Happy New Year!

January 4th, 2010

It’s been a while since I last posted, and it seems that I’m posting much less frequently than I used to. I have a list of excuses for not posting, but I won’t bore you with them- most involve chasing Hazel around and keeping on top of things here at home! Since I last posted, almost a month ago, we’ve had quite a bit of fun.
Christmas this year was celebrated with a full house of out of town family- Grammy and Grampy, Uncle Preston and Great Grammy, Aunt Sarah, Uncle Andrew, and all the usual suspects who hang out here in Yorktown. We had so much fun spending time with everyone that we only took about 5 pictures over the entire holiday! (shame on us!).
Of course this was the best Christmas ever- Hazel absolutely loved the Christmas tree, seeing all of the neighborhood houses all lit up for the holidays, and our trips to the Celebration in Lights and Busch Garden’s Christmas Town. She learned to say Christmas Tree, Snowman and Merry Christmas before it was all over, too!
Christmas morning was so much fun- Hazel slept in until almost 8 am, and then came downstairs to a full house and the most presents I’ve ever seen under a tree in my life!
Here is a quick video of Hazel inspecting “under” the tree on Christmas morning:

Christmas Morning 2009 from esther benoit on Vimeo.

We spend the entire day opening presents (it took us until almost 5 pm to get through them all, but we took it slow and enjoyed the day). Hazel got a kitchen and shopping cart that occupied her most of the day, and have occupied her ever since! Everyone was so generous and we were truly thankful to be able to spend the holiday with family- it was a fantastic Christmas.

Duo seems to be doing well- we had a quick OB appointment on the 17th of December where we heard duo’s heartbeat for the first time (153 bpm, loud and clear!). I’ve been feeling much better and have just recently started to feel the baby move around in there. I’m also finally starting to show just a little bit, which is always nice. It seems like the second half of the pregnancy goes much quicker than the first- and with as fast as this first half has flown by, we’ll have this next baby before we know it! I am almost 20 weeks along (19 weeks and a few days) and we are scheduled for our big ultrasound on the 19th of January, following a routine appointment on the 18th. We are not going to find out if we are having a boy or a girl as we enjoyed the surprise with Hazel. The naming process has begun, and we’ve got a few names we really like for both a boy or a girl- more on that in a future post.
I’ll leave you today with a few videos, starting way back in October- I had a few on the camera that I never uploaded and I thought they would be fun to put up here.
Hope everyone has had a great start to 2010- looking forward to all the new things this year will bring!

At the pumpkin patch from esther benoit on Vimeo.

More October fun from esther benoit on Vimeo.

Shopping in Mama’s shoes from esther benoit on Vimeo.

These last two involve our new learning tower- a contraption that allows Hazel to safely help in the kitchen (we had one too many standing on chair accidents for our liking and decided this was worth the investment!)