Allyn Elizabeth Hemmer!

Allyn Elizabeth was born last Wednesday evening, and she was in quite a hurry!

After Alyssa's water broke, she started hard contractions almost immediately.  She was at our house, so Mom and Mel quickly helped her into our car and drove the 20 minutes to her house.  Jason met them there.  5 minutes after they walked in the door and 2 pushes later, Daddy, Grandma, and Auntie Mel caught little Miss Allyn because the midwife didn't make it in time!  48 minutes of labor from start to finish made for an exciting evening!

Mia adores her new baby sister!

We love this little girl!

Alphabet and piano time!

Ever since she was a little tiny thing, we've been letting Mia play the piano. When she was just a few months old, she would dance on the keys with her little feet. She's too big for that now, so we've moved on! She loves to play "pano" and "moosic", and it's never too early to instill a love for it!

Miss Mia loves to learn new things so everybody has been teaching her letters. She's only 17 months old, but why not? She recognized "E" after only two times of me showing it to her today. She is always requesting us to sing "abcfg".   She's missing a couple letters in there, but she'll get them eventually. :)

 

 

Water fun and animal sounds!

Mia loves to play in the little wading pool we have for her, but she obviously wasn’t too thrilled about the towel.

 The new brand of superhero! You’ve heard of Batman…Spiderman…Well, meet Frog Baby!

 We took her to the splash pad last week, but she wasn’t too sure about all that cold water shooting up at her.

  And then yesterday we took her to the pool.

 After a while, she found it was just as much fun to hide behind the chairs as it was to play in the water!

 She is quite the little monkey.

Our little girl loves to dance and "sing".  I thought we'd share some of her cuteness!

We had Mia go through all of her animal sounds today (except that I skipped “sheep”). Our favorite is her rooster noise!!!!! The first one I asked her was “dog”. It is a little cut off in the video. Her last two are what Daddy and Mommy say. Mommy’s is “ow” because that’s where she is in this state of her pregnancy. And for anybody that knows my brother, his is self-explanatory!

Delight!

She loves to clap and/or dance when we sing. :)

Mia's announcement!

Can't wait for Oct. 26th!!!

Baby laughs are the best!!!!!

I don't know what was so funny about the pillow being thrown in the air, but Mia sure thought it was hilarious!  She went on like this for 15 minutes and had us all laughing right along with her!!!  At 0:18 she is laughing so hard she can hardly breathe.  Her laugh comes out in squeaks only! We sure had a good time that evening!!!!!!!

Mom's Fun Christmas Present!

 We did something a little different for my mom's Christmas present in 2012.  If you know my mom, you know her love for games, treasure hunts, puzzles, etc.  To tell her about her gift, we made this puzzle.  On the reverse side were the 8 dates on which a surprise would happen.

The day after Christmas, Dad called home on his lunch break, and Mom had to play "20 Questions" in order to figure out our activity for the evening.

She asked if someone had invited us to their house...to which I answered, "No."  Technically speaking, we had invited ourselves over to the Lewis's house!  :)

 

After a yummy meal, we played Christmas charades/pictionary.  We had the option of acting or drawing or a combination of the two.

 At the end, we switched to Christmas songs...can you guess what Mr. Lewis decided to depict?

While we were at their house, we told mom to find a red-head and ask them if they had something for her.  4 people matched that description, and she ended up going through all four before finding the right one.  Each successive clue had to be received in numerical order, so she had alot of fun going back and forth amongst everyone trying to remember who she'd asked and what they'd answered before she finally received all her pieces of paper. 

Those slips led her to guess that we were taking her to lunch the next day to Fiesta Cancun along with her best friend, Mrs. Wegmeyer.

On Saturday of that week, we had her come to the library.  Her first clue was handed to her, and it led her to a book in which she found another clue leading her to the next book.

I'm not sure if you can read these, but we had a variety of clues...unscrambling a title, a "Mad Gab" game type of clue, a drawing of a scene from one of our favorite kids' books, a quote from a book.  Can you guess any of the book titles?

 The final clues were particular words in books that told her we were going to Rockford to Applebees and then to see the Festival of Lights at Sinnissippi park.

On Sunday afternoon, we dialed a phone number and then handed Mom the phone.  Mom had no idea who she was talking to for the first few minutes, and Mrs. Sisson played along really well.  She actually took the time to put jelly beans in her cheeks and pinch her nose shut in order to disguise her voice.  Finally she laughed, and Mom guess who it was.  

Mrs. Sisson then informed her that we were coming up to their house for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day for a time of games and fellowship.  They invited a number of families over during the evening to join in the fun!

Nate, Mel, Ellie, Robbie, and Matthew

Angel and Mr. Sisson

We greeted 2013 with songs and a time of prayer.

Gretchen, Kyle, and their three kids were there as well, and Alaina wanted to do crafts the next day.

Kyle, Stephen, and Mom

Gretchen and Stephen.  

Unfortunately baby James was napping when we had the camera out, so we didn't get a photo of him.  He's pretty cute!

We had a wonderful time with these special people!

To find out her next activity, Mom had to do this word search.  What made it difficult was that I only gave her the first letters of each word.  It was quite a challenge!  We laughed at some of the words she tried to make as she sounded things out.  She didn't find out who our fellow participants were until most of the way through the puzzle!

The Pollock ladies came for a visit, and then we all went out to a local Thai restaurant for lunch.

Back row: Sadie, Stephanie, Emily

Megan is in the front row with us.

 We hid an invitation in the washing machine for Mom to find Friday morning as she went down to start the laundry.  It told her a guest would be joining us for an afternoon of card-making.  Mom had a few guesses as to who it would be, but she was still surprised when her sister, Tammy, showed up!

For our last activity, we were supposed to have Jason, Alyssa, and Mia over for supper and then go play laser tag.  Alyssa got sick that night, so just Jason and Mia came over for supper and some games.  We ended up playing laser tag in Texas on our trip in January...but that's another post!

We had just as much fun with Mom's Christmas present as she did!  It was a very memorable couple of weeks, and we thoroughly enjoyed our time with friends and family!