Granny's Birthday

This year for Granny’s birthday, I once again made her favorite cake….a chocolate boxed cake with store-bought chocolate icing. :) She’s so easy. It really is one of the best cakes. Why mess with perfection?

I got it all made the night before, and Meredith and Wallace helped me decorate it with sprinkles and candy hearts. And then once I got home from work on the 23rd, the kids helped me add the finishing touches!

They, of course, fought over who got to put on the candles (so they each got to put a few on there), and I added the Happy Birthday bunting that I’ve grown so fond of. :)

We did the whole cake and ice cream thing in a hurry because the kids and I had to run to make it to Anna’s soccer party on time.

Oh, and Wallace' added his train from last year again. :)

So, I really thought we had just enough distance between the candles and bunting….. Apparently I was wrong.

It was so funny. We were only like a line and a half into the “Happy Birthday Song” when it all caught on fire, so Granny was holding back from blowing it out! Haha! And so I quickly rushed us through the rest of the song!

We didn’t set off any smoke alarms, and the cake still tasted great. But it appears I need to invest in a new bunting. “/

Granny, we all love you so much and honestly wouldn’t have made it this far without you.  Thank you for all you do for us.  I sometimes still can’t believe that you just picked up and moved from Houston the day after Anna was born.  Talk about commitment!  I can only pray I will be as awesome of a Granny as you are one day. 

Happy birthday!

Jesse and Aaron's Wedding

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of getting to shoot another wedding! Jesse and Aaron actually got married on my anniversary. Good thing Josh and I are fairly terrible at anniversaries. I begged Jen to come and help me so I’d have an additional shooter, and I’m so glad I did. Not only did we get to hang out, but together I think we did a pretty good job capturing everything. Jen, I owe you one!

They were married in an airplane hangar! It was a great location. I’m just going to post a few of my favs here. :)

Meredith got to go along and photobombed a few times.

This wedding was so much fun, and so original. Everyone had such a great time! Thanks for letting me be a part of your special day Jesse and Aaron.

What we've been up to this year

I just realized I haven’t posted anything on here since December!  How did that happen?  Well, I guess we’ve been busy.

Anna had a great basketball season, and just like last year, she finally scored a goal in the very last game. :) It was sooooo exciting!!!! In my opinion, even better than watching the Spurs.

Valentines came and went, and it was kind of icky weather outside, so for their annual Valentine’s photos, the girls and I set up an indoor photo shoot for the first time.  They cut out most of those hearts in the background.  It ended up being a fun project!

Since it looked so cute we went ahead and did some sibling pics.

They all picked out their own clothes for the pictures, and I think they did a great job!

My bestie Jen moved back to Texas!!!! I still kind of can’t believe it. It’s so nice to be able to visit her whenever I have a free weekend, and also not have to wait 3-6 hours for a response to text messages.

The third grade at Anna’s school put on the most adorable recorder concert that she was quite frankly very nervous about. She did great though! They all did. I wish we would have gotten to do something like this when I was in school.

Anna’s been learning how to build a slide show on the computer, and she wanted a photo with her pet hamster, Chenille. She’s almost 2 years old, loves running on her wheel in the middle of the night, eating spinach, tomatoes, and grapes, and pooping on you when you try to hold her. She wore out her old cage and recently moved into a new habitat, which she loves. She had a very close encounter with our dogs yesterday morning, but she seemed to have no idea how dangerous the situation was. Thank goodness we had her cage up so high!

And yesterday we had our track meet!

It was another long, hot March day. How does it always seem to fall on the hottest day in March? Meredith did so much better this season. She was actually excited for practices, and didn’t run away to play in the dirt nearly as much. :)

Hommie was pretty young for his age group this year, and although he didn’t place, he had one heck of a good time!

Anna participated this year!

I’m so proud of her. She had her tonsils removed right in the middle of the season, and she was such a trooper about it all. Of course, her favorite part of the track meet was still all of the socializing in the racers tent.

Maybe I should commit to updating this thing a little more often.  The kids and I love looking back through it now and then.  I was talking to a girl at work who loves to journal, and I thought to myself, who the heck journals?…  Well, I guess I sort of do…just in a different format.  Lol.

The Holidays!

The holidays have finally slowed down just enough for me to get all caught up here. :)

It’s been a busy month! Everything kicked off with the 3 Thanksgivings we get to celebrate! First was one in Blanco with Josh’s Mom, then one in Valdina with Josh’s Uncle, and then we hosted one here at home for my family. I love Thanksgiving, so getting to celebrate it 3 times sounds great to me. :) I didn’t get any photos in Blanco, but we rode around Valdina for a while with the kids and got some.

The kids love this ranch.

Then back at our house…

Jenny tried very hard to give the kids their Christmas present from last year. lol. It was sort of a shared gift where they would unwrap items and I think get whatever came out of the big ball next. But that concept seemed to be lost on my kids.

