Christmas 2009

Warning: This is going to be a long one, folks.

We had a great holiday season here at Casa Perry! We started off the festivities on the 24th with Doug's moms big birthday bash. Since she's a Christmas Eve baby, we wanted to make sure that she still got an official birthday celebration in. So we had the Perry fam over for dinner and a (fabulous, if I do say so myself :) chocolate cake. Here's the pretty birthday girl...


Make a wish!


Our first Christmas morning with Olivia was so much fun! The holiday really does take on a whole new meaning with a little one in the house.


Attacking her first present. Pretty sure that she was more excited about the wrapping paper and ribbons than she was about any of the gifts.


Livvy's new favorite toy.

It's loud and obnoxious. The batteries will most likely eventually disappear from this sucker.

Ooooh... presents!!!


My parents and brother flew into town on Christmas afternoon. It meant so much to us to have both sets of grandparents and all of the aunts and uncles together for Olivia's first Christmas. In all of the chaos, we didn't even get a big group picture. So sad. This is pretty much what the night looked like.


Love this picture of miss O and her grandmas!


Carson and his cars (and his loyal subjects).


Because we didn't get any group shots on Christmas night (and I REALLY wanted pictures of Olivia with everyone), I subjected the whole gang to a photo session the next morning. Thanks for cooperating!

Four generations. How cool is that?


Perry grandparents.


Pearlstein fam.


Uncle Craig!


We spent the rest of the week relaxing, taking long walks, shopping, and even took a touristy trip out to Snoqualmie falls. It was such a great holiday, and we're looking forward to 2010. This has been such an amazing year, and we feel so incredibly blessed to have Olivia in our lives. Happy new year, everyone!

A very Merry Christmas to you and yours!
Much love,
Doug, Andrea & Olivia

Olivia's New Favorite Game

It's called "let's take every toy out of the basket and throw it onto the floor".


What are you looking at?

Punta Mita

While Doug was stuck in Washington for MBA finals week, Olivia and I escaped for warmer, sunnier weather in Punta Mita with his parents, Kevin and Whitney. It was such a wonderful vacation! Olivia absolutely loved swimming in the pool and hanging out outside for the whole week. She's definitely a warm-weather baby :).

Her new obsession is reading magazines (and by reading, I mean chewing on the pages and then ripping them to shreds!).


I also introduced her to something amazing: ice cream! She LOVED it.


Hanging out poolside at the villa with Grandpa.


Just relaxing on the balcony, looking at the ocean.


We also took lots of walks (and Livvy took lots of naps!).


Olivia made a big discovery on this trip... she finally managed to figure out how to shove her entire foot into her mouth. Yum.


She loved playing in the big bed!


And, of course, we had some Bumbo action. I don't know what I'd do without this thing!


Pictures of miss O splashing around in the pool soon to come!

We're Back

Olivia and I had a fantastic vacation in Mexico! I took a bunch of photos, but it's going to take me a bit to go through them all. So here's a shot of our little sunbather to hold you over!

Really Starting to Sit Up!

Guacamole Baby

We let Olivia try avocado today.

Pretty sure that she thought that it was the best thing EVER!

Please excuse her wonky eye. Poor thing. She's going to the doctor tomorrow to see what we can do about it!

Sunrise

Olivia was up painfully early this morning! I'm pretty sure that she's hitting her 6-month growth spurt, which means that the 8-hour sleep sessions she was taking last week have turned back to 2-3 hours maximum at a time. Ugh.

The one good thing about getting up at the crack of dawn was that I saw the most incredible sunrise this morning. It was so gorgeous that I contemplated going outside to photograph it, but then I realized that it was 29 degrees! I don't do that cold. I snapped these through the window of our guest room.

As people up here love to say "the mountain was out".

What a pretty place we live in.

Thanksgiving 2009

We had an awesome Thanksgiving weekend. It was my first turkey cooking experience, and thankfully everyone survived. We were blessed to have both sets of grandparents here for Olivia's first Thanksgiving, and we had so much fun with everyone. Apparently, we were having too much fun to take many pictures! Here's the few that we got over the weekend...

Olivia spent the entire meal dive-bombing the table in an attempt to get some of the delicious food. Luckily, we had Uncle Craig in town to hold her back.

This is what she does during meals now. I think that our days of going out to eat are over for a while!

The following day, we headed out to some of the local wineries to experience Washington's finest. Don't the boys look super excited to be on this adventure?

The ladies, looking lovely as always :)

Guess I'm really going to have to keep an eye on her once she hits her teenage years...

What, you mean that's not for me?

We had such a great weekend with my parents, brother and aunt visiting. Thanks for coming guys! Can't wait to see you for Christmas.

On a totally different note, a few random things...

Olivia has become obsessed with Baby Mozart. I know that watching TV isn't the best thing for little ones, but hey, it buys me a good 15 minutes of freedom and it makes her happy! She loves to sit in her Bumbo and watch the DVD's on my laptop.

The little miss is so incredibly close to sitting up on her own! Right now she topples over after a few seconds, but if we give her something to lean on she can stay upright for quite a while.

Hopefully she'll be sitting on her own in time to tear into her presents under the Christmas tree!

Happy Turkey Day

Food!!!

Livvy has become very interested in what we're eating, so we decided that it was time to give her a taste of the good stuff! Come on, milk for EVERY meal must get boring after 5 months.

We discovered that she likes rice cereal. A lot.

Gimmie that bowl!


Yum.


Chunky monkey!!!

Weekend Update

We had a pretty quiet weekend here. Doug was studying for his midterm on Monday (ahhh, how I don't miss that aspect of school!), and it was pretty cold and rainy. So we amused ourselves indoors and had a pretty lazy few days. Since it's been a while since my last post, I snapped some pictures today to get some new images up for Olivia's adoring fans.

Of course, we spent some time in the Bumbo. Little miss is attempting to launch her way out of this thing, so I think that our Bumbo days are numbered at this point.

Whatcha lookin' at?

Oh, you're taking my picture? I'll smile in that case!

Olivia is looking longingly outside and thinking "rain, rain, go away".

She absolutely loves being outside! (Unfortunately, she's still not a big fan of her stroller, but we're working on that.)

Livvy is very into sticking her tongue out!

Again with the tongue...

And if she's not sticking her tongue out, she's shoving her fist (or anything she can get her hands on) into her mouth.

Playing stackers with mommy. She's SO close to sitting up on her own - she just holds onto one of our fingers and balances herself.

Olivia's very favorite part of the day is bath time. She literally fusses like crazy when she wakes up from her last nap, and as soon as we go upstairs and start taking her clothes off she goes nuts kicking and talking and giggling. It's really adorable!

Starry baby lashes. Love 'em!