A New Year, A New Blog

I hope that the New Year is finding everyone in good health! With a new year ahead of us, we decided to go with the times and start a blog this year instead of continuing with babysites.com. I am going to do my best to post a new blog weekly, so keep coming back for the latest and greatest on the Best family.

NOTE: You can view more images, by clicking on the title of the article above. I will have this option with each new post, but hopefully won't have as many photos as I do now, I am just a little behind on updating everyone with photos. Enjoy!

Emma and Nolan both celebrated their birthdays a couple weeks ago. Emma is now 3 and Nolan had his 1st birthday. As goes with most kids who have birthdays 4 days apart from one another (something I always said I would never do to my children, of course until I learned you just don't get to choose those things in life), a joint birthday party was had. It was a great time, but I have to say, I can't wait till next year when we have a "small" party (all done with the big parties....we decided to only have those for "big" birthdays)! We rented space at The Pizza Machine, a fun, new-ish restaurant here in Springfield, and ordered several 40" pizzas, which were delivered to us with a crane. All the kids seemed to have a great time running, playing in the video arcade and going down the slide. Emma and Nolan were all hopped up on sugar by the time we left and we thought for sure they would both fall asleep on the way home (especially since Nolan was 2 seconds from falling asleep on Aunt Kristin), but quite the opposite happened! Emma wanted to open ALL of her wonderful presents when we got home and Nolan wanted to play with the paper, so at 9:30 they were both finally in bed. I wish I could say I got to rest after that, but I had some freelance work to do. I did get to sleep finally at 3:30am. Don't feel sorry for me....I do it to myself!



We had the Fleck family over for lunch this past weekend and the kids had a great time together. Little Jori couldn't look more like her father if she tried! (She is in the picture with Emma in her new "big" girl bed.)

Other big news....

Nolan is walking, well, part of the time. He has still decided that he enjoys the "knee walking" every now and then and even some crawling still, but is really getting the hang of walking. He walked the whole length of our hallway this evening...yeah Nolan!!!!

Emma is officially in a big girl bed and loving it (well for the most part...tonight she told me she wanted her "tent" back on her bed)! We are struggling a bit to get her to lay down at night (as I am positive that is a typical 3 year old struggle) but once she lays down and falls asleep, she stays in her own bed until about 7:30am. Thank goodness that I do not have the 5am wakers (is that a word?).... not sure I could handle that since I normally don't go to bed till after midnight.

We had our first parent/ teacher conference for Emma's preschool. She is doing wonderfully, which I have to say I might be a little biased, but I am not surprised!