Tack Mormor och Morfar

Hayden tyckte om sitt nya flygplan som han fick av Mormor och Morfar. Nu kan han flyga och halsa pa dom nar han vill.

Gymnastics

Hayden just graduated from his first session of gymnastics. He's going to continue for a while longer as he enjoyed it. Here he is on the uneven bars, with his ribbon around the neck.

Emmie slept through Santa's visit, but did wake up and open a few gifts. She especially liked the box it came in.

Santa came to visit with lots of presents. Hayden was impressed by Santa's ability to know exactly what he wanted.

Merry Christmas

The entire Binfield family on Christmas Eve.

Jean, Gary, Emmie, Annika, Hayden and Allan.

Christmas is here

We have enjoyed a great Christmas with lots of presents and food. We are frying a turkey today Christmas day (with the rest of the rednecks in Georgia). Hopefully we won't burn the house down. The kids had a great time opening gifts. Emmie likes everything shiny (she'll have some expensive habits later I'm sure). Hayden was sooooo excited with all his gifts, and was slightly over tired last night.

I'll post some pictures so enjoy!

Hayden's Christmas Party at school

Hayden had a performance at his school for Christmas. They sang Jingle Bell and We wish you a Merry Christmas. Enjoy!

Emmie's trying to walk

Click to see a short video of Emmie as she is learning how to walk.

Emmie's almost walking

I wanted to add another picture of Emmie, showing that she is very close to walking. She has gotten a lot more steady on her feet.

Emmie's first birthday

Emmie turned 1 on November 30th. I cannot believe it's been a year already. She is really close to walking by herself. She does really well when she holds your hand but is still a little hesitant trying on her own. Emmie is quite the climber, and tries to get up on everything. Her birthday party was fun. She got her own little smashcake (Publix gives you a seperate cake for the 1 year old that they can dig their hands and face into). She enjoyed licking all the icing. Emmie got all these cute little dresses, and several dolls. Although she fell asleep prior to opening all the gifts.

Thanksgiving at Fripp

We spent Thanksgiving at Fripp, which was wonderful. We enjoyed a hayride, met with Santa and just relaxed the whole weekend. The kids had fun and we saw the biggest alligator ever.

The weather was nice, slightly cold. But ey, not beats a weekend at the beach.

Today it's 75 degrees outside, very warm, but we need rain. Yesterday people were protesting because the governor had asked everyone to pray for rain. Obviously some people don't have anything better to do than protest!

Emmie has an earinfection, poor thing and has been miserable. Hopefully the antibiotics will help her soon. This past weekend we just hang out at the house, watched football and cheered for the DAWGS.

I'm adding a picture from Homecoming. It's taken at Legion's pool (it was empty). All the kids were running back and forth in the pool and had the best time.

Emma, Kenny, Dylan, Hayden and Olivia

Homecoming at Georgia

This past weekend was Homecoming at Georgia and my dearest girlfriends, Paige and Sonja with their families were in town. As usual the swimteam has a tailgating party prior to the game and it was great to run in to some old friends that we use to swim with. I remember when I was younger I use to be so annoyed by all the kids that were running around but of course now that it is my kids it's adorable. Everybody went to the game, UGA vs. Troy which we won, except for Sonja and I, we always hang out at the tailgate and get drunk. Some things never change!

After the game we went to the Wilson's to hang out and catch up. Another former swimmer, Danielle was their with her family which includes twin girls that are 5 (Olivvia and Emma) and a boy who is almost 3 (Kenny) so the house was rockin' (poor Wilson's). Hayden and Olivia totally bonded and were playing all evening. The little girls Emmie, Lauren (5 months) and Maeve (8 months) had their first picture together. It's not easy to get them to sit still and look at the camera. They are so freakin' cute!

Sonja and Maeve stayed with us until today and it was so nice to hang out and catch up. It's hard to be so far away from eachother.

