Merry Christmas to Us!

We had another great Christmas with our sweet little Hannah! Unfortunately I had to work on Christmas day this year, but Santa came a day later and we had a great time celebrating on Saturday. Sam, Hannah and I had our own Christmas at home on Saturday. It was really nice and she loved her gifts. It was hard to keep her interested to open them because she was so busy playing with everything! On Sunday we traveled to Florida to see our families. We went to Orlando first and exchanged gifts and visited with everyone. Then we went to Lake Wales and saw Sam's family. It was actually kind of chilly in Florida which made for a nice Christmas time there.

Hannah's favorite gifts this year were her kitchen set from Santa, a shopping cart and lots of play food, books, and blocks. She also got a potty and some books about going potty. We will be working on that pretty soon! I am so hopeful that we can get her potty trained before our new little baby comes!

Here is Hannah cooking up a storm with her new kitchen set. She was not all that interested in her other gifts after seeing this!

This toy was also a big hit and was great for keeping her entertained on the long car ride to Florida.

She loved her hat and mittens!

Go Gators!!

Hannah thought our nativity set was pretty fun when we let her play with it!

Aunt Jackie and Uncle Andrew

Hannah got another cute hat! She loves hats!

We had a surprise visit from Great Grandpa when we got to Florida! He came all the way from New York to spend Christmas with us. We were glad to get a picture of Hannah with both of her great grandparents!

Opening presents at the Dergosits' house!

Happy Half Birthday!

Today is Hannah's half birthday! 1 1/2 years old today! Here is her latest stats:

Wt: 21 lbs 5 ounces

Ht: 30 1/2 inches

She is getting so big! We love you little girl!

A Visit with Santa

Today Hannah and I went to visit Santa. It went much better than I had anticipated. She cried briefly when I first sat her on his lap, but after he gave her a candy cane she was okay. We quickly wiped away the tears and got some pictures. Of course she refused to smile, but I was just happy that she was not screaming!

Decking the Halls!

Christmas is my favorite holiday! I just love this time of year! It is so fun to be able to teach Hannah all about Christmas and pass on all our Christmas traditions to her. We decorated the house for Christmas this past week. Hannah is loving all the decorations. She keeps pointing to the stockings hanging from the mantel and telling me "socks!" She is so cute!

I am hoping to take her to see Santa this week. I am sure she will be terrified of him this year. She has a major fear of facial hair, but we will at least attempt it so we can say we tried to visit Santa.

Another exciting thing for us this year is that we actually got a real tree! Sam and I have always had an artificial one and even growing up I never had a real tree except maybe when I was real little, so this was very exciting for us. We went out in the cold a couple days ago and picked out a really pretty tree. The house smells so nice and it looks so good! I don't think we will ever go back now! It was quite an experience getting it in the house and in the stand but well worth the effort.

We put on some Christmas music and pulled out the decorations for the tree last night. Hannah wanted so badly to help with the decorating and I felt like the whole time we kept saying, "No," "Don't touch," "Careful" to little Hannah. We have so many ornaments that are breakable, but we did find some she could help with and they are hanging near the bottom of the tree within her reach. She was a great helper and had a good time with it. It was so fun to be able to do this as a family and we can't wait to have another little one to share the next Christmas season with us!

Here she is admiring the tree!

She loves her baby.

She is going to be a great big sister!

Thanksgiving

Last week we celebrated our second Thanksgiving with our little Hannah. I was off work and it was nice to be able to spend time as a family. Sam's parents were able to come up and spend the week with us as well. Hannah is very worn out from all of the excitement over the last few days. Sam even informed me today that he had to put her in "time out" because she was being so naughty!

Hannah did not seem to appreciate her Thanksgiving dinner as much as the rest of us did. She is such a picky little eater! She liked the bread and the cranberry sauce but not much else. While the turkey was in the oven we all went to Kennesaw Mountain and took a little hike/walk for a few miles. It was so nice out and Hannah fell asleep in the stroller.

Then on Friday, after some morning online shopping, we all went to Cochran Shoals and took a walk down by the river. We were trying to walk off all of the food that we had eaten the day before. Sam and I decided we would go for a jog. It ended up not being a great idea since I believe I would have put myself into labor had I continued on much further. After some rest everything was fine, but I won't be trying that again until after the baby is out. I will just stick with Zumba for now!

Playing in the leaves!

Hannah also finally learned how to say "grandma" a couple days ago. She has been saying "papa" for a while now, but Grandma Sampson was very excited that she could say her name while they were here visiting.

We had a great little Thanksgiving break and have lots to be thankful for this year! We are especially thankful for Hannah's little laughs and sweet smiles, our little baby girl that we will be meeting soon and our family and friends!

Little Indian

She loves her little Indian hat she made at school!

Andrew and Jackie's Wedding!

So last week we made a very long trip down to Florida for Andrew and Jackie's wedding. The car ride down there is just so long and Hannah was excited to go and stayed awake just about the whole ride. She was in good spirits as long as she had a snack and a cool toy to play with in the car. We spent time at both my parents house and Sam's parents house. It was really great to see everyone that we had not seen in a while and for them to get to see Hannah and see how big she is getting. We were definitely missing the comforts of our own home by the end of the week and Hannah had started to get sick so we cut our trip short by a day and headed back home. It was so nice to get back in our own beds!

Here is Hannah sleeping in the car on the way down. At the very end of the trip she finally gave in and took a very short little nap with her blanket in hand as usual.

Excited to finally be out of the car!

Hannah had not seen Aunt Amy since last Christmas. Amy also brought along Hannah's future Uncle Josh. They got along great!

