Happy New Year Baby!

Happy New Year to all, a belated Merry Christmas and apparently Happy Thanksgiving as well, since I haven't posted since November, gasp, how dreadfully embarrassing! As always, I have a wonderfully cute excuse who keeps me away from the computer more and more as she learns to get into everything more and more each day : )

Ella has had a fabulous "winter", if you count the 70-degree days we're having here in Texas winter, tee hee, to all our beloved east coast family and friends, we love it! Ella's first Thanksgiving was a fun one spent at our aunt & uncle's in College Station, Texas, Ella was really getting into her solid foods so had a fun time with stuffing, mashed potatoes and turkey, woo hoo!

Her first Christmas was a fun whirlwind of travel spending a week in Maryland with mommy's family and a week in New York with daddy's. While in New York she also got her first taste of snow, woo hoo! She detested the copious amounts of layering she was subjected to, to endure the strange fluffy white stuff, but she seemed to have fun, and even got her first sled ride with papa. Overall, I think she loved all the extra attention from her relatives and was sorely disappointed to come back home to her boring days with just mommy : )

Since we've been home Ella has been jumping through milestones with leaps and bounds. Before Christmas, totally not interested in walking, after Christmas, pushing around her cute walking cart with a vengeance and demanding to hold hands and walk around the house all the time, she has even taken up to 10 steps all alone (before she realized she could get down and crawl much faster). Before Christmas she was a sea of crazy babbles and then just this week she proudly uttered her first real word - "baby". And while she points to a variety of things whilst uttering "baby", including daddy and the cat, she gets most excited about saying it when pointing at the baby faces in her "Happy Baby 1, 2, 3" book and when looking through her cousin Kyle's baby albums. Looking at photo albums is one of her new favorite things to do, she scrambles joyously down the hallway to our front living room where all the "nice" stuff is and pulls the photo albums out one-by-one, flips through the pages, excitedly pointing to each picture of Kyle and pronouncing "BABY" as if we had no idea a baby was hiding in these books, it is truly beyond adorable.

It seems as if her brain cells are just bursting with growth and activity the way she surmounts new tasks and explores her world. We can even proudly acknowledge that she no longer just eats the shapes in her shape sorter that we bought for her, to teach her shapes and colors, and while she is still not completely interested in "sorting" them, she does like to dump them out and then playfully drop them back in the bucket (leaving that darn sorter lid off, it's just no fun yet, mommy!).

We are excited about the coming weeks as her first birthday quickly approaches, we can hardly believe a whole year has gone by, although it feels like we have never been without her - what was the world even like before she came?

Happily awaiting new milestones to share...



p.s. -- we are also trying out another fun way to share info and stuff with everyone, check out http://figierafam.aboutmybaby.com/, we're doing a 30-day trial before we decide to keep it, they let you post photos and VIDEO, if friends & family like it we'll keep using it so let us know!