Christmas Countdown

We are eagerly awaiting Christmas in our house. We've been doing a lot of Christmas preparation and shopping these days and so Noah and I have been talking quite a bit about it. I'm not sure what I said the other day, but as he was talking to David at bedtime, we realized that Noah thought Christmas was the very next day. He was so disappointed to find out that it's still over a week away! And every morning since then, he's asked if it's Christmas morning. I sure hope the anticipation doesn't build it up too much!

Noah, Elena and I have had busy days these past few weeks. Thankfully, Elena is easy going and is generally happy to tag along shopping, meeting friends for lunch, long walks through the neighborhood and lots of other outings.

Today, Noah helped David clean out the gutters. Noah was all bundled up out in the cold and playing nicely in the dirt while David did all the work. (Here's a little relevant background: Noah is used to helping me water flowers and I usually let him use the hose to water them by himself for a little bit.) So today, he saw David using the hose and was desperate to water the bushes with it. The only problem was, I usually have the nozzle set to a gentle rain-like setting and David was using it to clean the gutters so it was set to a full blast fire-hose kind of setting. In a matter of seconds after Noah pressed the trigger on the nozzle, he lost total control of it and completely soaked David. I had to hide my smile and giggles while I herded Noah inside. I think we can all laugh about it now, but David had a hard time finding the humor of it all drenched in 40 degree weather. Here are a few pictures of Noah helping out before "the incident."

Here are a few more pics from around the house...

Sylvester update

So far, Elena has been a generally laid back baby. It's enabled me to be far more productive during the day than I was when Noah was this little. We venture out of the house a lot more and enjoy stores where we can park once and spend a lot of time in that one place. We've already gone to the zoo (sorry, somehow with me and two kids in tow, I forgot to take pictures!), the mall and gotten done most of our Christmas shopping.

One of the best inventions for little ones is babywearing. We stumbled on it with Noah when we used our Bjorn all the time and have taken it to a new level with Elena. Since she's still sleeping lots, but needs to be held the majority of the time, she spends most of her days in a carrier like this wrap...





The hardest part of the day is Noah's naptime. Noah still has a hard time falling asleep (although it has gotten so much better), but it's hard to juggle both of them. So there was one day where I was working to get them both to sleep and lo and behold, they both fell asleep on Noah's bed. Elena's too little to leave her there with him, but it was so cute to see them asleep together that I had to take a picture!




Here are some other just random pictures of Noah and Elena around the house...