Christmas Tree '08

Each year since Mark and I have been married, we've gone to a tree farm to pick out and cut down our Christmas tree, so it was no different this year. We looked back at our pictures from last year's tree cutting, and Nina was just over 6 months old and spent the afternoon in the Baby Bjorn while we were tree hunting. This year was a much different experience. She seemed to enjoy tromping around the fields of the tree farm, and we found our perfect tree just before it got dark.

We finally found our perfect tree.

It's at this point when Mark has been laying on the cold ground cutting down the tree and then has to drag it back to the tree store that he wonders why we don't just buy a pre-cut tree each year!

We made it back just before it got dark.

Thanksgiving at Hartfield

Here are some pictures of our time at Hartfield. We had great weather on Thanksgiving day, so we all spent a lot of time outside - Mark and Garland shucked oysters and fried the turkey, and Emme and Nina made Thanksgiving "soup" and mud cake. My grandfather took all the family pictures, so I'll post some of them when I get copies from him, but we had tons of food (as usual) and a very nice Thanksgiving. Nina also got to experience Play Doh for the first time, and she really liked it!

So Much To Be Thankful For

With Thanksgiving right around the corner, I wanted to take a second to pause and say that our family has so much to be thankful for. We live in a free country with so much at our disposal, we are healthy, our families are healthy, we have good friends and good families, and we know that God has blessed us in so many ways. Sometimes it can be easy to "forget" all that we truely have to be thankful for as we get busy with the demands of life, but I'm so glad there is a holiday like Thanksgiving that just allows us to take time out to focus on just being thankful. So, we're headed off to Hartfield tomorrow to meet up with my family to celebrate the holiday. We won't be back until the end of the week, so I'll update the blog site with Thanksgiving pictures then.

In explanation of these pictures, I was trying to get Nina to smile on command (since we have holiday pictures coming up), and the first one didn't work for getting a smile. The second time I got a hint of a smile, but then I asked her to show her teeth (meaning, when she smiled), and the third picture is what that request produced!

Fishing!

Yesterday afternoon we took Nina over to a pond near our house. Mark taught Nina how to help reel in a fish, and they actually caught quite a few. As you can see in the video, they're HUGE! After it started to get dark, she got to play around for awhile on the pond's playground.

Here's a cute video of Mark and Nina fishing together:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9k9-1w9GlI

Friday Morning

Since Mark had the day off and Nina woke up not feeling the best, they took advantage of some couch time together while watching Dora the Explorer.

Time Change

The time change is just a little rough to accommodate sometimes. Nina had fallen asleep in the car for only about 5 min. at what used to be her nap time (now, obvioulsy it's an hour prior according to the clock), and she was barely able to be awakened. I might have let her sleep if she already had eaten lunch, but since I had to wake her up and feed her, she wasn't in a pleasant mood when I woke her.

Happy Halloween

We had so much fun with Halloween this year. Nina was excited to get into her costume, and she seemed to get the whole concept right from the very first house, so it was a lot of fun for Mark and I to watch her. We knew we had moved to a very family oriented neighborhood, but we had no idea the amount of kids that we would see just in the street that connect to our house. There were tons! We actually ran out of all our candy in under an hour (and I thought we had a lot of candy)! Mark and I went out together with Nina for the first 20 minutes, then we took turns so someone could be back at the house, but she ended up staying out for 1 1/2 hours. Needless to say, she had a blast and slept like a champ last night!

Ready to head out to get some candy!

Her first house - she got the idea very quickly that going up to doors was going to be a good thing!

What did I get?

This is so much fun!