Christmas

The year is almost gone, Christmas is over, and things are finally settling down again. I'm happy to report that my morning sickness is almost completely gone, and I'm starting to function like a normal person again.
We had a great Christmas! We spent Christmas Eve at my parents' house with my brother and his family (Debbie's siblings came also), and my parents. Mariana didn't join us because she is in Spain with her fiance spending some time with his family. Oh, before we left to go to my parents', we opened our presents at home because Mike just couldn't wait anymore. He is so cute around Christmas time, he really is just like a little kid all excited to get and give presents. He game me a beautiful saphire pendant and a jewelry box. I gave him a guitar, and we gave Isabel a baby doll with a stroller and little diaper bag (she walks around all day pushing all her babies and animals in the stroller - she waves at me, says bye-bye, and blows a kiss before going on her "walks").
We had a very lazy Christmas Day. Mike, Isabel, and I just laid around, played games, and read most of the day. We went to the Wilson's for dinner. I loved the White Elephant game Amy and Lindsey prepared. Now my favorite part of the evening was provided by my very precocious daughter. Isabel never stops (anyone who's spent anytime with her knows that). She also loves playing with phones. So is order for us to have some peace, my mother in law allowed her to play with their home phone. She said Isabel could do no hard to it, and we didn't have to worry about long distance calls, because they can't make them with that phone. A little later we were doing our White Elephant game, when all of a sudden I see flashing lights outside. 'I think there are cops outside' said I to my father in law. He went to the front door to check, and lo and behold a cop was standing in the doorway. The cop asked if anyone had called 911 from this address, and my father in law puzzled, said no. The cop then asked if any child had been playing with the phone. He said they had received 2 consecutive calls from that address, and had come to check afraid the worst might have happened. We finally showed the cop the little culprit, our 17 month old Isabel, who no one even ever considered was capable of calling 911 (not once. but twice). The cop was very nice about the whole incident, and didn't even charge anything for the fake calls. Well, now you know, never let Isabel play with your phone. The next cop might not be so nice!
These are some pictures of present time at my parents'. By the way, my mom doesn't usually go out in public like that, she was just playing dress up with my niece Dany. The video shows blowing kisses and saying bye-bye before talking her baby on a walk (which she later decided not to do). Enjoy!

Our Little Dancer

Since I haven't posted in a while, I figured I would add a little something besides the Halloween pics (I've so sick lately that it's hard to sit in front of a computer dealing with blogger - I should enter my second trimester next week, so hopefully the sickness will get better).
We were hanging out with Lindsey (Mike's sister) and listening to some music this week. Isabel was quite the dancer. I wished she had shown some more moves in the video, but you know how it is, you get the camera out, and they stop the cuteness. Enjoy!

Late Halloween

I know it's taken me a while, but I finally put my Halloween pictures in the computer. My mom has some more (we surprised my parents taking Isabel trick ot treating there), but who knows when I'll get those. Here are some of them. Oh, and for those of you who are wondering, she was a cat (hence the whiskers attached to the hood).
Well, it was cute to see her walking around with her little orange bucket, but honestly she is a little too young to get the whole tick or treating thing. We went to a couple of neighbors' houses, and she was pretty much done. She didn't really eat much of her candy either, but that's ok, I took care of that.

Insert witty apropriately ashamed title here

Sorry we haven't posted in a while. We have been very busy and many changes have happened in our lives lately. First, we are prego!!! Yes, really we are. If you want to see a video of Mike's reaction to this click here. Second, Mike has a new job, that's right he's left the church. He now works at a company called bluehost. If you would like to see a video of him preparing for his first day of work, click here (trust me it's funny). Third, we are in a new house! Most of you probably know this. But just in case. Sorry, no video of anything having to do with Mike and the new house.

