Introducing...

Our new niece, Destiny!  James and Kelly have been officially approved for adoption of this little 7 year old angel, and we are so excited.  The transition to their home will be gradual, so we haven't met her yet.  I feel like I'm getting to know her quite well through Kelly's pictures already!

Lewis Family Pictures

These were taken on Christmas Eve with the ENTIRE Lewis family! Kelly and James are so awesome. Here is their website in case you are interested: http://www.kellyisnice.com/

To close out 2011

Welcome to Christmas Part II. We are already half-way through January and back into the swing of things, but need to recap the last half of our Christmas before we can move on to new things in the new year.

One of the highlights not related to Christmas was that Hudson passed his post-test for speech therapy! We have been working with Misty (our speech therapist) for several months now, and we've seen great improvement during that time. I'm amazed at how Misty can sit down and "play" with Hudson while teaching him so much. I feel like I went through parenting therapy at the same time! He really caught on fast and grew to love Misty. He would go running to the door and wait on the front porch for her to arrive each week! He did really well on his expressive and receptive language, sitting in his chair for over an hour! Did I mention I strapped him down? Minor detail. He didn't complain a bit.

On to Christmas...This was the first Christmas in 3 years that included the entire Lewis family. Heather has been in either Boston or California, and Jennifer is now in Nashville, but everyone managed to come together at some point on Christmas weekend. We did miss Aaron Christmas day b/c of work, but everyone was at the park on Christmas Eve for pictures. I will do a separate post of Kelly's pics, but those of you are on facebook may have already seen some of them. We are so blessed to have Kelly in our family for MANY reasons, but one is that she so generously and amazingly photographs our family when we can all get together. I would love to have just an ounce of her talent.

We were able to have some quality time at our house with my sisters (Jennifer and Heather) before Christmas. I had so much fun, but it really made me wish we could do life together for real, instead of just catching up. My sweet neices (Skyla and Hazel) entertained Raegan and Hudson, and Hudson now calls every baby, "baby hazel".

We have some funny and sweet videos to share. Maybe only grandparents will care about these, but Raegan's matter-of-fact personality can be funny to us. See if you agree...

Raegan sings "Silent Night" :

Hudson has recently discovered that he loves watching himself on camera, but doesn't love singing on command. Instead, he enjoys saying no and shaking his hair. In typical fashion, Raegan takes over his singing debut:

And lastly, Raegan tells the story of Jesus' birth, with the help of the Little People nativity set and a book that our church gave to us. This one is long, loud (Hudson in the background), and the lighting is bad. But this little story was a key part of our Christmas this year, and I want to make sure that we remember and revisit it every year. So get used to it!