Josie is here!

We are overjoyed to welcome Josie.

 Never has a baby been so blessed as to have two moms like Lisa and Betty.

Lisa had a long labor- here are a couple of photos from the beginning when they didn't know it would take another 40 some hours.  Lisa did amazing in labor, from Thursday afternoon until Josie was born on Saturday afternoon.

We all relished our opportunities to hold baby Josie.  She is such an angel.

(I am pretty happy to be Aunt Amy)

Lilly is waving Hi to Josie.  We are trying to teach her not to touch babies, except for on the toes.  So far she is doing OK.

Uncle Tim

Grandma

Grandpa

I don't think there could be a better Christmas present than a new baby in the family :)

Our hike

So it isn't every Christmas Eve in Denver that you can take a long hike in a valley because the weather is in the 50s.  It was perfect :)  I know that someday there will be snow- and I can wait.


It was cold enough to need hats- here is Lilly, being the cute little girl she is.  She slept on my back whole hike so the only photo I have of her is before when we were eating lunch.

 Mark did hike the whole 2 miles- without any whining!  But he did find a lot of things to do along the trail that were not so fast.  For instance he wanted to hide under all the big boulder and in all the hiddy holes, he wanted to draw in the sand, he wanted to touch that water (it was cold), and he wanted to pick up rocks for dinosaur food.  My coat pocket is full of rocks and sand now.

 We had to cross the creek here- there was no bridge and the final hop was kinda far - especially for getting Mark, the stroller, and me with Lilly in the pack across

Speaking of the stroller, the BOB stroller we have will go over a lot of terrain, but not this.  The trail looked flat when we started, but then 90% of it was not flat enough for a kid in the stroller and a few parts of it were so steep/rocky that it had to be carried.  I only have photos of Tim hauling it, but Grandpa did quite a bit of it too.

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Christmas

This is how big they were last year

 Here is everyone first thing in the morning.

 Lilly with her Christmas Minnie.

 Mark was SO ready to open presents

 Life doesn't get much better than opening stockings with Grandma and Grandpa and getting to eat chocolate first thing in the morning.

 My attempt at getting a posed photo from them.  Only one ever looks up at the same time.

 Lilly's favorite present was my pearl (thank you Tim :) ).  She took them out of the box before I even had it all the way open and put them right on.

 Isn't this the reaction you always want from your kids?  Mark was SO excited to get a large Mac Truck.

 He also got a collection of other cars from the Cars movie- he has been playing 'pit crew' all day.

The last month or so

We traded in our Rav 4 for a minivan

We took Bob the Builder and a ladybug trick or treating

We rode the hippo statue at the zoo.

 It snowed and we tried to catch snowflakes on our tongues.

 We went to Delaware to visit Pop Pop and Nana.

just some photos

Words and lots more photos later

Redwoods

No trip to CA would be complete without walking around in a Redwood Grove.  We went to Muir Woods and Harry Colwell woods.  It really is breath taking to stand around with 2000 year old trees.  It makes me really glad that there have always been environmentalist willing to fight to preserve beautiful places for all of us.

 A lot of the trees are inaccessible, but this one was open to the trail.  The kids loved playing in it.

 Mark is being a backhoe.  Notice the scooper in the front and the back digger just digging away.  He is very into construction and really enjoying being a construction worker- or in this case construction vehicle.

The first day we were at Harry Cowell State Park we went to the gift shop.  Mark was busily taking all the plastic insects out of a jar, lining them up, and counting them.  I was wondering around with Lilly and the woman behind the counter was trying to engage Mark in conversation.  I overhear her asking if he would like to see their very cool train set, and then Mark says "yes, but I have to put all these away first".  And then HE DID.  The woman was amazed and told me about it twice- how wonderful and well behaved my son was.  I wanted to say that not all days are like that, but I decided to go ahead and just bask in a few minutes of happy motherhood instead.

San Jose Children's museum

The second day we were in CA we bought a pass to the San Jose Children's Museum.  We spent 5 days a week there in the afternoons.  The museum is large and has a ton of rooms.  We had a lot of fun there. Our two favorite rooms were the Bob the Builder traveling exhibit room and the water room.  For as many days as we spent there I should have more good pictures, but here are some of my best.

Mark could not have been happier about playing Bob the Builder.

The kids got soaking wet every time we went into the water room.  After the first day I bought an extra set of clothes with us.  The room had a lot of fountains (that Lilly was sure were for drinking) and a lot of ways to move plastic balls around.

 One day, while Lilly was napping in the stroller, Mark spent close to an hour playing with this magnetic board and the movable troughs.  Water comes out of the two round nozzles at the top.  He made many different configurations for getting the water to the bottom.  It was really fun to stand back and watch what he was doing.

 This is an actual old stagecoach.  The first time we walked by it Mark went right in and started playing house.  Lilly liked climbing up and down the stairs.

There was a hole room filled with these large blue building blocks.  Mark built lots of things with them, including helping another family build this fort.  Lilly loved knocking down whatever I would stand up for her.

The museum has an old fire engine for playing in.  The kids didn't spend too much time playing in it, but because they were contained in it I could get some photos of them.  

 Look at this cute boy!  Those blonde curls are so adorable I can hardly stand it.