Cabin Christmas

Christmas at the cabin is the best! There was TONS of snow, but it wasn't great snow ... and I had a black eye to prove it! So we did my favorite cabin activity: played games and ate food. Jason gave me The Hunger Games series for Christmas, and thanks to many hands to hold Norah, I was able to finish the whole series in three days. Best gift ever. Norah got a lot of books too, but she seems to think they're for eating, not reading. Silly girl. Jason got a pocket video camera to capture special moments, and if you're his facebook friend check out the video of him dancing he posted. You can thank me later :)

And now, in no particular order other than the one blogger chose to upload them, our pictures of Christmas 2010:

Toes, Ears, Nose ... mouth.

Norah's play station

Jason's main gift, a video camera

The gifts for all 9 of us probably took up Santa's whole sleigh

Norah was pretty upset to be left out of the matching pj crew

Luke 2

Norah loves her new Aunt Stacy!

Baby's first Christmas ...

A darling onesie from my friend Linne, that Norah promptly puked on hours after getting dressed

Our stockings hung by the chimney with care

So big!

This is Norah

Norah can sit!
Sometimes she tumbles over ...

But she doesn't mind!

Just as long as Mommy picks her up quick!

Norah's first food

For the longest time, Norah has been SO aware of food, mostly aware of the fact that she wasn't getting any. Jason and I weren't too keen on the idea of starting her on single grain white rice cereal, so we skipped right to the good stuff. The plan was to wait until Christmas and as the best gift ever feed Norah sweet potatoes (festive, eh?). But last night, she made it very clear that she was more than ready. My plan is to make her baby food, so I started up the oven and cooked her some sweet potatoes. Using this Web site as a guide, we fed Norah her first big people food!

She was in heaven :)

A really long post

Like the title says, this is going to be long. If you stick with me until the end, there will be really cute pictures. There will also be really cute pictures if you skip all the writing and scroll to the bottom. And now, things on my mind I'd like to blog about:

1. Do you ever read Seriously So Blessed? Well, I do sometimes. And I admit, I'm not a huge fan. But her most recent post had a portion that made me laugh out loud because really, she hit on something that has been boggling my mind for quite some time. She writes,

Dear My Outfits,

Your hotness {lol, is that even a word?} is making me realize that every day should seriously post pics of you, with sassy poses and deets about each darling item bcIbeen thinking TONS about the true meaning of holidays and to be honest, this blog is not enough about ME anymore, ya know?

Oh my goodness. Have you heard of "What I'm Wearing Wednesday"? It's where people take pictures of their outfits every Wednesday and blog about it. Some people don't just do this on Wednesday, they do this EVERY DAY. If I did this, it would go something like this "Hi blog readers! Today I'm wearing pajamas. Again."

2. Christmas music, I need some recommendations. We just spent a few days up at my parents cabin listening to the same twangy country Christmas album we've been listening to for years and I'm ready to move on.

3. I was so excited for that huge blizzard of the century to hit last week. I'm glad I survived, but I hardly think a breeze and a dusting of snow counts as a blizzard.

4. Remember that video I posted of me teasing Norah with juice? Well in just one (ONE!) short month, we will be feeding her real food. Well, real baby food. That I'm making myself. Since it's Christmas she will be eating yams. Festive, eh?

5. Jason starts his new job next week. Yep, new job. He didn't even go hunting for it, they hunted him. We're excited.

6. I have been dying to get family pictures done. We set up a shoot with a really sweet photographer from CA who was in town doing mini sessions for $65. Thanks to the horrible weather forecasts, we were unable to get the pictures done while she was here, so we took our clothes up to the cabin for Thanksgiving where we had my dad take our pictures instead. I'm thrilled with what we got, but none of them scream "please blow me up to a 20 x 30 and hang me above your fireplace!" Which is really what I want. So now I'm on the hunt for a photographer in our price range.

Okay fine, cute picture time :) Thanks Daddy for taking this for us!

Arizona

We drove to Arizona for Jason's step-brother's wedding on Nov. 13th. It was a short visit,but we had a lot of fun.

We went to lunch for Jason's birthday

Then on to the wedding festivities!

Our primary purpose in going to Arizona was for the yearly picture with Grandpa and Grandma Vance and their cute grandchildren. What do you get when you mix 12 children in one picture? Well, a whole lot of this:

Luckily we did get some of this too:

You'll have to forgive Norah, after 12 hours of driving and not sleeping in her own room, dressing her up and taking her out without a nap all day isn't exactly smile-inducing ...

You have to get her back in comfy clothes, feed her and let her sleep to get some of this smile action:

A cute cousin movie watching party

Nakey Norah

I spent all day yesterday trying to upload the cutest video of Norah talking. It didn't work. So we're all just going to have to settle for cute pictures instead.

Norah loves to be nakey. Here she is just chillin' in her room with her stuffed elephant.

She can also feed herself a bottle. It's pretty cute.

In other news, we road tripped to Arizona this weekend. Norah had a blast with her cousins and I have a ton of cute pictures that I'll be posting soon.

Norah love Halloween

Norah looked so cute dressed up for Halloween!

For being so happy while I took her picture, I rewarded her with candy:

Maybe next year I'll teach her how to take off the wrapper :)

Of course, Sonny wanted in on the picture action as well ...


Hope your Halloween was as cute as ours!

I'm a mean mom

Norah has been very interested in food lately. Jason and I have taken this opportunity to tease her. We hope she forgives us :)

One year ago

I wanted to post this on Thursday, but it was my sister's birthday and the day slipped away before I could get this posted.

A year ago on October 21, I got the best news of my life. After what felt like million months of negatives, I finally saw this:

My excitement could hardly be contained, and even though I spent the entire day researching cute ways to tell Jason he was going to be a daddy, I decided to let him find out how I found out. So when he got home from work, I told him that I wanted to take a pregnancy test. He gave me grief saying there was no use in setting ourselves up for disappointment a wasting a test until I had completely missed my period. I assured him that after this many months, I was getting pretty used to the disappointment so it wouldn't be that big of a deal. He reluctantly agreed and after 60 seconds of staring at the screen, the magic word appeared! We were so excited, but I don't think either of us imagined at that point just how much joy that little baby was going to bring into our lives.

We love you Norah!

Mini sessions

I've been trying to keep my personal blog and my photo blog seperate. Because, let's face it, you don't come to this blog because you want to know what's going on in my business life, but because you want to know what's going on in my personal life. But, this may interest some of you



Click here for more info

The cutest pumpkin in the patch

When I was younger, my mom would always take us to the Pumpkin Patch in October to pick our the perfect pumpkin. It's a tradition I decided I wanted to pass on to my kids, so here's Norah's first trip to the pumpkin patch!

She was by far the best looking pumpkin, so we brought her home.

Me!

Not nearly as cute as Norah, but a guest at a wedding snapped this photo of me on Saturday and I totally stole it off facebook. As you can see, I bought a new camera. Finally. The Nikon D700. And I'm in love.

Norah laughs

This is pretty much my favorite sound in the whole wide world.

Please forgive the lack of steadiness, holding a camera and playing with a baby isn't easy :)

Happy Birthday Geoff!

Today is my brother's birthday. To celebrate, I'm going to post cute pictures of Norah. What? You want to see cute pictures of Geoff? Okay, visit my mom's blog then.

Evans Family Pictures

When we were down in Arizona, we set up Stacey's camera on a tripod and took some family pictures. Which one is your favorite?

(pictures snagged from Stacey's blog)