Christmas Day 2011

This year we spent Christmas Day at Grandma and Grandpa's house and Abby got to have a super fun day all over again! We had so much fun catching up with family and indulging in good eats again. In fact, we had so much fun that I just realized I did a horrible job of taking pictures. I have zero pictures of our delicious meal or any decent family pictures! But I did manage to capture a few photos so here they are. Grandma let Abby open one gift early when we got there and she loved it!

White gloves and glass slippers!

Santa Daddy and his little helper!

By this time, Abby was a professional present opener so she was helping Grandpa and Grandma open their gifts too. :)

Abby got a little baby doll named Annabelle who came with a bag full of clothes, food, bottle, potty, etc. that Abby took care of all evening. From the looks of it, Abby is going to be a GREAT big sister!

Christmas Eve 2011

This is what I've been waiting for since Abby was born.  It's so fun that she is old enough to understand holidays and we can start making new family traditions with our little Abby.  :) 

This year, my family came over on Christmas Eve.  My dad is in Australia with Ruby and her family but we had my mom, Kirk and Lucy join us this year at our house.  So as Ruby put it, even though our family was divided, we still got to spend it together.  :)  Lucy just moved here from Sydney so we were so happy to have her join us for her first Chen Christmas.  I hope she doesn't think we typically indulge the way we did.  :)

To begin with, Bryce made a Cuban style fresh ham.  It was approximately 13 lbs of delicious pig shoved full of one head of garlic and then smothered in a citrus garlic mojo before being cooked/smoked in low indirect heat for 6 hours.  He also made Cuban black beans with saffron basmati rice and roasted some carrots.  Kirk made my favorite green bean casserole which I look forward to every holiday.  I even finally got to use my Christmas plates for the first time too!  Everything was so delicious. 

Before

After

Cheers!

 

Then we had to make chewy chocolate chip cookies for Santa and they were delicious as usual.  Bryce loves chocolate chip cookies and according to him, so does Santa so that worked out perfectly.  We were able to kill two birds with one stone.  :P

I made these sort of huge.  This recipe yields 2 dozen cookies but I only made 18.  Ginormously good.

Abby imitating her Jo Jo.

(Look!  She let us put her hair up in a ponytail!  A Christmas miracle!)

Everybody OPEN GIFTS!

Abby got a cloth sandwich set and she and Daddy were chowin' down.

Abby taste testing a chocolate chip cookie.  Does she think Santa will like it?  YES!

Before going to bed, we left a cookie and milk out for Santa by the chimney, read The Night Before Christmas and went to bed.  It was a perfect way to end a perfect day.  :)

Gingerbread House

We began the gingerbread house project on Dec. 4th and didn't get to come back to it until this past Saturday.  It had 2 weeks to set and it was hard as a rock when we were ready to decorate it.  :)  Here are a few pictures of our progress and final product. 

I didn't realize we had to wait an hour before putting the roof on and then another 2-3 hours before we could start decorating!  This was the extent of our progress (minus the roof) on Dec. 4th.

Fast forward 2 weeks and here we are icing the roof and trying to come up with a game plan.

Abby had so much fun decorating the roof!

Abby was in charge of the roof and Bryce and I did the sides of the house.  Bryce is way more creative than me, Abby and my MIL combined so we were glad he was there to help us out.

Good job Bryce and Abby!

Bryce decided to write Abby's name on the other roof and put sprinkles on it but the sprinkles came out funny and we just left it - haha!  By this time, Abby was eating more candy than she was actually putting on the house anyhow.

Bryce even meticulously cut out a door and made a chimney out of the extra piece!  Genius (because I'm sure no one has ever thought of doing that before...)!

Abby and the final product.

This was more work than the grown-ups bargained for but at least Abby had fun!

And then here are a few pictures from throughout the last week.  I've gotten the hang of the new camera and the issue with file numbering has miraculously fixed itself so we're good to go now. 

Abby's favorite way to eat her Big Daddy Breakfasts on the weekend.  :)

Abby's new favorite game du jour to play with us is hide and seek and she hid in my tote bag which later turned into a fun swing, thanks to Daddy!  It's a great work out.  :P

Bryce's favorite thing to do on Sundays: watch football and cook.  This week he made super delicious lamb, veal and bison meatballs with his perfected tomato sauce.  I've said it before and I'll say it again:  We eat sooo much better when he's home.

(Side Note: Abby is a whopping 38" tall now!)

