Happy New Year!

Matt and I count 2008 as our most Blessed year. We look forward to what 2009 will bring!

Celebrating our first Christmas with Alexa and CJ was very special and extremely fun. They are both growing so fast and getting to the age where they are more interactive. Each day seems to bring a new mannerism of trick, if you will. While CJ was raspberrying for a while, she has since tossed that over for the squeal of delight. Alexa on the other hand has discovered the joys of quickly shaking her head no and in the last 2 days she's started doing this funny sniffing thing while scrunching up her face.

They have also started discovering each other more. An especially cute moment happened at Christmas dinner at The Campbell's house where CJ's squeal of delight caught Alexa's attention.

We spent Christmas eve with the Alsup clan. Thankfully the temperatures were unseasonably warm, since we had a snafu and Alexa had to ditch her pants. By the time the temperatures had cooled, she'd opened a precious gift from her Aunt Kelly and Uncle Patrick and had cute little overalls to put on. Then Uncle Patrick saw to entertainment. She also spent some quality time banging on her new Leap Frog drum her Oma and Poppy gave to her!

On Christmas day, we slept in a little bit and then enjoyed Christmas morning at home where Alexa got to jump in her new jumper, which her Granny (my mom) gave to us early so she could have it in the morning. Then my mom came by to exchange presents, before we all headed to The Campbell home for fun and dinner. Yummy dinner.

Since I usually spend half an hour trying to get the photos in line and end up failing miserably, I'm going to just post them below with little snippets of what they are.

Christmas Eve:

Oma and Alexa having some fun.


Alexa opening her first Christmas gift.


Uncle Patrick "flying" Alexa in her new overalls.



Christmas Day:
She had plenty of fun jumping in her jumperoo.


Granny and Alexa having some Christmas day fun.


Smiley and his Christmas camera.



New Year's Eve:

Alexa in her "little black dress" compliments of Granny.


Matt and Alexa "sniffing". Well, she WAS sniffing until she saw the camera, then she started mugging, like always.


Matt and I rang in the New Year together while Miss Alexa slept snuggled in her bed, upstairs.

Holiday Times

Our poor camera is loaded with pictures and I'm way behind on updates. But I'm going to make an attempt to catch everyone up.


Thanksgiving was a lot of fun. We got both sides of the family together at our house. It's so nice to get to share Thanksgiving with both of our families! Alexa even got to meet her Aunt (cousin) Deborah, who just stole all her sugars!







We all ate way too much and poor Buckley was exhausted from chasing everyone around and begging for food. We slept super well that night.

Speaking of sleep... We've been getting a pretty good amount of it around here lately. Alexa has been going 9-12 hours between feedings at night. She averages 10 hours straight. And once she's eaten in the morning, she's usually ready to go on back to bed for another couple of hours. Seems like maybe she is taking after her daddy's need for sleep. You'll get no complaints out of me!

This past weekend, on the 13th, my very sweet and beautiful cousin, Megan got married. It was a beautiful wedding and we enjoyed the short trip very much. Mom, Lisa, Christabelle, Smiley and Dale made the trip too. Here's a cute picture of mom with Lisa and CJ. CJ was wearing the most precious little cap! Alexa spent most of the ceremony chewing on her shiny black shoe. She's so enamoured with them, I figured what doesn't hurt her will only make her stronger. Then we got to enjoy a small family reunion and yummy dinner in celebration of the union. It was so nice to see our family. Some whom we haven't seen in many years. Hopefully we'll be able to see each other again before so many years have passed!

Alexa's great-grandmother (Matt's grandmother) celebrated her 99th birthday on Wednesday and Alexa went to share a round of hugs and kisses with her great-granny. It was fun to see the two of them together. She's a very blessed little girl to still have two great-grandmothers and a great grand-father still here to share her hugs and kisses!

On Thursday her Oma had surgery and she was filled with excitement all day because I kept telling her we were going to see her Oma and give her a kiss that evening. We are so thankful everything went well. When we got there to visit, it turned out her hospital room was the one next door to ours when we had Alexa in July. And we got there just in time for a meeting with Santa! That's right, Santa. He and the Chik-fil-a cow (dressed in santa gear) came around to see everyone. We managed to snap a picture of them together with my cell phone.

