Happy New Year!
We hope that you all had a nice Christmas and New Years. We sure did...mostly we just relaxed and spent time with family. We had a lot of fun doing the first Christmas stuff with Stella. Thank you to the Simons and the Rodebacks for the Christmas gifts. You are too generous. We consider ourselves very fortunate to have such great birth parents and families.
She had fun opening the presents - mostly she loved the 'paper' that we ripped off the presents - but she'll catch on soon enough! :)
A few updates on the baby. The adoption was finalized there in Utah on December 15th. The hearing was conducted by proxy meaning that we did not have to appear there in court in-person. Our attorney and Sandy from LDS Family Services appeared for us. It was a happy day for us...Now we can bless her and be sealed to her. The dates for that are January 31st for the sealing (in the Mesa, Arizona Temple) and February 1st for the blessing.
Another update, Stella now has two teeth! They are so cute! She was teething for a while and then all the sudden one morning, they were just there! She's so good-natured, she wasn't even that fussy or anything. She is also sitting by herself now and is just on the verge of crawling. She gets up on all fours and rocks back and forth - I'd say she'll be crawling within a week or so.
I took her to the doctor this morning (the poor thing had to get four shots!). We found out that she is now 27.5 inches long (75 percentile), her head is in the 33 percentile (I can't remember the exact number of inches), and she is now 15.1 pounds (12 percentile). So, apparently she's kind of tall and thin! Let's hope for her sake that ratio sticks with her when she's an adult! :)
Here are a few pictures of her. Some are from Christmas time, Christmas morning and others are just some we had taken recently.
Taken just last week...
I thought you might like this one because you can see her cute little teeth and her big blue eyes!
This is her blessing dress - I wore this dress when I was her age...my mom saved it for me in case I had a daughter. So, it is very special to me that she will be able to wear it for her blessing.
