Christmas!

Its amazing to me that Cooper has now celebrated two Christmas seasons already.

This year was wonderful. We had family from out of town, we visited my parents and saw my husbands family as well. It was packed full of love and happiness. What more could I ask for.

Here are some pics.
A new toy Cooper loved...


Cooper's favorite gift on Christmas...
Early morning family pic at mom and dad's house.
Natalie playing with her barbie house Santa brought her.
Cooper is sitting at the picnic table uncle Matt made him.
This is Christmas eve night while we were at Nana and Papa's



Grandma's house Christmas day with my aunt and Cousin.


Christmas morning. He was opening his stocking


My new curtains we bought and got in right before Christmas. Finally :)
Oh and I just had to include this one from last week. This is how I found Cooper standing in front of the tv watching the Mickey Mouse clubhouse. Looking like a mini Al Bundy!

The signs from Pottery barn I mentioned in my last post that we bought for Blake's room. I LOVE THEM!

Where have I gone... Oh and we picked a name :)

Can anyone say "LOST". Man the excuses this year for my bad blogging habits just keep adding up don't they? I am making a promise to myself to be better. If nothing else I will be better for our sweet new little bundle that will be joining us this coming year. :)
I'm just going to jump right into our sweet baby girl's precious name. We have chosen a name and there is no turning back now. Well not now that I went into freaking pottery barn and spent over $100.00 on some adorable little vintage wooden plaques to go in her room. One of which just so happens to be personalized with her beautiful little name plastered across the front of it in big bold letters :)
I will post a picture of all the signs as soon as we get them all in the mail. I had to special order two of them.

Ok, ok, I get it. You want to know the name. FINE, OK, I'm getting to it.. Just hold on now and be patient.

The name is.......

BLAKELY ANN

or as we have been calling her the past few weeks "Blakey bug".

Now I know not everyone is a fan of the name Blakely, but the hubs and I just love it. Ann is my mom and Julian's nana's middle names. Also its a saints name. These are the reasons for the Ann being in the middle name.

Its made everything so much more real. We can't wait to welcome our sweet little bundle into our lives forever. She's already a part of us and we are awaiting her arrival eagerly (but not too eagerly considering the lack of sleep and exhaustion).
Last week we finally moved a ginormous desk from the guest room which is now Blake's room. We still have to paint and do some major changes but the baby planning has already started. I have made her room perfectly mapped out in my head down to the tiny little details and touches that will make it special and her own. I'm so excited to start working on it.

I'm 19 weeks pregnant today, doing well and trying to keep up with my little monster and all this holiday fun that is going on.
We had a wonderful Christmas surrounded by loved ones and friends. I will share lots of pictures this weekend of our past few weeks.

Until then, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Family Christmas dinner 2010

Each year my uncle hosts a huge and very nice family Christmas dinner out at a special restaurant the week before Christmas. We all get to dress up nicely and meet up and enjoy an evening of fine foods, drinks and laughter. It is always so much fun and so great to get everyone together.

This year we had lots of children at the dinner, as our family is multiplying quickly. Those of you who have ever tried to have a 4 course meal with wine, appetizers, deserts, the whole shebam. You know how hard it is when your wrestling a 1 year old the entire time. Kids just don't understand the concept of sitting still for 3 hours and enjoying a good meal and family talk. So needless to say, that although we did have a great time as always. Next year the kids will be at Nana's (hubby's grandparents) while Julian and I go and enjoy and nice family dinner. Its more for adults anyways and the kids tend to get in trouble the entire time.

We ran around the room chasing the babies this year and I'm pretty sure they had fun. It went way past their bed times and yes there were some meltdowns, there were quite a few injuries as well. Cooper fell and hit his teeth on a windowsill and started bleeding and I couldn't see where it was coming from exactly. It scared me like you can't imagine. He then got stabbed in the cheek by a thumb nail of someone that left quite a nice gash on his poor little cheek. Those kids were completely wild and we had to nearly wrestle Cooper to get him to sit in his chair.

Everyone did look just beautiful including the little ones and the dinner was so nice as always.
Here are some pics of the evening...
My family
Unfortunately I didn't get one of all of us that were there. Aunts uncles and cousins not included.
My sweet cousin Courtney holding Coop
Cooper and Natalie ran laps. Which was so not ok with me, but they literally had to be chased down.


All the guys. Minus my dad and uncle

My sister in law, mom and I



The rest of the weekend we spent at my parents. Mom and I shopped, Cooper napped well, toys were strung all around. Natalie and Cooper were jumping on the guest bed at one time. Scaring this mama half to death! That is not happening at our house!
But they seemed to have a great time. :)

Now we are ready to move on into the week ahead. CHRISTMAS!
I'm so lucky to be able to spend this Christmas with so many I love. To have such a beautiful son, Husband and sweet angel baby growing inside of me. God has blessed my life with joy and happiness and I couldn't be more grateful. I have all of this and an eternal life in Heaven all because God gave us his only son and he died for me.
I hope all of you have an absolutely beautiful Christmas week ahead of you, safe and happy and surrounded by love.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

2010 Family Christmas pictures

A couple weeks ago my cousin came to visit and took our family Christmas pics for our Christmas card.
She did great as usual. Although the weather conditions were not exactly my favorite. It was Freezing cold and windy as all get out but we had one day and she would be leaving so we took them anyways.
I think she did a great job.