Elfen Christmas

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

Miss Alexa in for some fun Christmas photos this week. We even managed to put ourselves together enough to get a family picture. It was a lot of fun.

We had to take her shiny black shoes off mid way through the session because she was too enamored with them to look at the photographer. Oh the simple joys of young life!


She's been doing so many new things... Attempting to sit up is at the top of that list. She wants to sit up on her own so much. But usually she ends up trying to fling herself forward. Scary! But we're always near by to try and prevent any injury!

I can't wait until she and CJ are old enough to play together. For now they check each other out and go back to chewing on anything within 2 inches of their mouths. But they look so cute together. Lisa and I hope to take them for pictures together sometime in the new year.

Matt and I ventured out to dinner with Alexa tonight. We made an attempt at it when she was 5 or 6 weeks, but we didn't make it through dinner. She was NOT having the whole sitting in her carrier doing nothing routine. But she did great tonight. I fed her then we left. She sat in her carrier chewing on her toys, eyeing our food and flashing a smile at anyone who looked her way. We had a really nice, relaxing dinner. It's amazing what a good mood getting to go out to eat with your family will put you in!

Love, April

A Note About Saving and Using Pictures

Hi Everyone, A couple of people have told us that they have pictures saved or printed from the blog, but that they are low quality or grainy. The pictures that you SEE are low resolution. But if you will click on the picture you want to save, it will open up the high resolution image. You'll note that the picture will actually be bigger than your screen. This is the image you should right click on and save. Blogger makes the pictures low resolution on the actual blog so that they don't take a really long time to load.

And here is a little video. Miss Alexa has decided my Rolodex would make a terrific toy. I've caught her in it a couple of times. The first time I realized she was in it when cards were being sent sailing through the air out of it. It has a plastic cover that I keep closed. Today she was particularly determined to open it. So after closing it 3 times I finally caught her on video. She had no idea until she heard me laugh. Then she promptly stopped. I couldn't care less about her messing it up, but I'm worried she'll get a nasty paper cut from the cards with the way she swipes at it. When the video begins she'd already gotten the lid up and is playing with it.



Love,
April

More than the leaves are turning!

For the very first time, Alexa turned over from her back to her tummy last night... TWICE! She's been turning on to her side, but has not been able to make it the rest of the way over. Until last night that is.

Matt and I were sitting her watching Ghost Hunters and playing with her. She was laying on her play gym Uncle Patrick and Auntie Kelly gave her. And next thing we knew she was pushing her giraffe out of the way and rolling on over. We tried to get the camcorder out in time to film it, but we didn't catch the rolling. Just the end result.

Another recent change is that she's laying on her side to sleep. It's so precious. We put her down on her back like the doctors say we should, but once she's asleep she's on her side. We have an Angel Care monitor. It was expensive, but worth the piece of mind. It detects movement. It's sensitive enough to pick up her breathing and heart beat. So if it goes 20 seconds without detecting any movement an alarm sounds. Since we can't do anything to stop her from sleeping on her side, it's given us some reassurance. So now we just get to enjoy how cute she looks sleeping.

She's been doing a pretty good job of sitting up. She can't do it on her own yet, but she's attempted it much to mama and daddy's panic! She can sit against the back of the couch. We make sure to protect her from her own ambitious attempts to fling herself forward. And she loves sitting in her bumbo. We're just enjoying each day with her and trying not to anticipate what is next for fear of missing the present with her!

This is one of Matt's favorite recent pictures of her:

Alexa's Christening

This past Sunday Alexa was christened at our church. It was a wonderful day and we welcomed her into the church family. She did so well. Life is never predictable with a four month old, so we weren't sure. But she was soooo precious. She didn't protest a bit when the priest poured the baptismal water over her head. Her eyes got big and she looked at her daddy and the priest as if to say, "What's going on?" But not a peep.

