Our Christmas Memories of 2008!

We have had a wonderful first Christmas with Andrew! Below is a slide show, because there are to many wonderful holiday pictures to leave some of them out, but then I'm also putting the best of the pictures of each event as well. Last Christmas was a very hard time for me, because I had one deadline, I wanted Andrew home with us before Christmas. When that didn't happen I was very sad but made the best of it. Spending Christmas with all three of my children was the best present I could of every asked for. I thank God for the blessing of my family, along with the birth of his son Jesus.

First we had Christmas with Cain's family on the Sunday before Christmas!

Ryan and Sarah announce their new engagement! Way to go Ryan!

On Monday we baked cookies with my mom! Thanks for helping mom, it would of been boring without you!

Andrew also enjoyed playing with the cookie dough!

What are you up to girls?

Then we went to my mom and dad's house on Christmas Eve!

Here is a picture of Andrew trying to figure out Kylee's curly hair!

Then on Christmas we opened our gifts with the kids and later both our parents came over as well as my Grandma. What a wonderful day it was.

This shirt is so fitting!

Andrew learns about the true meaning of Christmas (baby Jesus)!

We all worked on a Gingerbread House!

The house turned out great...

for at least a few minutes, until it fell apart!

Grandpa and Alisha chilling on the couch! I guess they won't get blamed for the gingerbread house falling apart!

Andrew it has been a great first Christmas with you. It was everything I imagined it would be. I love you and can't wait for many more Christmas memories with you in the future.

Fun Family Christmas Traditions!

Well we had a family Christmas outing on Saturday. We started off by taking Alisha and Megan to a movie and we left Andrew at Grandma's. We then headed down to Tower City for shopping, holiday lights, and other festivities.

Andrew was terrified of any of the people in costumes, so we would stand in line to get a picture and Alisha would back him into the picture without him even knowing who was behind us, otherwise he would of been screaming for the picture.

We always enjoy seeing the toy soldier, and we have had many pictures of him in the past. The guy who is dressed up as the toy soldier is very tall, and intimidating. It's amazing that the entire time he is there he doesn't have one facial expression.

We saw some friends of ours at Tower City twice and they took this great picture of us when we were walking around looking at the lights!

We then found the gingerbread lane that had the most amazing gingerbread houses I have ever seen. Here are some pictures of some of the houses.

This was a gingerbread office!

We went to stand in line for Santa and the lady in front of us said it would probably be longer then an hour to see him. We said forget that and went on our way! This is the closest thing of a picture of Santa, with Andrew not crying that we have so far! We did go on to find the Twigbee Shop where Andrew got to go with his sisters to shop for mom and dad. I can't wait to see what he picked out when we open the presents on Christmas.

We then ended the evening going out to eat at the Hard Rock Cafe. Andrew loved dancing to the music as he was eating dinner. We had a great day and it was wonderful being able to share some fun traditions with Andrew that we had had as a family.

Getting Ready for Christmas!

Getting ready for Christmas has been a big undertaking with a toddler in the house this year. It has been fun sharing all the joys of Christmas with my son, but it has also added more stipulations on things he can't touch. What torcher! Anyways, I'm officially done with Christmas decorating, Christmas cards, Christmas shopping, and Christmas wrapping. So now the only thing left to do is enjoy the holidays. I also spent the entire day yesterday doing chocolates for my customers. I own an office cleaning business, and I like to take a platter of chocolates to all my customers for Christmas. I started at 9am yesterday and worked until 8:30pm. My older daughter and her friend also contributed about 4 hours of help. That would take us to a grand total of around 15 hours of 20 lbs. of candy making. Below is a picture of only about 75% of the candy that we made. Now I have to deliver it all but that is my last Christmas project. I'm looking forward to some fun events ahead. I'm hoping the next few weeks are better with Andrew then this last week. He is officially crossing over to the terrible twos, and I think lack of attention this week has put him over the top. I have never seen so many fits, and all he wants me to do is hold him, and if I don't he just yells and starts hitting something. Oh my little Andrew, mommy loves you, even when your bad!