I think she eventually got to the point that she just handed them what was next….but then they proceeded to barter among themselves to get what they really wanted.

In the end, everyone was happy.

Temporary tattoos were in the ball of goodies. She had to have this on her forehead.

This puzzle is still sitting unfinished on my table… Maybe I’ll work on it this evening.

It was awesome getting to see everyone for Thanksgiving!

The next weekend I took Anna and Wallace to Canton to do some camping and shopping. I don’t quite trust Meredith just yet to not just throw big fits all day long, so she got to go live it up with Big Mama and her cousins since the State Park is pretty close by.

Wallace spent most of his money on tractors, trailers, cement mixers…

When everyone else went shopping for a second day, Wallace and I went for a very long hike. And then I got him this little bald eagle miniature flego kit from the Park store thinking it would keep him entertained for a few hours…but it was ridiculously challenging to put together. It quickly became my project, and I didn’t get to sit and chill and read my new cookbook I’d bought myself as I had envisioned. We finally finished the eagle after we got home.

The next weekend, Hunter and Wind came back to my house to help us out with a new little pet we were planning to get. Wallace asked for a lizard this past summer after he caught one in the back yard. We weren’t really prepared to keep a lizard alive, so we had to let that one go, but then Josh told him we would get him a lizard at some point. Wallace has a memory like an elephant. He never let us forget that promise, so I went ahead and started researching reptiles. I settled on a bearded dragon. They are becoming pretty darn popular, and there’s a lot of information out there on how to care for them. So, we made a plan to get one at the reptile show when it came to town.

Meet Harvey! He’s a little older than a baby and loves to eat his weight in live roaches, crickets, and fly larva. Having this little guy around has been like my own personal episode of fear factor. I’m getting to where handling the bugs aren’t bothering me nearly as much (I use tweezers to mess with them). I quickly discovered that I surprisingly prefer the roaches (as does Harvey), we aren’t going to be keeping live crickets around (too stinky and noisy), and I think I might just start my own roach colony because you’d be surprised what people charge for these special little roaches.

He’s growing pretty fast; he’s already shed his skin once!

Then came the Christmas plays and presentations at school.

I made the mistake of putting antlers on him with bells. He stood there and just shook his head for quite a bit of presentation.

Meredith’s presentation was adorable as well, but I struggled to get good photos.  It’s like a mad dash to get up to the front and elbow your way in front of other parents…and then realize you left your long lens on…  So I got these super close up photos of her.  Oh well. 

And then it was finally time for the ski trip with Josh’s family. The kids have been so excited about this since we told them about it a couple of months ago. I wasn’t able to get any photos on the slopes because it was snowing so much, but I took some around the cabins we were staying in.

We let them play on a frozen river like crazy people.

They got the biggest kick out of all the ice.

We were on the trip over Christmas day, so Anna sent Santa 2 different letters letting him know where we’d be.

Wallace has been on this Titanic kick for a while now.

You would not believe how long the battery charge lasted on this microphone. Meredith was so excited that Santa got this one right.

She pretty much played with it non-stop.

Anna rode and rode this hover board around that tiny living room every day. I think she’s pretty much mastered it.

The kids got to spend lots of time with their cousins!

Anna won the cookie decorating contest this year! Meredith is still working on being happy for others’ good fortunes… lol

The best part was that it actually snowed this year! And snowed a lot! The kids got in some great skiing and snowboarding lessons, and they got to sledding quite a bit as well.

On the way to Colorado, we drove through Roswell and stopped at the alien museum, but on the way home we visited a prairie dog town in Lubbock! The kids went crazy over it! They are just the most adorable little creatures.

The funny thing is, you don’t even need to go to the park to see the prairie dogs. They appear to literally be all over the town! Once we knew what to look for we saw them for miles as we drove along the highway.

We drove straight through on the way home yesterday, and slept in this morning. And now I’ve got a couple of days off before I go back to work. Just enough time to relax and get started on my roach colony. :)

Just a little more soccer

This girl finally decided to play a little soccer!!!!  For the last 3 games.  We literally got to the point where I would ask her to just give me a good warm-up.  “Meredith…just warm-up with your team.  Please…  Will you just give me a good warm-up?”  Haha!  She was willing to do just that, but then they decided to use her ball as the game ball, so I asked her if she’d like to go kick off, and she did!  She’d play for about 1 to 2 minutes at a time, and then just run off the field when she decided she was done. 

The next game, she was a little less enthusiastic about warm-up, but she still did it after some coaxing.  And then she played a little in the game again and actually scored a goal!!!  She’s so big that when she decides to play she really has a presence on the field and can be effective. 

And in her last game, she warmed up great, and played a little in all 4 quarters!  And she scored another goal, and I caught it on video!  I noticed she was more likely to go and play if I was recording with my phone, and then she’d watch herself on instant replay. 

And boy was she pumped about her trophy! I’d say she actually earned her participation trophy this time. :)