Thanks to Alexa's Auntie Kelly, we have some great pictures of the day. And her Uncle Dale did a fabulous job of videotaping it, but I have not yet figured out how to convert that so it's viewable on the web. I'll put it on my list of things to do, I promise.

In the meantime, hopefully this will suffice:



Granny and Poppy entertained Alexa before service began.



Alexa's Momma, Oma, Poppy, Daddy, Granny (Godmother) and Uncle Patrick (Godfather) all got to participate!



Mommy's finger was a terrific snack while Alexa waited for the fun part.



Alexa isn't so sure about what's coming next...



And finally, the moment we all waited for.



Getting baptised takes a lot out of a girl!




Auntie Kelly and Uncle Patrick with Alexa



The precious Campbell family.











Our precious nephew and niece, Smiley and Christabelle. He's such a loving big brother and cousin!













Proud mama and papa.










The Alsup Clan.

















The Hall Clan.








Everyone together. Left to right: Granny (my mom), Smiley, Lisa holding CJ, Dale, me (April), Patrick, Alexa (being held by Matt), Kelly, Poppy (Matt's dad) & Oma (Matt's mom)






Whew... that was a lot of uploading. Remember: if you want to save and print a picture, click on the picture. This will take you to a larger version of it. Then right click on it and click on Save as... or Save Picture as.... Then save it where you want to on your computer.

Love,
April

Pictures...

Here are the Halloween pics we had taken. I finally remembered to post them. If you would like to save them for printing, just click on an image. It will open in a new screen and be a higher resolution file. Then right click on it and click "save".

It was a Spooktacular Halloween

After a traumatic episode early in the week in which a motorcyclist terrified Alexa at a pumpkin patch, we decided to take her in for pictures with a pro. I promise to post some of those tomorrow. I forgot I don't have the files on this computer. But I do have some other pictures.

We celebrated the evening by decorating and handing out treats. Matt really got into the spirit and made the house look great. The precious little 3 year old a few doors down calls it the spooky house now, but it looked great just the same and I think the handful of Snickers and M&Ms will convince her we're not terrible people.


Then Oma and Poppy (Matt's parents) came by, on their way to Patrick and Kelly's, to see our little pumpkin and get in some sugars. Oma even dressed up for the occassion! We took Alexa over to see her Uncle Patrick and Aunt Kelly, but forgot our camera. Hopefully her sweet and leveable aunt will send me a copy of the ones we took with her camera =).

On Saturday I took her to her Granny's house where she got to play with her cousin CJ. Ok, they just look at each other and wonder right now. But playing is just around the corner. Lisa and I decided to dress them up for a group picture. They made a really cute bunny and pumpkin, I must say.

They also took a picture with their delighted granny! Then they and we got to relax. Matt was at the game for the evening. So Alexa and I shared dinner with mom, Lisa and CJ then headed home, with a stop by our good friends, Cam & Timmy's house so Alexa could get in some last minute trick or treating. Once we got home she of course wanted to watch the Gamecocks clobber TN (sorry to my lovely family in TN). Obviously Alexa is going to be a daddy's girl since she loooooves football.

I promise to have her little glamour shots posted soon.

Love,
April

It's Celebration Time!

This week has been full of fun. On Tuesday evening, Matt and I took Alexa to the fair for her first time. We thought she'd be taken by all of the lights. But the people seemed to interest her more. Not even the ducks proved to be as entertaining. Here are some pictures from our trip:


Whoa, look at all these people... with hair!


Mommy has me, but I'd like to have a funnel cake, please.


Daddy won her, her first fair animal (it's the white tiger)


Then she started getting tuckered


Two seconds later


The fun whirled on around her, but she was oblivious


On Wednesday my side of the family had a group birthday dinner. We didn't get a chance to get together for my birthday in September, so we got together on Dale's birthday and celebrated mine, Dale's, and Matt's. It's neat to see CJ and Alexa become more aware of each other.


Who is THAT?


How come that baby has no hair?


What a sweet big-cousin!


Who is this strange uncle of mine?


Bouncy time!


Rockin with Granny

That's all for now. I'm amazed I managed to get photos on her within days of them being taken... WOO HOO!!