We put up our decorations the weekend after Thanksgiving, but I have been to busy to post the pictures!

This was Alisha's way of helping with the decorating, playing guitar, and texting!

There we go, now she's helping!

Andrew loved all the ornaments we put on the tree!

Every year we all give each other ornaments. I bought some for Andrew when we were in Kyrgyzstan since we were there at their Christmas, however I want to save those for when he gets bigger and understands where they are from. However, I thought this ornament for Andrew was perfect. I told Andrew when we gave it to him," that last year we packed our bags right around Christmas time, got on a plane, and traveled around the world to get him". How perfect!

It's so pretty! I wish I could touch it!

I've had the worse time of it with the lights this year. First of all none of the lights on the Christmas tree were working. So we got all new ones for the tree. Then I have this garland that I put around our door outside, and when I got that out the lights were out on it. I then put a working set of lights on it and then that went out. So then I bought two brand new strands for the garland and I got it hung up, and then half of a strand went out. That's it I'm not taking it down, and I'm not fixing it!

This is as good as it got at 8pm at night to get a family picture for the Christmas card!

Andrew has his sisters wrapped around his little finger!

I guess that photo shoot of ours was exhausting!

We went to a Christmas party last weekend with our home builders class and this is what Andrew thought of Santa. He wouldn't have anything to do with him! In fact, he set the tone for the other toddlers there. We are going to try to get a Santa picture tomorrow at the mall, so we will see how that turns out!

This is some of the candy that I did yesterday! I feel tired just looking at it!

This is Andrew's way of helping me with the chocolates!

An Andrew Update!

I thought I would just write a post all about Andrew. He has been doing so wonderful lately, and I am so grateful for his progress.

Health Issues: Andrew has recovered wonderfully from both of his surgeries. I can't believe what strides he has been making to try to talk since the tubes were put in on Oct. 30th. His speech therapist has been seeing him weekly and she also can't believe his progress. After surgery she said to me that she was starting to think she lost her touch because we haven't seen any improvement with Andrew's speech since summer, but now everyday he is saying new sounds. It's like the kid had so many thoughts trapped into his head, and he couldn't wait to get them all out. We don't understand much that he says but he is really trying to repeat things we are saying. In fact today he decided to act like a two year old and he got upset with me that I was taking to long washing his grapes to eat, and he pointed his finger at me and was waving it up and down and yelled at me! Lets just say the kid got a time out (which he responds well to) and he knew right away that he crossed the line. It's hard to not laugh at him when he is bad! We also will be getting another echo done on his heart in the near future. We don't foresee any problems with that, but they like to keep an eye on his VSD and we are also hoping that the whole will be smaller. I'll give an update on that when we know further.

Eating Habits: This has been a big issue with Andrew lately. He is a very picky eater and I'm not use to this because both of my girls would eat whatever I gave them. Lets just say there has been a few nights when the poor little guy has gone to bed hungry because he refused to eat anything healthy for him. I just talked to the psychologist about this yesterday and she said he is just a picky eater and to just keep doing what I am doing, even if that means sending him to bed hungry. I hope this gets better soon, because meal time sometimes turns into battle time.

Sleeping Habits: Andrew also has had some issues with sleep. The kid won't sleep past 6am for anything. Sometimes he starts getting up around 4:30am. Lately this has caught up with me, and I have been dragging. I have tried everything I can with getting him to sleep longer and nothing has worked. I also talked about this to the psychologist but she said that it sounds like Andrew has a built in alarm clock and nothing I do will change that. They did wake the kids up at 6am in the orphanage, so it amazes me that even though we are in a different time zone that is the time he needs to get up. Andrew has also been restless some nights waking up every 30 min. for the first couple of hours of sleeping and then he wakes up doing it again around 4am. I think this has been due to teething, so I'm hoping this will also go away.

Development: Andrew is still on target for all of his development, aside of his speech. This makes me feel good every time we have him evaluated and he is doing exactly what he is suppose to. Sometimes you would never know he was in an orphanage less then a year ago.