Christmas Card Photo Shoot

Today, we took a bunch of pictures of Stella for our Christmas card.  We thought we would just focus the card on her since she is "brand new" and that's what we want people to see.  All of the pictures from the photo shoot are in Stella's gallery in this album.  The following is the Christmas card we built using Shutterfly and the three pictures we really liked:

Much to be Thankful For

Megan, Stella, and I went down to Wichita for Thanksgiving.  It goes without saying that Megan and I couldn't be more thankful to have a healthy and beautiful baby daughter.

When I was born, my grandparents on my mom's side had a cradle custom made for me.  My parents still have it and Stella got to experience it for the first time.  Here's a pretty good shot showing the whole thing:

Neat closeup with her hand on a spindle:

The green toy in the upper right hand corner of the cradle, AKA Greenie, was also actually mine.  My Aunt Susanne made it for me.

Stella got to meet several great-grandparents for the first time on this trip.  Great-Grandma K.:

Great-Grandpa K.:

Great-Grandpa P.:

Cousin Braedon managed to work in a feeding session with Stella:

While at Megan's mom's, she dug up one of her baby pictures.  The resemblance is uncanny and there's no doubt that Stella is Megan's daughter:

Happy Halloween!

Megan's mom got Stella the above cat costume for Halloween.  We weren't sure if she was even going to be here on time to wear it, but she's here to pull it off!

Happy Due Date!

Stella came a little early on October 11th, but today is her actual due date.  Although I don't think it's common to celebrate or put much weight on the due date, I thought it was worth noting since we were blessed (and a bit stressed) to have her almost three weeks before we were expecting (according to her calculated due date via Naegele's rule and even then most babies are born after this date).  In celebration of her due date, here's a goofy looking picture of her with her eyes open:

Uncle Ryan

Today, Ryan came up so that Stella could meet her only uncle (currently).  We went out to dinner, and Stella was surprisingly calm.  In fact, she was so good, that one of the waiters didn't notice her and spilled a little bit of salsa on her.  Don't worry, he only got a bit on her clothes, but it could have been bad if it ended up in her mouth or eyes.

Stellar Pumpkin

Tonight, Megan and I carved pumpkins.  As I've previously mentioned, Stella's name means star in Latin, so I wanted to do some kind of star carving.  I was planning to do this before Stella was even born, so it was kinda cool to actually have her around to be in the picture since she came a bit early.  Megan carved the pumpkin on the right which turned out great but was unfortunately ruined by the neighborhood squirrels shortly there after.

Both of the Megan's (my wife and sister) teased me for it's simplicity when I was looking for a star pattern I liked, but I think it turned out pretty well.

Nursery Tree

Early on in the nursery design phase, Megan and I talked about how we wanted to do some kind of tree and bird mural.  Megan looked around a lot and found a company called Surface Inspired that creates a lot of really cool wall decals.  It took a while, but we finally narrowed it down to one we could agree upon.  They're really flexible with the colors of the different components.  We opted for standard brown for the tree limbs and lime green for the leaves and grass while choosing a light pink for the birds.

We got it in the mail a couple of days ago and I started working on putting it up.  Here it is with just the limbs up:

And then something like 75 individual leaves:

Finishing touches included grass around the base and various birds in and flying towards the tree:

We are very happy with it and it looks great in the nursery.