Moving On

Well I have given up for the moment finding the Thanksgiving and Christmas pics I took with my camera. I really hope they are not gone. I have some cute ones of activities we did throughout the Christmas season. But I need to move on with blogging instead of waiting to find them. So maybe you all will see Christmas pics in July or something when I finally come across them. Fingers crossed that I do.

Cutest Baby Ever

This picture of Natalie and my mom on Christmas Eve makes me smile every time I see it. I just want to pinch those cute little chubby cheeks.

Natalie is a big topic of conversation in our house. Ella has named all of her dolls "baby Natalie." When we put out our Nativities for Christmas, she insisted that baby Jesus was actually baby Natalie. When I tell Ella her adoption story she often asks if we can go bring baby Natalie home to our house :) It is so cute!

True Meaning of Christmas

When we are in town, we spend Christmas Eve with my cousins. It is one of my favorite days of the year. I love it when we all get together. It is really interesting to me that even though we all grew up so far away from each other and didn't see each other for years, we were able to pick up right where we left off. When I'm with my cousins it FEELS like home. I'm really lucky to be so close to 5 more amazing women.

Anyway . . . we have noticed in the past years that we tend to be a little excessive with gifts on Christmas Eve. We all didn't have the best childhoods growing up so we I think we overcompensate with our children no matter how hard we try not to. So this Christmas Eve we decided to adopt a family. Sandy found a single mom with 3 teenagers who just took in her niece and nephew who are 4 and 6. I'm not posting this to brag about what we did but to remember how good it made us feel to help this family. We went a little overboard so next year we are going to adopt 3 or 4 families. Here is a pic of all of us and the gifts for the family:

Check out Aaron in the far back left of this picture. I just noticed it - he cracks me up.

I'm posting this picture of us eating dinner so you can get an idea of how much we had. This whole table was covered with gifts for the family, as well as having gifts under the table and on the side of the table:

I really wish I could have been a fly on the wall when our adopted family had Christmas. We have all been recipients in past of families adopting us for Christmas and it felt so amazing to give back. I hope they had the Christmas of their dreams.

The Baby Whisperer

Lance has always been so great with kids. Natalie loved being held by Lance on Christmas Eve. If anybody tried to take her from him she would cry and then stop crying when he would take her back. His calling right now is in the nursery which he thinks is the greatest calling in the world. Every Sunday morning he gets phone calls from parents thanking him for the job he is doing and he often gets cards and treats from the kids. I married a good man.

The Real Butterscotch

Those of you with girls understand my love/hate relationship with this horse. Ella wanted one for Christmas so bad!! She told everyone that she knew that she was going to be a good girl and Santa was going to bring her "Butterscotch." She accidentally found one of her Christmas presents hiding in my closet and she said "Oh no Santa brought the wrong thing, take it back to store and get Butterscotch." As much as I love to make my little girl happy, I just couldn't justify shelling out the almost $300 for a toy that didn't seem to do all that much. Luckily, Aunt Sandy saved the day!!!! Sandy lives on a farm in the neatest house built in the late 1800's out in Greensboro, Maryland. She gratiously volunteered to let us tell Ella that Santa left a pony for her at Sandy's house where it could be taken care of. She even let Ella rename it. Christmas Eve we went over to Sandy's and all eagerly watched Ella's reaction to getting what we considered the best present a 3 year old obsessed with horses could get. Ella was uncharacteristically shy at first but as soon as everyone (and all their cameras) went back inside, she really warmed up and was so excited!

Another Thanksgiving!

I am so excited because I accidentally deleted these pictures but just found out that my mom had some on her camera. My cousins held Thanksgiving a week early so that we could all have Thanksgiving together. I was happy that they did that because my favorite time of year is when we all get together for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I am so lucky that I get to live near all of them. They are more than cousins - they are sisters. Thanks Stephane for hosting this!

20 Things

Taking another slight break from the updates. Saw this on a message board and thought I would try it. Who knows - maybe I'll learn something about myself if I can make it through the whole list.


20 THINGS ABOUT MYSELF THAT DON'T INCLUDE KIDS


1. I LOVE to read. Love, love, love it. I constantly am reading 4 or 5 books at a time. We purposely moved right next door to a library so I always have a supply of books. I sometimes worry about going blind because then I wouldn't be able to read.

2. I finally turned 30 this year. It was very welcome as I have felt on the edge of 30 forever.

3. I once performed in a circus at a Club Med in Ixtapa, Mexico. My act was the Spanish Web. I also was on the trapeze and rode a bike with 7 or 8 people on it at once.

4. I collect pitchers and pottery. I'm looking right now at old pottery on ebay to bid on. No idea why I love it so much - just do.

