All Amaia wanted for Christmas...

...was her two front teeth.  I promise they are there if you look REALLY close in this picture :)

 We had a wonderful first Christmas as a family of three.  I always leave Christmas feeling so blessed by our families.  More details to come on Amaia's first Christmas.  Merry Christmas!!

Christmas Week Snapshots

We are slowing down a bit this week and enjoying the week leading up to Christmas!!!  Does the excitement for Christmas ever fade?!  I will be 30 in a month (yikes!) so I would say that qualifies me as an official adult, but I still get a little bit giddy inside for Christmas.  This year I am excited to observe Amaia's first Christmas experience and watch her reaction to everything, I am super excited to see my sister and have extended times with our family and eat wonderful food!  

I'm also really enjoying that this week seems be a little less busy for us.  Here are a few snapshots of what we have been up to this week....

 Adam I went on a Christmas date night to Centro.  In my mind there would be a snow on the ground and twinkly lights in the trees downtown and it would be oh so Christmas-y and romantic.  Well... there is still no snow around here and no lights BUT it still was wonderful.  Honestly, Centro pretty much never disappoints.  We both ate brussel sprouts for the first time and discovered that they are awesome!   At least they are awesome when prepared well. AND i ordered this wonderful marshmallow brownie sundae dessert - yum!  Adam had a hazelnut creme brulee that was even better.  If anyone knows how to make creme brulee I think I need to learn.  It just might be the way to Adam's heart.

Amaia and I had a playdate with Oscar and Julie this morning.  I had a really cute picture of both the babes in which they were both actually looking at the camera, but I accidentally deleted it.  She is so happy and cute. I love her smile. Oscar and Amaia actually played together this morning. This is a big development!  They seemed genuinely interested in one another and I think that Oscar was motivating Amaia to try crawling a bit more.  He needs to show her the ropes.

Orange tea and english muffin with peach-mango jam while I worked this afternoon.  Yum.  I guess I was feeling a bit English :)  One thing I love about this time of year is just being "cozy" -- sipping warm drinks, lighting candles and wearing slippers....

Only 4 sleeps until Christmas!  Merry Christmas everyone!  

10 Months!

My Dearest Amaia,

You are 10 months old and more fun than ever!  You make me laugh incredibly easily and often with your adorable faces and sounds.  Your dad and I love you SO much.  I love spending my days with you and your Daddy is constantly telling me how he misses you and wishes he could spend more time with you.  Sometimes, I ask him if he thinks that we should ask someone to come over and watch you when we have something to do at night and he says "No, I want Amaia to come with us.  I miss her!".  He loves you :)

You seem so old all of the sudden!  If you look closely at the picture above you can see a couple teeth just starting to peek through.  You have also become much more vocal over the last few weeks.  You are making new sounds loudly and often!  Your favorite thing to say is still "ga, guh, guh" but you have also developed an affinity for "da, da".  Your daddy sure hopes that you are working hard at calling him daddy soon.  I love this new development.  I just cannot wait until you can talk to me and tell me what you are thinking!  You crack me up without saying a word, so I can only imagine how much fun we will have together once you can talk too.

On the day you turned 10 months old you officially slept 12 hours un-interrupted for the first time.  You have been sleeping through the night since you were about 2 months old, but you had been sleeping 8-10 hours.  So proud of you baby girl!

You have also developed a very strong preference for standing.  You often resist sitting down when I put you down, you are happiest standing and you are always trying to pull yourself up on whatever you can get your hands on.  You are also becoming really good at taking steps while we hold your hands. I am beginning to think that you are going to skip crawling all together.  If you are on your tummy you don't try to crawl very much and you would always prefer to be standing.  You also still love your jumperoo and for some reason have taken quite the liking to the tomato on your jumperoo.  You love to stand up and just hold onto your tomato.  When you start talking you are going to have to tell me what it is about the tomato that you like so much, ok?!