Here are a few she took. These are my fav's.
Her photography website is http://www.carolinerentzelblog.com/

17 weeks on Thursday

Well I'm getting closer and closer to being halfway there. Things are going great so far with number two.
Not to much to report, although I did go to the doctor for something that randomly popped up and they confirmed again that its a girl. We go next week for our regular appointment and I can't hardly wait to see our little miss.
I've been feeling like I'm really growing. With Cooper I was extremely small still at this point in my pregnancy but with this one I'm feeling larger than I did with him earlier. I'm not sure if its true or just my imagination. Either way I'm a little nervous how big I will get if I'm already this much bigger with her than I was with him?
Hopefully that doesn't mean I'll be ginormous!

This past weekend my brother Matt and Sis in law Jamie and my sweetie pie Niece Natalie came to visit. We took the kids to meet Santa. We tried to get the kids to take a picture together with Santa but Natalie was not having it. So we took separate shots. They were so cute.


The rest of the weekend we took it easy at home and finished some Christmas shopping. We are pretty much done HALLELUJAH!
While we are at home most the weekend Cooper kept finding things to climb into. Like this cabinet in our kitchen that I keep all of our place mats in.
He also thought it was really fun to climb in this box and sit in it.
He basically climbed into anything he could. What a goof!

ITS ALL ABOUT THE COOPY MAN, and a little about the rest of us.

Lately I've been blogging a lot about the new baby and things going on in regular daily life. I feel like I haven't done a good post involving what Cooper's been up to in a while. So I will try to update all of you on our sweet little Coopy Monster. Then I will tell you about our weekend.
The child prodigy that he is :)

Starting with new things going on with him :)
Cooper got 4 new teeth last week. Three molars and one of the front teeth on the bottom that he hadn't gotten in yet. He handled it surprisingly well for someone getting 4 teeth at one time. Poor kid.
He is talking a ton, but half of it you can't understand :) I can understand so much of what he says though, even though it sounds like gibberish to everyone else.
Cooper is dancing like crazy, he likes to do this shoulder bounce thing. Julian put on Thriller and started calling him Michael Jackson this weekend because he kept "Shoulder dancing". I will have to try to catch it on video so you all can see it.
Cooper has been climbing on all the furniture lately also. Worse than usual. He's learned to climb the kitchen chairs, couch anything and everything and when he gets up on it he stands up. Its so scary so I literally can't turn my back for a second. He's quite the little dare devil.
His babysitter informed me that he is one of the most rambunctious, active children she's ever had. GREAT! In other terms he's the Hellion of the group. I swear he's a good kid, just active and he has a mind of his own.
We are having so much fun with him, his smile brightens my day. He truly is a joy to have around.

Onto other news....
This weekend I went over to another blogger friends house Megan at http://www.inthiswonderfullife.com/ and met her and few other girls that blog as well for the first time. They were all so sweet and I really did have a great time meeting them and learning more about them in person. Its amazing how quickly you can truly make friends in this blog world.
Saturday Coop and I woke up and spent some mommy son time together. We had a great morning. Cooper was listening to me and not touching the tree (this is not usual at all), he was being so sweet and cuddly and he kept coming over and giving me kisses. What a sweetie he is. Once Julian got up and around we went Christmas shopping and got a ton of our gift buying out of the way. WOOHOO! What a relief that is for me.
Saturday night we went to dinner with 2 couples we know. We had a great time. Cooper was so funny, he kept trying to whistle for them. He's just started whistling and its so cute. My dad taught him and he loves it. Everyone was cracking up at his "o" face he made when he tried. So cute.
Sunday was church and errands all day long. We had a great weekend and got up all of our Christmas decor. We got a new area rug for our living room and I love it. Its a fluffy white rug. I know what your all thinking right now, GASP, "A white area rug for your family room, your crazy for getting white rug". Yes maybe I am but oh well, it wasn't too insanely expensive although it is very nice, I figured we could clean it like carpet it something spills God forbid. If it gets ruined than oh well, I guess we won't be doing the whole white rug thing again :).
I ordered new curtains also but they won't be in until next week sometime. We had to special order them, ignore the maroon curtain we have now. We also got the white runner rug for the hall. We have been eying these particular rugs for about 6 months now and finally did it as an early Christmas present for us. I'm so excited. It really lightens up our room since there is so much dark wood floors.
Here is one of the new throw pillows we got for the couch a couple weeks ago. I love them!


Here is the area rug, I will post a pic of the curtains and runner rug next week sometime.

Here is our tree also and a few other Christmas items I put out. I love Christmas!

My fifteen week belly shot.

I never really posted any of our Thanksgiving pictures either. I'm WAY behind on posting pictures. I have all the way from Thanksgiving through putting up Christmas through new Cooper pics. So here you go.
Cookin the turkey
The main cooks.
All the delish pies.


Cooper loving on his Granny :)
My cousin Caroline and I
Cooper was running a muc, he was EVERYWHERE! This was his favorite spot to play, of course on the stairs. Trying to give his mama a heart attack.
Miss Natalie