APL Holiday Party

Luc's holiday party was a very kid-friendly party complete with Santa Claus. There was even a nice caroling group that came and sang. Beautiful music for a beautiful afternoon. The night before the party, we received a care package from Grandma Carolyn with a beautiful red holiday dress. The timing could not have been better. Amelia's dress was a hit. Although it was a bit too cold to just put her in the pretty red tights that came it with it- we put some comfy white pants under that you can just see poking out.

Amelia really loves to reach out and touch the other babies that she meets. This is a picture of her with Graham- Jim and Jess's son. She is sometimes so intent that the other babies cry. Graham is a trooper- he did not cry and even seemed to be interested in her, too!

Amelia especially likes Amanda. They have spent some special evenings together!

This is Amity at 9 months pregnant. It was her due date the day of the party, but she carried a nice, compact beautiful belly. Now she is sharing the holidays with Thea, who arrived a few days later.

Crazy Taiwanese Pants

Luc brought back some of the cutest little clothes from Taiwan. Several pairs of pants have little animals on the butt. Here are her Tiger pants! Although it is hard to tell from this picture- that is a cute little Tiger face on her butt!

Holiday Party at the Science Fiction Museum

Dec 4th we went to Melissa's SBRI Holiday Party at the Science Fiction Museum. We went early and left early, but it was great to be there. Amelia has now seen ET and R2D2 up close- a must for infants- ha! There was a lot of obscure memorabilia in the museum as it seems to aimed at the true sci-fi geeks. I did really enjoy the special art exhibit featuring glassworks that looked like jellyfish but the added music and lights gave the exhibit a distinctive alien feeling.


That is right- you guessed it! That is Captain Kirk's original commander chair and uniform. Amelia was speechless.

Christmas Tree

We bought our first christmas tree this year. SInce we are not leaving town this holiday season and it IS Amelia's first christmas, we decided to decorate for the holidays. It is still a rather simple tree. We bought one of the fuller trees so as not to draw attention to the sparse ornaments. We have one box of red balls, lights and Luc has been making silver origami cranes. It looks quite nice. We haven't gotten around to stringing cranberries and popcorn- rather time consuming. But here is our tree shopping trip and decorating.



At the Boy Scout tree lot near our house. The boy scout were super cute and had "learned" all about the 8 different species of trees available. I really loved the look of the White Pine tree, but then our scout informed us that it looses needles pretty quickly. We skipped that one! And decided on a more fragrant tree.

Thanksgiving 2009

This year we hosted a potluck Thanksgiving with Bonnie, Peter, their son Sol, Joe, Meghan, her mom Fran and daughter Eva. When our families are so far away, we turn to our friends to create a family away from home. We had a nice selection of goodies including the traditional fixings, two pies and a Tofurkey (even Luc thought it was tasty! although he won't be changing his turkey eating ways for it).

Amelia had a great time entertaining Fran- dancing on the ball and laughing away. Eva loved Amelia's blocks and Sol was generally trying to find all of the things in the house that needed to be child-proofed! A good time was had by all! Mmmm- Pie!

Also- a very cute picture of Amelia helping Luc rake leaves in the yard!

Giggles!

I was just looking over our pictures and found this adorable little clip- not sure why we didn't post this earlier. Just a sweet daddy moment!

November is over!!

Personally I welcome December. November was a rough month for us. I started back to work on Nov 1, and Amelia started daycare. We were both nervous about the changes. It has turned out that our daycare is working out great. I am adjusting to being away from Amelia and pumping at work. Just as we started to get a rhythm- Luc left for Taiwan for a week. And I got sick while he was away! Why do I always get sick when Luc is out-of-town?

At any rate our delicate balance of little sleep and adjusting to a new schedule was thrown completely out-of-whack. Now I was waking Amelia up at night- in addition to Amelia's touchy two-hour wake cycle. Ouch. Then when Luc got back HE got sick.

Despite all of the difficulties, we hosted Thanksgiving at our house for a handful of friends. It was wonderful and fun to have everyone over- we did rely on our friends contributions with a potluck T-day- a fun way to broaden your T-day traditions. It was a great start to our 4-day celebrate-rest-and recover plan.