You are turning into a great eater.  You have been eating more and more table foods and you can handle soft chunks of food bigger than I would think.  You still love your cheerios and you are also now consistently eating, oatmeal, bananas, applesauce, chunks of carrots (pureed carrots currently disgust you), tuna, tilapia, green beans, peas, mixed veggies, yogurt and you have had tastes a variety of other things too.  I made homemade chicken noodle soup last week and I gave you some of the carrots from the soup and you liked them, but you LOVED when I let you slurp some of the broth.  I am glad that you like my cooking.

Your personality is showing itself more and more all the time.  Your are goofy and silly and all kinds of fun.  We love you so much baby girl.

Love,
Mommy

Christmas Traditions

I fully plan on having many, many Christmas traditions as Amaia gets older and we add more children to our family (Lord willing!!!).  I am still brainstorming on potential Christmas traditions, so we don't have very many built into our family Christmas celebrations YET, but we do have one!!  Every year for the last three years Adam and I have gone to Starbucks to get a warm drink and then we drive around looking at Christmas lights and listening to Christmas music.  I was so excited to take Amaia out this year!!  We ran into a few bumps in our Christmas merriment road, but they did not deter us.

Bump # 1:  Last year we found this crazy, wonderful house in Grimes. It was decorated with a million lights and huge blow up lawn ornaments.  It was cheesy and festive and wonderful.  They even played music and you could get out and walk around and look at everything.  I have been REALLY looking forward to taking Amaia to see it.  I cannot say this with absolute certainty, but I think it was quite possibly the #1 thing I was looking forward to experiencing with Amaia for Christmas.   Well, we found the house last night and they apparently are not doing it this year.  Insert huge sad face here!!  Needless to say I was a bit dissapointed.  However, Adam did a find a consolation for us.  I really wanted somewhere that I could take Amaia out of the car and show her the lights so we did find the Grimes public library.  It wasn't nearly as crazy, but we could still get out of the car and walk around.

Isn't she a vision in her new winter coat??  I decided that she just must wear it even though it was 50 degrees in December at night and Adam was wearing flip-flops :)

Bump #2: Amaia did not particularly enjoy our tradition this year.  And by that I mean that she cried almost the entire time that we were in the car.  She has to enjoy it more next year, because I don't think that she could enjoy it any less :)

We do have one other tradition - we attempt to watch Home Alone 2 every year.  It is one of Adam's favorite movies and I honestly have never seen anyone laugh so hard at a movie before.  Typically he laughs at the movie and I laugh at him.  It is great fun :)

What Christmas traditions does your family have??

Friends

Please meet my dear and awesome friend Julie.

Julie has been one of my dearest, if not the dearest friend in my life over the last five or so years.  My heart is often overwhelmed with thankfulness for her.  Our lives have been very much on the same path over the past few years.  Julie and her hubby, Ryan got engaged a couple weeks before Adam and I.  Adam and I actually got to decorate the bridge where Ryan proposed and watch the whole thing from a distance, which was super fun.  The above picture of the four of us is from that night. Ryan and Julie got married a month before Adam and I. They also had their little boy, Oscar just a couple months before Amaia came into our lives.  Clearly, God is trying to get us to be friends :)  In fact, Julie told me that she was pregnant on the exact day that I took a positive pregnancy test and she was the first person (other than Adam of course!) that I told I was pregnant.  Thus, Julie has gotten to listen to my many thousands of questions about all of these major life changes.  It is an amazing blessing to have such a caring and authentic friend.  Also, she makes amazing cheesecakes and other treats.  But the reason I say all of this....

Today we got to celebrate Oscar's first birthday!!  

The birthday boy, in his birthday hat...

Julie and I are (not so secretly) trying really, really hard to make Oscar and Amaia bff's!!  They currently interact mostly by stealing one another's toys, but we are working on it :)

And I would totally be okay with it, if they wanted to get married someday....

but I know I need to stop talking about that or it is bound to get awkward for them.

But we just love this family!

Side note: Adam is now officially a huge Tim Tebow fan!!!  We watched the end of the game at Oscar's party and Tebow pulled out the win at the very end AGAIN!  Ryan and Adam were maybe a wee bit excited about this.

Amaia was very tuckered out by the time we got home.  Clearly, she had a great time!