The Start of a New Year

We are taking the opportunity this Holiday to reflect on how life as we know it is going to change so much. For the last two years, it has been just Cece and us, so we have very much gotten used to doing everything as a family and it is going to be a whole different dynamic soon when one of us will have to watch Cece and one will have to take care of the baby. It will be an interesting change, but definitely one that we are looking forward to!

This year instead of Christmas gifts being exchanged between the adults in my family, we decided to set up a vacation at Great Wolf Lodge in Williamsburg, VA and celebrate there. We didn't want to go up for both Christmas and Great Wolf at New Year's with Michelle being 7 months pregnant, so we only saw my family at Great Wolf Lodge. This was our first ever visit to a Great Wolf Lodge, and they are a pretty impressive water park complete with arcades, bowling, magic quests, and everything else to keep you light in the wallet when you visit. Unfortunately, it is tough to get a lot of pictures and video when you are inside the water park itself because the place is so humid and I don't have a water proof camera, so I didn't get any photos or video from inside the park.

Overall Cece really enjoyed the trip, but did get bored of the water park itself after a couple of days. She did okay swimming and loved the pool that she could stand up in, she even went down one of the small water slides a couple of times. But then I made the mistake of telling Michelle not to catch her at the bottom and she went under water and then was not having any more of the water slide. She couldn't get enough of the characters in the lobby, and they even had a puppet show every evening where the mechanical puppets sang, and she told us that the robots were really good singers. As an adult the show got old very quickly, but she couldn't get enough. Here are a few photos from the lobby:

 

 She enjoyed the bowling as well, but didn't like how loud it was and got bored at the end of the frame. 

Our favorite moment from the trip was when they had one of the characters out in the lobby just saying hi to everybody and dancing a little bit to the music that they had playing. Cece of course loves characters and went right up to him and gave him a hug, and she also loves the music that they were playing, so started to dance with him as well. It was incredibly cute as everybody in the lobby just kind of watched her dance and were so amazed that she was actually mouthing the words to two of her favorite songs. Here is a photo of her first going up to him and some great video of her dancing with him (hopefully the video shows up, was having problems getting it to load on here). 

Of course the main reason that we went on the trip was to be able to see the family for Christmas, so even though we didn't do presents for the adults, we still did presents for the kids. One of Cece's favorite presents was the giant puppy that she got from her cousins Ian and Will, because Will had one just like it that Cece loved! Here she is opening up her puppy.

Cece loves her oldest cousin Will, and here they are playing in the bed in our room having so much fun!

Of course Cece is still practicing to be a good big sister and one of her favorite books is "I'm Your Big Sister." It is a great book that talks about becoming a big sister and Cece certainly enjoys it and enjoys reading it to us!

More to come very soon!