Vance Family Christmas Card 2009 (pdf)

Building on a long tradition, everyone in the Vance family receives a new Christmas ornament each year.  Here’s a picture of Jenelle’s new ornament.

As the mother of three kids under three, Jenelle thinks it’s the perfect ornament for her life right now.  To better understand why, we should explain that the ornament winds up.  Below is a video of it in action.

Jenelle and Jonathan, reluctant to let their three-kids-under-three status keep them from enjoying the Great Outdoors, decided to take their family camping.  Since this would be the first camping trip with newborn twins, they were reluctant to go certain places.  For example, they were reluctant to go anywhere that would require spending the night in a tent.

In November 2008, Jenelle found two infant monkey costumes on clearance at Target.  By this time, she and Jonathan knew that they were expecting twins, and they hatched their costume plans for 2009: the little girls would all be monkeys (i.e., Curious Georgias), Jonathan would be the man in the yellow hat, and Jenelle would be the Woman in the Yellow Hat.  (Literary purists will point out that there is no “Woman in the Yellow Hat” — but don’t you think that the Man gets a little lonely with just a monkey for company?)

This week the Vance family welcomed into the world Clara (formerly known as “Baby A”) and Nicolyn (formerly known as “Baby B”).  The labor was easier than expected, and the babies are larger than expected (both over seven pounds).

Everyone is healthy (but we should note that “healthy” is different from “well rested”).

Here are some pictures of Jenelle from the beginning of February to mid-March.

Autumn and Matthew drove themselves and their little Jedi knights up to see us this past weekend.

We had quite the time.  We all made our first visit to the Portland Children’s Museum, which featured a special exhibit on Bob the Builder.  Bob himself was there.  We also got to enjoy a “Tractor Petting Zoo” with some shiny yellow earth movers.

Do you know what the best time of day is?

At our house, it’s bed time.

(In the later part of the video, Annika is looking at the viewfinder screen on the camera, which has been turned toward her.)

Jenelle thinks these pictures show how much Annika looks like Jonathan when he was little.  What do you think?

In our last episode, the Portland metropolitan area was shut down for a day when several inches of fluffy snow showed up.  That proved to be just a test run for the arrival of the real snow.  The Sunday before Christmas, over six inches of fresh snow fell from the sky.  By Sunday night, our street looked like this (click on the photo):