Day Two

Day two with Chiara has come and gone. She continues to do all the spectacular tricks you night imagine: nursing, sleeping, peeing, smiling, making little sounds, and helping me write this.


Chiara getting some sun.Snuggling after our sun.

Now we have proof.

Snuggles

Uncle Dave can hold a baby one-handed.

Look how much bigger Ezra is holding Chiara than holding Asher four years ago.

I bet this will be a common sight.

Chiara Beth Springfield Serrins

Welcome to our daughter, Chiara Beth Springfield Serrins.

Born 12/28/2007 at 9:51 am. She was 8 lb. 10 oz (one oz more than Asher) and 19.75 inches. If you can't tell from these pictures, she is beautiful and perfect! She is doing wonderfully so far at figuring out her main jobs including nursing and snuggling and sleeping.

Chiara is named for Rachel's maternal grandmother Clara Pierce (Chiara is an Italian form of Clara and it means light). Beth is after Rachel's sister Laura Beth.


Mama and Chiara have some naked snuggles.
Look how little she is.
Chiara gets her exam.
Michelle, our midwife, and Chiara in her first outfit.

Christmas Day

We had a very good and cozy family Christmas. Christmas eve Asher opened one present and we bundled up and went for a walk to see lights in the neighborhood. Then we got up early and he just wanted to open one present and play with it for a while. The adults opened all our presents and Asher spread his out throughout the day (and today too and he's not done yet).

Asher's big present this year is this electronic talking globe. You can see how excited he was by it.


Asher and Mama play with the globe.

LD and Joey took a break from redecorating and cooking to come over and share our Christmas dinner of dressing, broccoli/cheese/rice casserole (courtesy of LD's day of cooking), green beans, salad, and pie. Here she's playing and Asher is dancing.

And a little thing like Joey's sleeping off the exhaustion of five days painting and putting in new floors can't deter Asher playing dragon puzzle with him.

Presents from Haley

Rachel's friend Haley is very funny and, I guess, likes to look in second-hand stores or some other vintage place. She sends awesome and funny presents and post cards. This year's holiday presents were.

This awesome coin bank so that you can save up your coins to buy new jeans. It actually had directions for saving money. Put coins in the slot or something like that.

This coin purse. The other side has a guy throwing his hands up in front of a rainbow but I couldn't get a picture to come out without a glare from the flash. It's Rachel's new coin purse.
Thanks, Haley.

Grandma Susi Sweater

We are so lucky. Ok, we're not lucky in that neither Asher nor Lucky got to meet Grandma Susi or have her make them a sweater. But we're lucky that our cousins have shared their Grandma Susi sweaters so generously. The other day we opened a box of hand-me-downs and found this very colorful sweater.

Trail of Lights

Sunday night was the Third Annual Sullivan/Serrins/Springfield Trail of Lights tour. We may want to shorten the name sometime and be grateful that Mike is a Sullivan or it would all become even more cumbersome. Per tradition, we got a table for the 3.94 Serrins/Springfields and 5.84 Sulivans at Shady Grove after playing on the stage for a while and opening presents. Then we moved to the Trail of Lights with the other few thousand folks now celebrating Sullivan/Serrins/Springfield night. Nice of them to come, hum? Jay took a picture of everyone (but Jay) under the entrance way and I'll post it when I get it.


Opening presents

Asher and Molly seeing the lights in Style.

Candidate Finances

Wow. Yesterday I read this article in Money magazine on Candidate Finances. It's a little mind-boggling and while I'm aware that the average Joe could afford neither to quit his/her job for a few years and travel around campaigning nor to finance a campaign, it's really shocking just how much these people's personal finances differ from that average Joe. The article has more details but the bottom line summary for reported assets:

Obama(D) 1.3 million
Thompson(R) 8.1 million
Clinton(D) 34.9 million
McCain(R) 40.4 million
Giuliani(R) 52.2 million
Edwards(D) 54.7 million
Romney(R) 202 million

Those are the only candidates on which the article reported. Wow.

'Tis the season

Christmas preparations and celebrations are going quite well. Today we got the lights on the tree and the tree topper on top. It's a good thing we cut a few more inches off the bottom of the star wouldn't fit. I held Ash so he could put it up there and it was still a stretch (and I was standing on a step-ladder).
And the other night Audrey, Will, and Keegan came over to exchange presents. Audrey picked up Greek food (yay!) and then the kids exchanged their presents. Asher got the Latin America puzzle which completed his set and we got Keegan a pop-up train book and train sticker book.

"So I said, 'look here, ABC is the way it goes' and he goes, 'no way' and I said 'yes way' and he said, 'no way.'" Then pow.

Ok, that's not how it happened. More like Asher was running around the corner and fell into the dining room chair. Nice shiner though?

Holidays

The holiday season is upon us and it's always fun. In true blended family style, here are assorted pictures. Asher has enjoyed lighting the menorah every night and he has done the lighting. Here's a picture, although in this one I am holding the candle. He's really enjoyed his presents too, including: South America puzzle, Asia puzzle, a Barnes & Noble gift card, and some little toys. Then, yesterday we went out to the Elgin Christmas tree farm. Ok, it was a little strange to cut our own Christmas tree when it was 83 degrees out and I worked up a good sweat sawing it down and dragging it back. They have a good system there where you ride out on a hay ride and they drop you and you just wander around to pick the best tree and cut it down. It wasn't very expensive either which surprised me. Asher helped me cut down the tree but you can't see him very well in this picture.

We haven't started decorating the tree yet but look how big it is. I'm not even sure that our tree-topper star will fit on top. It's our first time to have a live tree and it's just beautiful.

An Ode to TiVo

Ok, not really TiVo but a DVR. This post isn't strictly family related but the Digital Video Recorder (DVR) deserves a blog entry (or 30). We got a DVR less than 2 weeks ago. It's wonderful. We got more channels too and I can't say that I've watched any more TV than before but the DVR is great. Now we can start something taping at 7:00 and start watching it at 7:20 rather than having to wait until the show is over. How wonderful. Particularly if we're taping something from 7-9 which means it would have taken us two days to watch it.

Let's say it all together: The DVR is great!