So after spending most of the week down in Florida it was finally wedding time! Sam and I were so excited to see Jackie and Andrew get married. They are just perfect together! Hannah came with us to the rehearsal dinner so she could see everyone, but we decided to leave her at my parents house for the wedding. She thought it was fun to yell "dada" throughout the entire rehearsal, so we decided it was best to not have her doing that at the wedding. It was definitely a good decision though as we did not get back from the wedding until late and Hannah would have been losing her mind if we tried to keep her up that late.

Here is most of the Sampson family except for Andrew and Sam. We are all dressed up and ready for the wedding to start!

Andrew and Jackie's first dance!

The "Brothers"

Sam and Andrew looking very handsome!

Andrew and Jackie had a beautiful wedding and we were so happy that we were able to be there to share it with them!

A Thanksgiving Party

Today at Hannah's preschool they had their Thanksgiving party! Each parent had to sign up to host one of the partys for the year and this one was mine. The kids were so cute! There are just four sweet little girls in her class. When I got there they were all wearing little Indian headbands with feathers in them. I wish I had brought my camera! I brought them the world's messiest cookies....They had sprinkles everywhere! I was supposed to be doing a craft with them and we made little turkeys out of paper plates and painted them. The kids had such short attention spans and I ended up finishing Hannah's for her. I read them a cute little Thanksgiving story which most of the kids actually listened to and enjoyed. Then Hannah proceeded to show me every toy that they had in their classroom. Hannah is the smallest one in there but was talking the most. She is such a little chatterbox! They were so good and played so sweetly together. It makes me very excited for all her future little school projects!

The Bump

So people have been asking to see pictures of the baby belly. I have not taken nearly as many pictures this time as I did when I was pregnant with Hannah. My belly is getting bigger so much faster this time! Here are a couple recent pictures.

A Little Sponge

I don't mean to brag but I have just been so impressed by Hannah lately! She is just like a little sponge now and it is so fun to teach her new things. She is so eager to impress us with her new skills and loves to copy what we say. She can now point to just about all of her body parts and tell us what they are and her new cutest trick is that she will tell you what sounds animals make. My favorite is when she throws her head back and says "Moooo!" She barks back at our dogs now and meows at our cats. It is pretty cute!

Here she is showing us where her belly button is

She also has become pretty good at using her fork which makes meal time much cleaner. Hopefully soon she will be able to move from the high chair to the table to eat with us! She is also quite the climber these days and has figured out how to climb onto the dining room table chairs. This means that she can now also reach all the things we put on top of the table to keep out of her reach. We will have to modify our babyproofing to keep up with her Today she even tried to be a big helper and throw away some papers for me. We told her what a good job she was doing by helping, so she then proceeded to "help" by throwing a bunch of her toys in the trash too!

Our Little Ducky's Halloween

The Sampson's had a very busy and fun-filled Halloween. I actually had a Saturday off of work, so we all got to spend the day together and it was great! We carved our pumpkin this morning and Hannah was interested for about the first 15 minutes and then she decided she would rather just watch Sesame Street. Sam decided that to cheer on our team we should make a Florida Gator pumpkin. It came out great but was so much work! We were a little sad that we were not able to actually go to Jacksonville and see the game like so many our friends got to....maybe next year!

Hannah and Daddy carving the pumpkin together.

Here is our pumpkin all lit up!

When it was time for putting her costume on Hannah, of course, hated it, but after a few minutes she was okay. She was the cutest little ducky! We took her to the fall festival at her preschool. There were so many people there and she was very overwhelmed. We had so many people thinking she was anything but a duck. We were asked if she was Big Bird or a chicken.....I thought she was pretty obviously a duck. We tried to put her in the bounce house but she was not having it. After a lap around the festival we decided we decided to leave and try this kind of thing next year. Hannah was very excited to see her teacher, Ms. Tanoa, there and got some candy. The M&Ms are her favorite! Even though Hannah was pretty much ready to go to bed after her busy day we thought we would try some trick-or-treating. We only made it to one house before our baby was about to fall asleep and the rain and the cold brought us back home. Time for Sam and I to settle in to watch our TiVo'd Florida/Georgia game! Go Gators!

A New Way to Ride

So we finally gave in and bought a jogging stroller last weekend. The regular stroller was just not cutting it and this new one is so much better. Sam has been running a lot lately (so proud of him by the way!) and now he can take Hannah with him when he goes. Doesn't she looked relaxed? Today me and Hannah went to Kennesaw Mountain and took a nice long walk. The fall color was so pretty!

It's a Girl!

Sam and I just wanted to share that the new baby we are expecting is another girl! Everything is going well and we are still on track to be meeting her in early March. My belly is growing fast! We cannot wait to meet her!

Loving the Pumpkin Patch!

It is cooling off up here in Georgia and that means fall! This is my favorite time of year. Sam's parents came up to visit for a week or so and we thought that while they were here it would be a good time to take Hannah to the pumpkin patch. There is a church near our house that has tons of pumpkins and Sam and I have been getting our pumpkin there every year.

Hannah loved it! She had so much fun running up and down the aisles of pumpkins. We tried to let her pick out a pumpkin and she picked a little tiny one that she wanted and carried it around. She tried to pick up one of the big pumpkins, but of course she was unsuccessful. She got to ride in a wagon with her pumpkins and she had such a great time. It was in the 50's outside when we went and Hannah's little nose was so pink and cute in the cold. We got some great pictures!

Looking a little overwhelmed by all of the pumpkins!

Hannah found her perfect pumpkin. She picked this one out all by herself!