Friday, January 1, 2010

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2010!

This New Year's Eve our celebration was spent with great family and friends in Fairfax! We started out the evening with yummy snacks and enjoying each others company. The kids had a great time watching video's and playing games of their own.
Danielle loved getting all kinds of snuggles and watching everyone around her! She is such a joy to be around and definitely prefers to be held most of the time. She is not afraid to snuggle right into whomever is holding her!


This was perfect for the kids. The big kids were good about including the little kids in the games they were playing. Dylan loved watching the kids play a mean game of Twister! Danielle can't wait until she is a little older to get right in on the fun games too!


She sure was a trooper. She stayed awake ALL night long! Everyone kept thinking that she would finally give in and close those pretty eyes of hers, but nope, she was bright eyed and bushy tailed even on the drive home!

Another favorite of the kids at our New Years Eve Celebration was making homemade ice cream sundae's! YUMMY! Sheila brought all of these yummy toppings and delicious ice cream wafer bowls to hold all of the goodies!

Look at all of that caramel! Even the adults indulged on a yummy dessert ice cream sundae! Great idea!While daddy joined in on a few games of poker Danielle enjoyed watching and showing her emotion when the emotions at the poker table were running high as well!A bit after we welcomed in 2010 we snuggled Danielle in her pj's for the car ride home. She looks to be sleeping so soundly..BUT...don't let her fool you, just a 5 minute cat-nap was all she needed to re-energize! At 1:30am we arrived home and tucked her into bed, finally some zzzz's! She was definitely keeping up with the rest of us at this New Years Eve Celebration!And after some sleep she was ready for some morning play time with daddy on New Years Day!
Our family gladly welcomes 2010. We are praying for a great year for our family. Although 2009 was a great year we hope this one is even better.
2009 started out great with Danielle getting off oxygen at the very beginning of March. In May Danielle had her first airplane ride to the sunshine and warm temps of Arizona. In June we had another plane ride to visit Grammie and Great Grandpa Phillips in Pennsylvania. We also celebrated Danielle's 1st Birthday at the end of June. What a fun celebration we had! We had many things to celebrate on that bright and sunny day in June! In August we ventured on a fun weekend getaway with our friends the LeConte's to Wisconsin. In September we celebrated Labor Day in Des Moines at Adventureland with Ellie and the Aarhus family! Danielle took her first real swim in the pool with daddy and she loved every minute of it! We also celebrated Dylan's 3rd birthday with a Hawkeye party for him. October brought Danielle's first trick-or-treating, she was the cutest 'adorable' witch ever! November brought ear tubes for Danielle but she really needed them, she had too many ear infections to count and we are proud to report that tubes have done wonders for her! Thanksgiving was spent with great family at the Krejci's, and what a feast we had! We also ventured to ride on our first 'Polar Express' Train ride that weekend in Boone. The kids really enjoyed their first train ride. December was really chilly and brought us a lot of snow so we decided to enjoy Christmas in sunny Arizona! Danielle had her second trip to the dessert west and we had such a great time enjoying sunshine and warm temps for Christmas this year! We ended the year with Danielle's tear duct surgery, it went okay, not totally according to plan, but we are hoping with lots of hope and prayers that things are just fine. New Year's Eve was spent with Aunt Ellie, Uncle Bill, the Aarhus family and friends....what a way to send out 2009 with a bang and welcome in the New Year!
We are praying that 2010 brings lots of health, love and happiness for our family. Wonderful follow-up doctor visits when they come and we are praying for a surgery free year!
Welcome 2010, we are optimistic this will be a great year for our family!

2 comments:

CWZARZMOM said...

hey amber- i knew that danielle was having surgery because of your FB posts, but didn't know what for. I was going to email you on FB and ask you, but found your blogs instead. i have enjoyed catching up with everything that has been happening next door. ;) you're right- you have 2 miracles- it's amazing to see those pics of them when they were so little! hope you guys have a happy and healthy 2010!

CWZARZMOM said...

BTW- this was "Jaime" from next door leaving a comment, if you didn't figure that out. I didn't realize it put my "blogger" name on my comment. Didn't know if you would know who CWZARZMOM was. LOL (stands for Cade William Zaruba and Ashlynne Rae Zaruba)