Jamie and John's Blog

Sophie Elizabeth Gillispie arrived on June 9, 2016 at 5:02pm.   She weighed 8lbs 6oz and was 20 inches long. Leah and Emma are excited to have a new baby sister and we couldn't be happier to have our new sweet baby girl!

Leah has enjoyed her first ballet class!  She was in a group of preschool aged girls 3-5 years old.  She danced to a song called "My Heart Does A Little Dance."  She is second from the left in the picture below. We are so proud of our little dancer!  She was so cute in her tutu and did a great job remembering her dance moves!   May 21, 2016

 Leah loves dresses and princesses and all things girly!  She only wants to wear dresses and asks us to call her by Disney princess names.  She has a few favorite toys but the ones she loves the most are a stuffed guinea pig that is pink and named Fiona and her new Build-a-Bear, also pink, named Cinderella.  She has been attending her first ballet class and her recital will be in May.  The girls have started playing together and sharing a room.  Emma loves her big sister and copies everything Leah does! Emma has starting talking a lot more!  She loves the dogs and playing outside.  Emma also loves playing on the piano.  Plastic princess shoes are her favorite thing right now but she also has a stuffed cat named Peaches that she loves.   We have had so much fun with these two and can't wait to see what is in store with our next little girl!  

Emma is 18 months and Leah is 3.5 years old.  Casharina took these beautiful pictures of the girls.  Leah was a darling angel and Emma was running around and trying to avoid the camera at all cost.  They must work it out before hand that only one child will behave during photos. Taking the girls to have their pictures made makes me sweat and my patience is usually edging toward zero before we even walk in the door. I am very impressed by anyone who can get a decent picture of a child.  Casharina did a wonderful job! We're having a great fall so far! We went to Nitro to celebrate the Grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary!  That was fun and we had family photos made with the grandparents and the entire family.  The next day we went to Gritt's Farm and walked through a corn maze and enjoyed each others company. Next week the girls and I are going to Corbin to go to the pumpkin patch with the Baker crew!

We celebrated Leah turning 3 and Emma turning 1 at our house in March.  The theme was Frozen, but Leah just had to wear her Ariel pajamas!  They had fun playing with thier cousins and friends and family.  For Easter, we went to Dana and Chuck's house for dinner and to hunt easter eggs.  The weather was perfect and the girls had a blast!  Here are some pictures of the girls in action.  John just started a new job with Coke working with Wal-Mart accounts across the state.  He will be traveling several times a month and is very excited to be out of the office and back in sales and working with a team.  I have decided to go ahead and take a few years off from teaching to stay home with the girls.  John and I have always talked about me staying home and the time seems right so we are going for it.  This is the Baker family at Holden Beach. With 6 kids ages 5 and under, it was pretty much chaos all week.  We had fun but...

 Time is flying!  Emma is 10 months old now and growing so quickly!  She is catching up with Leah!  Leah and Emma are beginning to play together and as seen in picture #3, Emma likes playing peek-a-boo.  These girls are so much fun!  Leah has really starting talking a lot.  She sings ABC's, Twinkle Twinkle, Itsy Bitsy Spider, Go Tell it on the Mountain, and her new favorite is "Shake it Off" by Taylor Swift.  She likes to start sentences with "So..." and end them with "over there" like, "So... I'm going to go play with my toys over there."  Leah can almost count to twenty without missing a number and she loves flash cards, painting, reading books and playing with her kitchen set. Emma is crawling everywhere.  She can pull up and take few steps with a walker or ride-on toy.  She loves the bathtub!  She also loves anything to do with Leah and giggles and smiles at everything Leah says and does.  The purple shirt she is wear...

Emma is 8 months now and she is trying her best to catch up with big sister Leah!  She has 7 teeth, weighs 19 lbs, and loves Leah!  The week after these pictures were taken, Emma got four top teeth over 6 days.  She is very busy and loves to play and army crawl.  We're looking forward to Christmas with our two girls this year, it should be a ton of fun to watch them enjoy the holiday!  We love our sweet girls!