5. I feel a strong connection to Italy - maybe I lived there in a past life (j/k). Italy is my dream vacation.

6. I am a closet hippy.

7. I miss dancing. When I was in highschool I performed with two different folk dance groups. I miss it all the time. As soon as we are not so busy, Lance will be taking folk lessons so we can dance together (he doesn't know this yet).

8. I really like to find good deals and then tell everyone how much I paid for everything.

9. I am extremely shy but I think I hide it well.

10. My dream job would be teaching seminary or high school English. I love working with teenagers.

11. I am psychic - no REALLY I am!

12. I loathe myself for the amount of TV I watch but don't do anything to change it.

13. I am 15 lbs overweight but refuse to do anything to change that. I blame the weight on my medications and am fine with that :)

14. I am trying to buy a 1/4 of a cow right now. I only want my family to eat grass fed, free range beef. Along the same lines, I am excited for the farmer's markets this year. I am going to try and only buy our produce from them all season, not from a grocery store. I feel passionately about supporting local farmers.

15. I am terrified of starting the next round of medications the doctors have for me so I have been putting it off. I know it would help but I am afraid of even more weight gain - which is just silly.

16. I love being busy. I turn into a nasty mean grouch while I'm busy but I love projects, deadlines, and stress. Go figure.

17. I have recently learned to knit. I am currently making a very "interesting" scarf.

18. I have terrible insomnia. 2 to 3 hours of sleep a night has been the norm for quite some time now.

19. I really want to take Tae Kwon Do or Karate.

20. I have minor OCD which drives everyone crazy except me :)

So Proud of My Son

I had to take a break from updating my blog to mention how proud I am of Spencer. If I don't do it now, by the time I've caught up I will have forgotten to post this. I am impressed by Spencer on a daily basis. The other day he told me his friends in the neighborhood were having a Nintendo DS Wi-Fi party and they were playing a game that was rated "teen" for a lot of violence. He told the boys he wouldn't play that game and his friend told him to not bother coming then. I felt bad for him and offered to look at the game and see if I felt it was okay for him to play. He told me he knew it wasn't right and he would rather miss the party than do something wrong. He has so much integrity. I am very proud of the person he is becoming.

The Perfect Gingerbread House

Check out Ella's gingerbread house. If you look closely you'll see that everything was placed symmetrically on both sides. She had free reign when decorating and impressed us all. The only part I helped on was the icing. She is so like me - we both love order!

Tiny (And Not So Tiny) Racers

After Nascar, we decided to get in on the action ourselves and take the kids racing. Maddi and Ella were so cute riding around the track. We didn't purposely dress them in matching outfits, it just ended up that way.

Lance, Spencer, Scott, and Michael got to race the real Go Karts. Here are the promised pics:

Nascar

What a fun time! While in North Carolina we took the kids to the speedway to see where they race the cars. The kids had a blast!

We look like we were airbrushed into this photo but we really were there - I promise!

Thanksgiving

Top 5 things I am grateful for this year:

5. Ella being potty trained. The thought of not having to buy diapers anymore makes me giddy with joy!

4. Family support. This has been such a hard year in so many ways, but my family has really helped me through it. A combination of me, chronic pain, and medication side effects, does not make for a very good time. Luckily they have laughed, (and cried!) right along with me.

3. Lance being done with school. Yes, he has been done with school for well over a year now but this will be on my top 5 for many a year to come.

2. My husband. Yes, so incredibly cheesy - I know. We hit the big 10 year mark this year and I couldn't imagine anyone more wonderful to experience life with.

1. Having family live close enough that we can invade them on Holidays. We have lived so far from family most of our marriage that is has been really nice for our kids to have a chance to get to know their cousins.

This year we went to North Carolina for Thanksgiving and spent it with Lance's brother Scott and his family. The kids had a BLAST (and us adults had fun too). After the Thanksgiving meal we played a couple games of croquet. Thanks Scott and Michelle for letting us visit with you guys!

I LOVE this last picture of the kids. Scott reminds me of the Pied Piper - I think he could have made them do anything. Could Ella's smile in the third picture be any more fake?

Happy Halloween

Halloween was awesome this year. Spencer went as Mario with Ella as Princess Peach. We are so lucky to be in a neighborhood full of kids. The kids had a blast running around with their friends. Once Ella realized that candy was given to her at every door, there was no stopping her!

Cox Farms

Every year our family goes to Cox Farms in early October. They have so much for the kids to do - a hayride, slides, rope swing, goats, etc. This is the first year Ella wasn't afraid of the goats. Here are some pics of our fun day . . .

It Took Months . . .

. . . for me to finally sit down and play with updating my blog. I don't love it, but I don't hate it, so it might stick around for awhile before I change it. At any rate, I now have a ton of pictures to add to cover the last couple of months. I really want to get caught up this week!