Our Winter!

Christmas!
Our first Christmas as a family of three! It was an adventure. We usually combine our two families (much easier on us, and on Andre's parents since they don't have to cook), but this year Andre's parents decided they didn't want to travel. So I suggested that we go up and visit them for dinner on Christmas Eve. It ended up being a huge ordeal for us having to lug a bunch of crap for a half day there, but I felt is was important that Emilie get to experience her first Christmas with both of her grandparents.

Emilie and her Nana

Opening her new jammies!

Giving her Grandpa his present.

Santa visited our house!!

 The next morning we spent the first part of the morning together just as our little family. Listening to Christmas carols and opening presents. Emilie was a little overwhelmed by all the gifts though, so it ended up taking us the entire day to get everything opened.

Opening her stocking.

She loved her new activity table.

Opening more presents!

 After a nap in the morning we went over to my parents house to open even more presents!

Emilie and I going through our stockings.

Our day ended (after nap #2) with a turkey dinner at my parents house. I was a little nervous about how this was going to go down with a house full of people, and two active babies in my parents tiny house, but it all went really well, and Emilie did very well.

Swimming Lessons 
One thing that Andre and I felt was really important was to have Emilie get comfortable with the water, and one day be able to swim, so we started by enrolling her in a water babies swim program at the local recreation centre. The best part was that Emilie was in the same class as her cousin Joshua!

Yay, swimming lessons!

Learning the back float with Mama.

Playing with Papa.

Fun in the snow
You'd think that living in Canada that this would be an everyday occurrence, but this year, not so much at least where we live. We did however manage to get a few snapshots of Emilie having some fun in the snow with her cousin.

How can we forget...

More on the BIG ONE later!

A New Year

And hopefully a start to more regular blogging. To tell you the truth I have found having two blogs (this blog and the baby blog) to be a bit much to keep up along with work and home, and Emilie....you get the picture. But then I keep thinking about different blog post ideas, and then I think of how the people that read our baby blog may not be terribly interested in reviews of greener products, or recipe ideas, or my general rants about life in general. Sometimes it's nice to have a place that not everyone knows existed right?

I'm going to try to get back into doing little things for myself though. I really do want to get back to blogging, and back into scrapbooking as well. Two things that really do make me happy, but have fallen by the wayside first when Emilie was born, and then again when I went back to work in July. Just not enough hours in the day, and energy to get through those hours! But enough for the grumbling.

I really do want to catch you up on Christmas, what has been going on around here, the status of our marriage since I last posted about our transition into parenthood last year, and what we have been up to this winter. I also want to try out some new recipes (I found an awesome new Crock Pot recipe website!!), share with you some blogs that I love (maybe my readers will do the same?) and do a series on cloth diapering. My goal is to do a new blog entry every week, but I think a more realistic goal would be biweekly. We'll see how it goes!