over a foot of snow...the first big snow storm of the year, and we decide that was the perfect night to move! The snow really put a damper on how we moved everything though. In the end it took us a whole week and I don't know how many trips to get everything moved because we had several storms in a row.

Here's a picture snow from our first morning in the house, taken from our living room:

While the snow did make moving slow going, that storm will always be one we remember fondly because we got to weather it out in our first home!

Now as I was saying there were several storms that first week in our house. The second storm was the day we decided we were going to move the Christmas tree. As I'm sure you remember, we cut down our tree a couple weeks before we moved, and only decorated it with lights because we would be moving soon. We were smart enough to take the lights down before moving it, be we left the tree stand on, in an attempt to keep the tree alive. So imagine if you will, a car fulled to the brim of our belongings, with a tree strapped to the top with the stand still on it, driving down the road in the middle of heavy snow storm! At least we got the tree to the house in one piece, and we were able to weather that storm by spending a cozy night decoration our tree.

Lily really had fun helping us with the tree this year. She was fascinated by the lights. She liked wearing them like a necklace.
She also had fun with the ornaments. Unfortunately by fun I mean she liked to pull them down after I placed each one on the tree!

Here she is playing with one of the nonbreakable ornaments...or rather trying to eat it like a cookie:
Our tree after we were halfway through decorating it:
I should have a fully finished tree picture somewhere, but I haven't looked through all the pictures yet.

And I have one last picture for the night of Lily's hand print ornament from last year. This is an imprint of her hand on Christmas day last year...it's know my most treasured ornament!
That's all I can do tonight, Lily is crying to go to bed. I'll try to get Lily's 16 month blog up tomorrow, and then we'll see when I can do a Christmas post. Good night for now!

Honey, We're Home!!!

I know it's been a while since I've posted an update. The excuse is...we've moved!! We finally closed on our house the day before Christmas Eve, and it's been a whirl wind of packing, wrapping, unpacking and unwrapping since then. We just finally got our internet hooked up today, so I'm finally able to get on here to post an update. We love our new house, and are enjoying having all the extra space. There is still a lot of unpacking to do, including the actual computer where I load all the pictures onto. (Not to mention I've got to figure out what box I packed the camera cord in!) So unfortunately I don't have any pictures to share yet of Christmas or the pictures from Lily's 16 month photo shoot. I'll work on that this week, so look out for a new house, 16 month, and Christmas post in the near future! In the mean time, I hope you all have a fun New Years Eve tonight! See you in 2009!!

Quick Video From Today

Here's a quick video from this morning. Lily loves putting on our shoes and walking around. Again, sorry for the mess...our house is in a state of half packed.




And just a little FYI to those in the know....we didn't end up closing today. You'll all hear when we do ( because I'll be shouting from the rooftops after all the stress this house has been putting on us!) Please keep your fingers crossed for us that we are in our house for Christmas!

Music Time

While busy packing today I found a recorder, and Lily thought is was the funniest thing ever! After watching me play it for a couple of minutes, she wanted to give it a try. At first she tried humming into it to make a sound. It didn't take her long to figure out she needed to blow air into it though. She's been running around the house playing it for a while now...I think it may be her new favorite toy! Here is some video of her playing. Please excuse the mess, as I said I've been busy packing today!

Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree!

This weekend we went out to cut down our Christmas tree! Normally we get our tree the following weekend, but with us hopefully moving soon, but not knowing the exact date, we wanted to make sure we got a chance to enjoy the Christmas season. So off to the tree farm we went! We found a great farm with a large hill of trees that all looked nice. This was the easiest it has ever been for us to find the perfect tree. Normally we will walk around for quite a while, scrutinizing every tree, till we settle on one...this year it took us under 5 minutes...and that's with stopping to take pictures! We really couldn't go wrong at this farm, there were a lot of great trees! Ok...enough about the farm already...I know you all just want to see the pictures!

