Happy New Year

Wishing you a happy and blessed New Year!

We hope you all had a Merry Christmas. We were fortunate to spend ours with lots of friends and family. We spent Christmas Eve with our friends Laurence and Sarah. Christmas morning we woke up and opened our stockings and a few presents with Hannah. About noon Grandpa Lee and Grandma Mary showed up and we opened the rest of our presents. Grandma and Grandpa got Hannah, among other things, a xylophone. While I'm interested in developing her music skills early I may go insane while she learns to play it. Right now she's just interested in chewing on the mallet. (Sorry music people if that's not what you call the thing you hit it with.) I'm sure it won't be long before she it tapping out a tune on it.

About 3:00 the rest of the family showed up. Two of my uncles and their families came as well as my Grandma. We had 12 for dinner and had a great time. I smoked up the house cooking prime rib...really I was following the directions and it actually turned out fine. Dinner was topped off with desert and a couple of more presents. Hannah had so much excitement that she napped for a total of 1/2 hour over the whole day. It was early to bed for her while my Mom and I played a new game and Ben and Dad relaxed in the recliners. Now I'm off to clean up the aftermath and put the new goodies away!

Stocking are hung by the chimney with care.

Christmas morning

8 Months Old & Merry Christmas Eve

Hannah is eight months old today! She is doing really well. She is crawling like crazy. She is now pulling herself up on everything. In the mornings when I'm getting ready she likes to pull up on the bathtub and walk along it. I don't think she'll be walking tomorrow but it's not too far away. She's babbling up a storm. The most distinguishable words are "Da Da" and "Ma Ma".

I was asked what her favorite toy was and couldn't really think of one and then I remembered...Mom and Dad's cell phones. Last night she was playing with mine and holding it up to her ear. "Monkey see, Monkey do." That's a lesson to us to make sure we are doing what's right because we have little impressionable eyes watching.

It feels like we have had a week of Christmas already. Saturday night we had Christmas with Grandpa Randy. Last night we had Christmas Grandma Bev, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Two down and two more to go

I don't have any new pictures of Hannah and I thought that a post is kind of boring with out a picture. Here's a little glimpse of what it looks like around here. Some snow but not really enough. Hopefully the New Year will bring some more.

Bubble Bath

Hannah had her first bubble bath last night. She is teething again and has been kind of fussy so I hoped that a bubble bath might soothe her. At first she cried when I put in her. I guess she didn't like me messing with her bath. Eventually she got over it and started to enjoy herself.

Standing

Hannah is actively standing and pulling herself up on things. If it can be stood by it will be. In the bathroom when the bottom picture was taken she saw her Daddy and turned around like she was going to walk to him. She forgot that she hasn't quite mastered that but Mommy was there to catch her. Her friend Garret lent her the green toy that she is standing up with and she loves it. Sometimes she gets stuck standing up and can't figure out how to get down. She just pushes the toy over and problem solved!

Look Mom! One hand!

She really would love to stand up in the bath tub.

I can't seem to convince her that this is a BAD idea.

Little Vacation

It's not very often around here when there aren't wheel lines to be changed, flood water to be watched, cows to be fed, cows calving, or hay trucks to be loaded. This last weekend it was just the cows that needed to be fed so we were able to get out of town for a little while. We went up to the Willamette Valley to see our friends Andy, Katie and Cole. They were down for a visit in August. You can read about it here. Hannah and Cole had fun playing together. Hannah wanted to steal Cole's toys and Cole thought it was neat to pull Hannah's hair. They would yell back and forth across the room at each other and get jealous when the other one was getting fed and they weren't. They really did enjoy each others company.

The Dads got to spend some time together looking at equipment. They also toured a hay press where some of our local hay goes to be processed before going to Japan. The girls were able to get away and do a little bit of shopping while the boys stayed home and watched movies. It was great to see them all again and we had lots of fun!

Helping Mamma Feed

Hannah normally helps feed the cows from inside the pickup with Daddy. They drive me around and I feed the hay off. Today Daddy was working and it was just the girls left to do the feeding. Normally Hannah has to ride in her car seat when I do this but it was pretty nice today and she tends to scream at me from inside the pickup. She had a blast on the feed wagon! She loves the cows and dogs and squeals at the sight of them. I was impressed that she did so well today. I was able to sit her down on the wagon and she actually stayed where I left her. This is unusual for our recently crawling baby.

Notice that her hands are covered. This is an effort to keep her from having hay as a snack.

Hannah & Gus

So serious!

This is our other new little one, Freedom Dawn. She is about 1 1/2 months old. She came in a cow that we bought recently. If you missed our adventure you can check it out here.

EUREKA! She Found It!

Well that didn't take long. Hannah has found the tree! She was quite fascinated one evening with it but hasn't seemed to bother it since.

Christmas Pictures

Here's a sampling of Hannah's Christmas pictures. She loves to touch and play with the evergreen so it was quite a challenge to get her to look at the camera. Enjoy!

The Christmas Tree

Really it's the hidden Christmas tree. We like to have a real tree but thought that Hannah would like it too much and would probably end up eating the needles and ripping the ornaments off. We solved this problem by putting the tree in the corner behind the sofa and love seat. Hannah is on the move and crawling all over. As of right now she has not explored this corner of the room. I'm sure by Christmas I will have at least one present that needs to be re-wrapped.

Help Wrapping

I was wrapping some presents this morning and my little helper was right there with me. Luckily everything was pretty harmless. Hannah was wrapping herself up in the ribbon, throwing the gift bags and boxes around, and trying to pull herself up on the wrapping paper box. Oh yeah, she has pulled herself up to standing at least once so far.

Getting the Tree

Sunday afternoon we went to Medicine Lake to get our Christmas tree. The weather at home was very windy and it looked even worse up on the mountain. It was. We don't show it much in the pictures but it was snowing, windy and cold. We didn't spend any time playing around. We spotted the trees, cut them down, threw them in the pickup and left. We stood outside watching the huge trees sway in the wind. At that point I was ready to go. It was so cold Hannah hung out in the pickup through the whole adventure.