I also wanted to add to Paige, Sonja and Danielle that you are amazing mothers and it is great to see how you all have developed into great parents and you have the cutest kids.

Back from vacation

We just got back from Fripp after spending a week with our friends, the Jones' from England. Tim and Gary swam together for many years on the National Team in Great Britain and have remained friends since. Jo and I get along great, and our kids had a blast together. Their kids, Isabel (7) and Evan (3) are so adorable and have the cutest accent. Unfortunately the weather wasn't the greatest, but we had fun just hanging out together. Tonight the kids dressed up for Halloween and went trick or treatin' on Fripp. This was the first time for Isabel and Evan as Halloween is not as big over in the U.K. I will add some photos later.
This upcoming weekend is Homecoming at Georgia and we are looking forward to seeing old friends and reminisence a bit.
Cheers

More Christening pictures

Emmie was so cute in her Christening dress. Unfortunatley she was too big for the gown that has been passed down in the family. Here she is chewing on her doll she got as a present from Saga and Viggo. Emmie has 4 teeth up top and 4 on the bottom. It hurts when she gets hold of you!
We just got back from gymnastics. It was Hayden's first time and he liked it a lot. His favorite thing was to crawl through the tunnel and pretend the monsters were coming!
I'm excited that people are actually reading our blog. It's a great way just to write down some events and show pictures of the kids. It's not as fun to show pictures of ourselves as it is just depressing to notice the gray hair and love handles..

Hayden in front of one of the fishing boats at the harbour in Ramlösa

Fishing

One of my mother's and brother's favorite things to do is to go out deep sea fishing, and this time Hayden was able to go with them. The boat leaves from a small harbor in Helsingborg and goes out on the water between Sweden and Denmark (Öresund). Hayden was excited all week about the trip, however when he was woken up at 6am on Saturday he wasn't too thrilled. Once out on the boat, Hayden helped everybody reel in herring, macrel, and cod which we grilled that evening. Yummi.
Here is a picture of Hayden in front of one of the fishing boats. Apparently I will have to download that picture later as it's not working again.

So the picture downloading is finally working. Here is a picture from the Christening at the church in Perstorp. Emmie was very well behaved and didn't cry until the end, when we wanted to take all the family pictures.

Viggo and Hayden after running endless laps around my parents' house

So I'm back. Emmie is crawling like crazy now and has also figured out how to stand up. What happened to my sweet little baby who would stay in one place.
It was great to be back in Sweden and being able to catch up with friends and family. I got to spend some time with my oldest friend Elisabeth (she is not old, very young like myself, but we have known eachother since kindergarden). She has two kids and her boy Viggo is Hayden's age. We were excited to let them play together to see if they got along despite their language barrier. However, as long as you are able to run, scream, fight, box and play airplanes, it doesn't matter. They had a blast together.

The Christening went well. Our neighbors, Alan and Beverly are Emmie's Godparents together with my sister-in law Jenny. Beverly had slipped down our basement steps prior to heading to the airport, so her entire vacation was spent on crutches, poor thing.

I've lived in the South now for 17 years, and one great thing about the South is that it's OK to say something bad about somebody. You just add "Bless her heart" and you are OK. I just added that comment because I said poor thing about Beverly, it made me think about it. Although a real Southerner would have said "poor thang"!

So I'm trying to add some photos from the actual Christening but it's not going so well. Things to learn. It's time to pick up the little guy from pre-school.

Inspired by other friends and family that have created their own blog, I decided to give it a try. New to blogging, it will be a lot of trial and error which I already discoverd when I wrote my first entry and then it disappeared. Hmm, not a good start.
We just returned from a 2 week trip to Sweden. We went to visit friends and family, but most importantly to have Emmie Christened. She was Christened in the same church I was 37 years ago, and Hayden 4 years ago. It's a pretty little church from the 12th century. Talking about Emmie, she is just waking up so I will have to continue later.