The Osborne Family

This June, Ali will be a big sister. Currently she has no idea what we are talking about when we try to tell her. Maybe when she starts to see her mom’s belly grow she will start to understand something is going on. Right now she pretty much just ignores us when we try to explain, or she just laughs and does something crazy. We are pretty exctided about going through this process and just watching Ali try to understand everything. I do think as mom’s belly gets larger and Ali sees a few more ultrasounds she may start to get an idea of what is happening. I think it will be really fun when she can feel kicks comeing from mom’s belly. We have a little ways to go for that yet, but probably not too much longer. I am sure Ali is going to be an awesome big sister, she loves to play with her cousin and loves to interact with other kids. She has really started getting into “helping out” around the house. She loves to help unload the dishwasher, bring you your phone or shoes (although sometimes she picks them up and runs with them), put on her coat/hat, and throw things away (even though we don’t want her to open the trash). So when the baby comes I think she is going to step up and at least try to help out with things, it may just make the chores a little longer or harder but she really enjoys it and feels a sense of accomplishment. It is hard to tell her no when her intentions are good and smiles are so big. continue reading…

2008 seemed to pass by all too quickly. However, this year brought us a little more excitement than years past. We celebrated our first wedding anniversary, Josh celebrated his 30th birthday, our niece Milena turned 1, our good friends Chad and Erin were married, and as you know we celebrated the birth of our daughter Alexandra.

This year we were able to celebrate Christmas and the New Year with our entire family. In early December Colleen and I decided that we needed to take some christmas pictures with Ali. We took a few family pictures with the three of us and then finished up with a few pictures of just Ali. In all we took about 450 pictures. I have posted about 100 of them in this years Christmas gallery. We used a couple of the pictures to create a family Christmas card, we used a couple more as backgrounds for our computers and we also used one or two in a calendar we made for 2009.

We celebrated Christmas this year both in Ohio and in Michigan. In Ohio we celebrated with Grandma and Grandpa Osborne and we also celebrated with Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa Hays and the rest of the Hays family.  In Michigan (at Uncle Mike and Aunt Donna’s house) we celebrated Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa Sullivan, Uncle Mike and Aunt Donna, Ryan and Margie. We had a great time with everyone and Ali had a very nice first Christmas. We have a lot of great pictures and some videos.

While in Michigan we were also able to celebrate the New Year with the Osborne and the Sullivan families which was fun to have everyone together at one time.

Ali has now started to eat rice cereal; however, I would use the term ‘eat’ loosely as she spits out a large portion of each spoonful, leaving us catching the rice in the spoon and attempting to get it back into her mouth. But eventually we manage to get a decent amount in her and down the front of her. If you are interested at all in this process we have a small video of us feeding Ali posted on the Ali Videos page.

We hope your 2008 was great and we wish you a fine 2009.