Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Holiday Photo Edition

For the girls' first Christmas, we were lucky enough to travel south to see Steve's family for Christmas, and Christina's mom and sister Cyndie traveled from the east to be with us. It was a wonderful celebration filled with so much love, and we all cherished our time together and our first time with these amazing girls among us.

We try to put only a reasonable number of photos up, but after 10 days of Christmas celebration, we could only narrow it down so much. So, here are photos documenting Elena and Clara on their very first Christmas.


We didn't take the girls to see Santa (we'll save that for next year) but look who did get to meet Santa on her own terms - an increasingly strong little Elena.



On Christmas Eve we let the girls play under the tree...

But by the time they had woken up from their nap, look what had happened!



It was just too much for the girls to stay up on Christmas Eve to open gifts, so we did theirs on Christmas morning. Everyone was so generous and thoughtful, and the girls received so many lovely presents.



However, opening all of those presents made them pretty tired. Finally, poor Elena just fell asleep right on Nana Rose's lap!



But she rallied later in the day, and after a nap got right back into the holiday spirit.



We were so lucky to be with so many family members - we took a group shot to capture the moment together...


But of course we have so many pictures of special moments with all of the relatives getting to share their love with the girls:


The grandmas with the girls (Steve's mom, Christina's mom, and Granny Ellen, Steve's very dear aunt)


Grandma and Elena


Nana Rose and Elena (enjoying the sun outside)


Granny Ellen and Clara


Scott and Elena



Cyndie with her plaid twin Clara


Nanny (Steve's grandmother) and Clara


GDaddy with Clara - the girls just loved his smile!


GDaddy and Nana Rose outside, enjoying the desert landscape with the babies


Steve sharing a fun moment with Clara on the swing



Clara and Elena solo, taking a little advantage of the supply of vitamin D from all that sunshine, relaxing on a hammock.



And, because Clara didn't show up in quite as many of the pictures in this post as Elena, here's a bonus shot of her in the sunshine - although she isn't smiling, we love this photo of her. She's looking so grown up!




And yes, Christina really was there. She's too often the one behind the camera, so she didn't have many pictures alone with the girls, but she had as wonderful a time with these babies as anyone else did. We are just so lucky - thanks to everyone who made our first family Christmas such a wonderful time.

3 comments:

Laura said...

Tell those babies to stop it already with their turning into gigantic girls. What the heck?

So glad you guys had such a great time :)

Merinda said...

Beautiful photos! It looks as though you all had such a nice time and warm weather and sunshine thrown in!

M.C. said...

What great pictures! A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (maybe I'll send Christmas cards sometime this month!). Can't wait to see you all NEXT MONTH!!!