Meet Annabelle!

I got a pretty sweet present for my birthday this year-- a beautiful new niece, born the day after my birthday!  Her adoption by Heather and Andrew was finalized a few weeks ago, so it is finally okay to share her with you.  Her adoption story is a pretty crazy one.  Heather and Andrew learned they were picked to be her parents 2 days before she was born!  They were at the hospital for her birth, and became a family of 3 in 1 whirlwind week!  This fall, we girls used a long weekend to visit our newest cousin about a month after she was born and we had a wonderful time.

It was the actually the first time just us girls flew somewhere together.  We missed Dave, of course, but had a ton of fun on this little adventure to meet Annabelle.

The Colorado School of Mines, a STEM school, has been recruiting Ella pretty heavily.  Almost to the point of being obnoxious.  We had to laugh when the FIRST THING we saw after stepping off our airplane in Denver was this big sign!

Meeting Annabelle was one of the best parts of our year!  She is the most content baby, just starting to smile when we were there.  We held hands and read stories and had dance parties and oohed and aahed over her sweet little newborn outfits and rocked her to sleep and tried to help in any way we could.  Heather is an amazing hostess and mom and juggled it all with ease!

The girls just love having their first girl cousin.  Ella held her almost nonstop while Delia gave the pups lots of love and attention.  Though the public didn't see pictures of posts of Annabelle for the first 6 months of her life due to strict foster parent/adoption rules, we were just thrilled to meet her right away and have been enjoying regular facetime calls and updates.   

We would have been perfectly content if this long weekend had nothing but baby snuggles in it.  But, of course, Heather planned lots of cool outings so it felt like a lovely vacation too!