Now that is all behind us. We can look forward to our first Christmas holiday in our new home with Ameila. The future looks bright!

Hope that December is filled with love and hope for everyone!

PS we will get around to posting some pics from November. Some pics from Tday are likely to come soon! But here are a couple of my faves from this month- and we know you just look at the blog for pics of Amelia!

Amelia gets a new vantage point!

...and check out those cute monkey jammies (Thanks Bonnie, Peter and Sol!!)

Similarities: Luc and Amelia

Lucille sent us this picture of Luc when he was 3.5 months old. And the other night Amelia was playing- a little tummy time- and we thought this looks so much like that picture. We didn't get a shot with her looking at the camera- it took us too long to find the camera. But it does seem that Amelia is her father's daughter! Ha.

Halloween 2009

This was our first Halloween at our new house in Ballard and Amelia's first Halloween. Luc carved a beautiful pumpkin and Amelia even helped. We got a pretty good turn out from the kids in the neighborhood, but we couldn't stay until all the kids came through our neighborhood.




Our friend Jill and Jens hosted a wonderful Halloween party. Jill had the most beautiful candy table. We were definelty in the early crowd for the party, but it was great to get out and introduce Amelia to parties! She seems to like the music and conversation. Our Halloween costumes were centered around our beautiful little pumpkin (thanks Grandma Carolyn for the costume): the headless horseman and the black cat.

Grandpa Bertrand and Outlaw Grandma Kathleen visit!

At the beginning of October, Bertrand and Kathleen came to meet Amelia - at last Amelia met all her grandparents.

We started the visit with the obligatory tour of Pike's Place Market.

and with the delicious piroshkis from Piroshki Piroshki. Even Amelia was tempted.


Bertrand and Kathleen really enjoyed interacting with Amelia, who was using her smile and giggles to capture (and keep) all our attention.






A specially wonderful moment was when Amelia fell asleep in Bertrand's arms - it required a little bit of bouncing, but she definitely decided that Bertrand's arms was a safe and comfortable place.


A wonderful visit! Thank you!!!

Cider Press

This year we had our first fruit harvest from the trees in the backyard. We have two apple trees, a plum tree, ans a small pear tree. One apple tree had large fruit that fell off the tree in July during the heat wave. Hopefully nexy year we will have better luck. The other tree has much smaller apples and were ready mid- Sept. Our friend John has a beautiful apple press. And another friend had a pear tree loaded and ready to press. Mid-week we had everyone over to press the fruit. It was loads of fun.


Amanda and Zoe had made the most beautiful marshmellow pillow. Home-made marshmallow is deliious. What could be better than adding melted chocolate. That is right we made s'mores. Lisa was the excited to tend the masterpiece on the grill. Yumm

Amelia tells secrets to her bee...

...maybe someday we will know what she said!

Aunt Michelle's visit

Aunt Michelle, Melissa's sister, came to visit her new little niece in the last weekend of September. We had a lovely visit.
Amelia loved spending time with her aunt. We went to the Sustainable Ballard Festival (presenting ways to save, reduce, recycle, use alternate energy sources, remodel with energy efficient designs, etc.) and Sunday Farmer's Market to pick up some fresh PNW Salmon. Yumm.


You can even see Michelle's baby bump here. She is due in January! Amelia will have a cousin her same age on both sides of the family!

Camping!

On the last day of summer, we packed the car with lots of pillows, blankets, and food, and headed West towards the Pacific Coast for our first camping trip with Amelia!

It all started with a beautiful ferry ride.

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We went to Mora Campground, on the coast and in the Olympic National Park, close to a little town called La Push.

Amelia loved it! She really likes the big trees.


Snuggling all night with mom was also very fun.


The first morning was a little chilly, but after a nice breakfast we went on a short hike to"Second Beach", and our lunch there awesome.

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We went to look at the Olympic Mountains on the way back (Hurricane Ridge), to scout our future adventures. Hmmm, will we be ready for backpacking next summer?