Isabel is growing up so much, her newest thing is to babble endlessly and even say a few words. She yells for Phoebe, our cat, the whole day. "Peeebeeeee", it's so cute! She also says Grandpa, Grandma and the equivalent in Portuguese. Camila was surprised when she showed a picture with all four and Isabel proceeded to name them all without any prompting! She also enjoys singing and dancing. Sing any song to her, like "head shoulders knees and toes" or your favorite primary song and she will sing something babbleish back at you and top it off with some applause for a grand finale "Yaaaaayyy".

She is such a darling little girl. Admittedly we can't wait till she is old enough to go to nursery, but we are loving this cute active period of her life. Anyway to end this post, and given the amount of foolery that has gone into it, we would like to supply evidence of our with childness. For those of you who didn't get the videos, click here(this is not another video).

Family Reunion

We had a very good time at the reunion this weekend. It was great to sit, relax a little (as much as you can at least when you have toddlers), and enjoy great company. It was so cute seeing all our little ones playing and discovering things together.
I was surprised with how much we enjoyed learning about our ancestors. Grandma put a fireside together for the whole extended family in which we talked about our ancestors' legacy of faith, sacrifice, and commitment. Each couple was supposed to share a story of one ancestor. Grandma and grandpa asked us to read some stories they had given us, and prepare to present at the fireside while they took care of our kids. At first we were all complaining a bit and being silly, but once we started reading, we became really interested in the stories. We quieted down, and every once and a while I could hear a "wow" here, or a "can you believe that" there. I was very impressed with the great ancestors we have.
We had some not so spiritual moments that were pretty interesting too. It is always funny when siblings get together and start talking about how mean one was to the other, or how crazy they were in the past. We had a pretty candid conversation on Friday night... I'll just say it was interesting... those who were there will probably agree with me :)
We missed those who couldn't be there with us. We gotta figure out a way to all get together sometime, even if we have to use webcams for that.
Well, this post is getting pretty long, so I'll stop here. I did post the pictures I took on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/upoopoo/sets/72157606407322022 so you guys who weren't there can see a little of what we did. I tried to write some descriptions of most pictures. I have to say I don't have the talent Winnow has for story telling, so the descriptions are pretty straight forward. Also, I'm a very biased parent of a very cute girl, so there are a lot of pictures of her. Here is also a little video showing how much she liked the Canyon. Enjoy!

Isabel is One!!!

Isabel turned 1 on Saturday. It's hard to believe that a whole year has gone by already. It really was a wonderful year. The Lord is so wise in giving us the chance to be parents. I feel being a parent helps us understand Him better, and hopefully it helps us become more like Him.
It is so easy to love Isabel. She is always doing something cute. She is always either smiling or talking (her giberish is awesome), or cuddling with something... she is cute even when she is being naughty (when we tell her not to do something, she says no with her head and index finger - but she keeps doing whatever she was doing... it's bad, but it's cute). Mike is just in love with her. He stops at least a couple of times a day, looks at me and says, "I love my little girl so much!". She sure loves him too. She gets all happy when he gets home from work or when I bring her into our room first thing in the morning (She looks at him and says "Papa" all smiling).
Since we're not doing her little party till the 22nd, we dicided to take her swimming on her birthday. A couple of our friends who have babies almost the same age as her came along too. Go to our flickr site to see the pictures http://www.flickr.com/photos/upoopoo/sets/72157606142705881/

The Cuddler

Isabel loves to cuddle with anything that's fuzzy now: blankets, pillows, books, Phoebe... I love it when I go check on her after I've put her to sleep and find her sleeping on top of her touch and feel books, cuddling with the fuzzy pictures. I really need to get a picture of that.
Here are some pictures of our trip to Restoration Hardware, where she found a very fuzzy pillow, and to Borders, where she found some fuzzy puppets.

House Photos

Mike bought me a camera this week (we used to take pictures with our video camera), so we went to our new house to get some pictures. Would you like a tour? www.flickr.com/photos/upoopoo/sets/72157605977321615/

That's just the first one. Go to the flickr site to see the rest!

Condo Pictures

Mark Lowrance is our realtor. He came here last week and did a great job taking pictures of our condo to post in the mls listing. I'm posting some of them here so you can see what our condo looks like now after all we did.