Lily leading Daddy around looking for the perfect tree:


Daddy cutting down the tree:



Lily loved the baby trees that were her size:


Lily checking out our tree after it was cut down:


Later that night, after the tree was up, and the lights were on it (we're forgoing putting up ornaments for now, until we know when our closing date is), I pulled out some presents to wrap. Lily loved the bag of bows, and the crinkly wrapping paper. I put one of the bows on her nose, and ever since then she keeps taking bows and tries to stick them to her nose!

She also had fun pulling every bow out of the bag! She made quite the mess!

Our little present:

It would appear we got our tree one day to early though. We woke up the next morning and there was at least an inch of snow on the ground! And the good kind of snow...perfect for snow balls and snowmen. It's was ok that we already had our tree though, because we had plans with Becky, Jon and Kyan to take the kids to the Big E fair grounds to meet Santa! We let the kids run around and play in the snow for a while before going to meet Santa. I think they really loved it...they were all smiles!

Kyan and his snow ball:

Lily laughing at Kyan running around:

The kids did great when we went in to meet the big man himself. Santa unfortunately was a little underwhelming, and was in a purple suit, but he was nice. Neither of the kids cried, and were happy to sit in his lap for us mommy's to take our pictures.

Lily and Santa; wondering who this funny man is:



Kyan and Purple Santa; fascinated by his lollipop:

After meeting Santa we let the kids play in the snow again for a bit. Kyan is getting very affectionate with Lily lately. He kept leaning in for a kiss and a hug from her! It's so nice to see them getting along so well, and knowing they enjoy each other company so much!

Kyan moving in for a hug:


Kyan looking so handsome in his Christmas outfit:

Lily enjoying her time out in the snow:


I'm so glad we live in an area that gets snow, and that Lily enjoys it so much!!

Christmas Picture Photo Shoot and First Snow

New hard drive is up and running, so now I can show you all th pictures from this weekend's photo shoot. I don't think I captured the picture I want to use yet...but there were some pretty cute ones! I better get on this ...time is running out to take the "perfect" picture!

Here are some of the ones I wont be using ...still cute, but just not right!

Kissing her new rocking horse (Thanks Aunt Eileen and Uncle Johnny !):
This is what happens when you try to take pictures of a baby who is just not willing:
And my favorite capture of the day, a sweet moment between Daddy and daughter, Sean trying to calm Lily down:
The following day we got our first snow of the season! It was back to the park for us to see if we could get a better xmas picture. No luck...but man is this bear suit cute!

Now if only I could get a picture where she is looking at me, and I expose/focus correctly!!

Tagged

My friend Kelly tagged me to-

1) Choose the 4th picture folder on my computer

2) Choose the 4th picture

3) Explain the picture

4) Tag 4 other people

This picture was taken back on January 13th. Lily was 4 1/2 months old and really wanted some Ben and Jerry's apparently! We had a good laugh over her grabbing and mouthing the container. What can we say, our girl has good taste!

I'll tag Julie, Dawn, Becky and Heather.

In other Lily news, she has a new word..."No"! And that's all we hear now.."No, no" (she also strings two no's together). It's cute for now, because it's still new, but I'm sure we'll wish she never learned the word soon! :) Other than that she is doing really well. She's actually getting pretty good a sharing (we'll see how long that lasts!) At little gym this week she was so sweet sharing her balls with the other babies, and clapping for each kid as they preformed their forward roll. She also was handing out bells to all the parents during one of our bell songs. She was being such a sweetie!

Unfortunately I don't have any new pictures to share today. It seems I've filled up our external hard drive already. We have to set up a new one now so I have more room for new pictures! I expect that one to e filled by this time next year too!

Here's a picture from this week last year though. Lily at 3 1/2 months:
Somehow I think her checks have gotten bigger!!

Have a good week everyone! I hope to soon have the new hard drive up and running. It better be...I need to order my Christmas cards!