Happy New Year!

2009 has been a lovely year so far. There haven't been any medical emergencies yet, Chris found some dry aged ground beef at Whole Foods last night, and both kids are napping at the moment. That's my recipe for a good year. Oh, but we're out of rum. That's not so good.

Anyway, we've had a busy couple weeks, what with the holidays and all, but we not only survived -- we enjoyed ourselves! A lot! Grammy, Grampy, Aunt Rachel, and Uncle Dude came out to visit for Christmas, and we enjoyed a lovely, low-key holiday with them. Soren and Sigrid were treated very well by Santa and pretty much everyone in the family except their parents. Well, that's not totally true -- Chris made an awesome Lego table for Soren, which is the first decent gift he's gotten from us so far in his lifetime (besides love and a college fund, but we'll see about the college fund... it's not doing so well at the moment). Anyway, Chris and I didn't give Sigrid anything for Christmas, because we are lazy, and because she is a baby and was destined to get a million presents from everyone else in the world. The siblings exchanged very thoughtful gifts; Sigrid gave Soren a set of translucent Duplo blocks for building on his new table, and Soren gave Sigrid an Uglydoll which he picked out himself. The Uglydoll is actually quite a sweet gift, since Soren has loved his own Uglydoll (which he named Mimi) since he got it from Grammy and Grampy in 2007, and he wanted to get Sigrid one to match. He brings Sigrid her Mimi when she gets upset (and occasionally when she's not). What a good big brother. Here they are with their Mimis.



And here's the only decent family portrait we managed to get, with the requisite crying baby and uncooperative toddler.



A couple days after Chris's family left, we packed up the kids and went up to New Hampshire for the annual New Year's festivities. We'd originally thought we weren't going to go, since two kids seems to be a lot, but then we realized that we were tired of sitting around at home, we wanted to see our friends, Soren could probably handle a few nights in a twin-size bed, and Sigrid sleeps just fine in her car seat whether she's in her own room or not. So we went for it, and it worked out pretty well. We took up more than our fair share of space, since Soren really can't sleep in the same room as a baby that needs to nurse and have her diaper changed twice a night, but Seth (and everyone else) was quite gracious about us taking up half the house. We all quite enjoyed ourselves during the day as well; various people were happy to play with Soren and hold Sigrid, and I was happy to let them do it while I played games and knitted and generally pretended I didn't have any kids. Soren took a few walks outside with Chris, Adam and Margot, and Chris got some great pictures:




There's more, but Soren's awake and yelling "MAMA WHERE ARE YOU RIGHT NOW I'M ALL WAKED UUUUUUP," so perhaps I should post more later on.