Good Hair Day

After trying hard, she finally let me do her hair like this. She won't let me put headbands on her head anymore, so it's gotta be something she doesn't notice it's on (Emily, I need some of your cute stuff with the alligator clips). Anyway, I thought I would post some pictures of my victorious attempt to do her hair. (The quality isn't very good because I took them with my webcam).

Busy Month

We've had a pretty busy month around here. With the purchase of the new house, we decided to do some improvements to our condo to make it sell faster. With that purpose in mind we just underwent a month a painting everything that hadn't been painted yet (now we have two tone paint throughout the house), painting our kitchen cabinets (not we have beautiful antique white cabinets), and redoing our living, kitchen and hallway flooring (we found a good deal on this beautiful laminate). So pretty much the condo looks great now (or so we think) and we hope buyers will think so too.
Everybody asks me (Camila) now that things are almost done and it looks so good if we don't want to just stay, especially after all the work we put into it. My answer is "no, thank you". I'm so tired of all this mess that I'm very ready to move into our new place. It is true that I'll definitely miss my many friends here and even our condo (it's been a great place for us, and we really do like it), but I've prepared myself enough that I'm ready for this new phase.
Sorry we have no pictures to show. We don't have our camera at the moment, but we'll take pictures in order to to list the condo this week, and we'll post them later here.
Anyway, I hope everything is going well with all of you. I'm sorry if we've been ignoring some of the family stuff lately. I hope my Italian nieces and nephews are having great birthdays (how do you say birthday in Italian?). We've tried hard to check blogs and stuff. Hopefully we'll have a get together here soon!
Oh, I forgot to tell you. Isabel has been walking for about a month now (only she was too chicken to let go and walk around besides going just from mommy to daddy). She now decided she is a big enough girl to let go and explore around a bit more. Fun, huh?!

Groovin'

I turned on some music to feed Isabel her bananas this morning. She started moving her body and shaking her head, it took me a while to figure out that she was dancing. I had to film it, check it out!

We bought a house!

Hey everyone! Ummm, we bought a house. I wish I had more pictures of it, but for now I will just include a link to their site. Pay no attention to the price, that's definitely not what we are paying for it. Here are a few links:

MLS listing


View Larger Map

If you go to the larger google map you can click on street view and cruise around our neighboorhood. Ours is the house under construction with the guys working on it. We will close on the house in 90 days to give us some time to sell our condo.

Shame on us!

I know we haven't posted in a while... shame on us!!! It's just that either Mike was sick, or I was sick or Isabel was sick or teething. Yes, you saw right, teething, she now possesses 2 cute little bottom teeth!
She continues to grow and do all the cute things that we enjoy seeing growing babies do. We have some cute videos and pictures I've been meaning to post for a while, but I can't find the cable to transfer them to the computer... I know all I have to do is ask Mike, and he will find one, but I keep forgetting.
Sicknesses aside, all is going well around here. Mike is doing really well in his Primerica part-time job. His friends say he is a natural, and he is really enjoying it (and is making some extra cash, obviously)!
I keep just doing the mom thing and it keeps getting better! Isabel is so fun to play with right now. She giggles and laughs, and claps when she is happy... she is just a delight to be with. When I have some free time, I obsess over the Twilight series. Thanks to Lindsey and some other friends who kept pushing me to read the series, I finally gave in. I think I read all 3 of them in about 4 days. Now I've been talking about it with friends, checking discussion forums, etc. I always have to obsess over some book or author. I have had my Harry Potter phase, my Jane Austen phase, and so on. Now Stephenie Meyer (Twilight's author), Brandon Sanderson (Elantris, Mistborn's author), and Patrick Rothfuss (Name of the Wind author) are sharing my free time. I love reading authors' blogs and learning more about the creative writing process.
Well, this is mainly what's going on right now. I'll try to post those pictures and videos soon.
Oh, before I forget. I support Emily 100% in her comments rule (if you don't know what I'm talking about, go read her blog), so let's truly keep in touch by leaving comments!