Look!  We’re still here.  Life goes on, and Natalie continues to get older and cuter!  Today we celebrated Nata’s second Christmas Eve, whereupon she was gifted with pajamas (a tradition from my family).  Unlike last year, she immediately took to opening her gift.

Opening this gift was essentially the culmination of what amounted to days and days of trying (and sometimes not trying) to be good and not open the presents.  She had a fun time and required little assistance.

She was very excited to find her pajamas.  We’re looking forward to spending Christmas Day together, and hoping we won’t be quite as sick as today.

Recently, we had some photos taken by a photographer who attends our Adult Bible Fellowship at our church.  The results speak for themselves.

I’ll include a link to a full-size version in this post once I get it uploaded.

It really does seem like Natalie has done a lot of growing up recently!  She is coming up on 18 months old, and is having a lot of fun.  She enjoys reading to herself in the car, standing on her head (sort of), and talking, singing, and just making noise.

Just in the last week or two she has come a long ways in trying to repeat us, instead of just saying her “toddlish” word for what we say (for example, toddlish for “shoe” is something like “c’law!”), and has also discovered singing, and her natural talent at emulating the sound a dog makes.  Joanna, this one’s for you:

If you’d like to see that in high definition, I have uploaded a copy at 720p here.  The file is encoded with the Xvid codec.  You can download that here, or just use VLC for windows.

This is a funny program that arranges the most frequently used words on your blog, it’s called a “word cloud”.  It’s easy to see what (who) we talk about the most!