And lastly, Bryce and I got all dressed up for his company Christmas party and our friend took this picture for us at their house since we forgot to take one at home.  It's a rare pregnant picture of me and it's a prom-esque pose but we'll take what we can get!

We're still here!

Wow, this is perhaps the longest I've ever gone without blogging.  Over a month!  It's been so long I'm not even sure what we've been up to.  I basically posted that we were having another girl and then disappeared.  I finally got my energy back about a month ago and have been making use of my new found energy by going, going, going non-stop.  It's amazing, I haven't NEEDED to nap in so long.  Quite refreshing, actually. 

But first a quick update on Baby Baker #2.  All my appointments have been going well so far.  I'm fine and our baby girl is doing well too.  She continues to do the jitter bug in my belly to her hearts desire and I don't mind one bit.  I'll admit, I'm one of those people that LOVES being pregnant no matter how bad the first 20 weeks are.  I will throw up 50 more times if I had to do it all over again (although according to Bryce, we're done after this one.  Boohoo.).  I'm actually not as swollen as I was before at this time.  Oh, I'll be 25 weeks as of this Saturday.  As my doctor said, I'm 2/3 of the way done.  Woohoo!  It's getting harder for me to reach my toes and I have to sit like I have a stick up my butt (my rotational scoliosis is bothering me - only on the left rib) but otherwise, I'm feeling good.  I discovered compression hose this time around.  They are awesome. 

As for Abby, she's definitely going through yet another growth spurt.  I swear she'll be taller than me by the time she's 15.  She is actually napping EVERY DAY (this hasn't happened since she was 22 months old - it's a big deal at our house) for a good solid 2-3 hours and eating like a horse.  I feel like I'm feeding a teenage boy.  I hear "Mommy, I'm hungry!" about 20 times a day.  Her snacks in between meals are just full on meals between meals now.  Pants that I rolled up 2 weeks ago are fitting just right now.  The sleeves in her new 3T long sleeve shirts are shrinking by the day.  It's amazing.  She continues to have awesome conversations with us that crack us up.  Her ability to string logic together astounds me.  No more white lies with her, she'll know if something doesn't add up and she'll call you out too.  And her memory continues to be awesome (like my Dad and Kirk's).  If you go back on your word, she'll call you out there too.  She's still SUPER observant like me.  It's a gift and a curse.  I think she'll grow to have my OCD tendencies (sorry Xiao baby!).  We see signs of it already.  She is SOO excited about being a big sister soon.  She even told her teachers "When my mommy pushes the baby out, then I can hold her and feed her bottles."  *sniff*  So sweet.  (Side note, she says "pushes the baby out" because when asked how the baby gets out of my belly, I stupidly responded "I push her out."  Haha - it wasn't a lie and that seemed to satisfy her curiosity so there you go!). 

I have to say we did a great job getting Christmas decorations up early and Bryce made our yard look nice and festive.  Abby really GETS that it's Christmas this year so we made sure to do everything right.  At school, they are teaching and talking about Christmas too so she comes home telling me about ginger bread men, how you have to be a good girl in order to get gifts from Santa and she even learned to sing Jingle Bells!  Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer is still a favorite of hers (from when I first sang it to her in Taiwan because I ran out of nursery rhymes to sing).

Another reason why I haven't blogged is because we got a new camera and I'm still getting used to it.  The "continuous" photo numbering is not working so each time I upload pics, it starts back at IMG_001 again.  So frustrating.  So since my pictures are all out of whack, I'm just going to start from wherever.  I hope you enjoy these pictures and keep your fingers crossed that it won't be another month before I update again!

Chowing down on biscuits and jelly for breakfast.  Looks like we need to make this more often!

My mom got her this "princess dress" for fun and here she is singing and playing the piano like a regular musician.  I have a 10 minute video of this that is hysterical to watch.  :)

This is one of my favorite smiles.

Daddy and his little pink bunny after he just got back from a 6 day work trip.

I love this picture.

Daddy's little helper.

Inside decorations were done - time for some books!

We were able to squeeze in a super fun playdate with Audrey!

We set out to make a ginger bread house at Grandma and Grandpa's but I didn't know you needed a bazillion hours in between to let the icing set.  So it's still incomplete but at least Abby had fun licking the icing!

Luckily Grandma had a back-up project lined up so we made lots of reindeer ornaments instead!

And lastly, here's Daddy and Abby canoodling during a nap.  I love it.

I swear Bryce was meant to have little girls.  :)