Year End and New Years Eve

Another year is coming to a close. It's amazing to think about where we were one year ago.  David was still studying for his CPA exams. I was well into my second trimester of pregnancy while gearing up to teach all new classes at Westlake High School. We had just found out that Lydia was a girl and that she was growing just perfectly.

Throughout this past year we did some incredible things: 

-We delivered a happy healthy baby girl. Lydia Elise changed our lives forever, and continues to bring joy into our lives every day. 

-David passed all of his CPA exams with flying colors and became an official Certified Public Accountant.

-I finished teaching school, packed up my things, and started the adventure of motherhood. 

-Lydia learned to roll over, sit up, stand up, and is working on crawling. 

-We searched and searched for the perfect home for us, and ended up building our dream-starter-home which will be done February 8, 2013. 

-We won tickets to the USU vs BYU football game, which we used as we celebrated David's 28th birthday. (I asked David what our biggest accomplishments of the year were. After he said our baby and our house - he said "Going to the Aggie Football game." I should also probably include here that our beloved USU Football team ended up as WAC Champions, went on to the Potato Bowl and won! It was a huge happy moment in our Aggie lives.)

To celebrate the New Year, we...

...smiled..

...played with toys...

We got an awesome new camera for Christmas. It's the Nikon J1 - and I've been drooling over it for months. You can totally tell the difference in the quality of the pictures. I'm so excited!

However, our iPad is probably still our favorite toy. 

...practiced standing up...

...hung out with awesome family...

...showed off our cute baby...

...played games...

...practiced standing up some more... (who needs rolling over or crawling with you can just stand up?)

...ate some yummy food...

...took a bath...

 ...got ready for bed...

(after the baby was asleep) ... made some yummy waffle cones...

...and pretty soon we will watch the ball drop and kiss at midnight to celebrate the start of a beautiful new year. 

Happy 2013!

Ribbon and wrapping paper

Lydia was the perfect age this Christmas season. She was old enough to love the wrapping paper and ribbon and enjoy her presents, but young enough to not be all over the place and out of control. She certainly had lots of opportunity to play with lots of ribbon and wrapping paper. The most recent opportunity (and last opportunity for at least a little while) was when we celebrated the birthdays of Kevin and Amy. Lydia was in ribbon heaven with all of those Peaden bows floating around. 

 (Just a sidenote, I decorated this cake and was pretty proud of myself. One side was a scrapbook page of an elephant as a tribute to Amy's dedication to scrapbooking all of her Africa pictures. The other side was an Aggie A with a graduation cap as a tribute to Kevin's recent graduation from Utah State. It looks pretty awesome, right?)

And here come those ribbons...

There are a lot of reasons that I love my husband. David is smart, funny, handsome, hard working, and very nice. However, sometimes he does things that endear him to me ten-fold. When I saw this "bow" that he made for our present to Kevin, it made me love him even more! Don't you love that awesome Aggie A? We've got to support our fellow Utah State fans, especially in a house full of Cougars.

Lydia is getting so good at standing up on things. She would rather be standing than sitting at any given moment. It's so cute to watch her, although it's becoming much more difficult to get to her take naps and go to bed at night because she will just sit up then pull herself to standing along the edge of her crib. Regardless - she is so fun. We had a great time playing with all of the presents while Kevin and Amy took turns opening their gifts.

Popcorn Baby

Of all the random things that this post could be about, this may take the cake. Well, actually maybe not. We love popcorn. We love Lydia. We love random pictures of the two of them together.

We love this little girl. She is so stinking happy. Stick her in a bucket, she will just smile and suck on her toes. I love it. I was going through a bunch of pictures from the past several months and I can't believe how little she was. I know that someday I will look back on these pictures and ooh and aww over how little she is here as well. I don't know. I just love her and don't want to forget these little moments.