Here I sit on my deck, under my infrared heater and cafe lights, with Jimmy Buffett softly playing in the background and the sound of the high school football game in the distance. Rick & Carson are at the game, Mallory is still at camp (two more sleeps!) and I am enjoying a brief “silent retreat” :-)
We had a crazy busy summer (and spring!) full of baseball and softball. I counted up the games – 123 games played by the kids on their combined six teams (two travel, two spring Little League, one summer Little League and one summer All-Star) …
Category: family
A lull
Another blog post on this lonely blog of mine, another blog post of me starting with “man I wish I wrote here more often”.
After many months of being very busy, we are in a lull right now. The kids still have indoor baseball and softball practices for their travel teams but swim is ramping down and spring ball hasn’t started yet. We have occasional nights off from activities but tonight it’s just Mallory & me at home; the boys are at Carson’s baseball practice.
The only sounds in my house right now are hysterical laughter from Mallory (who is watching some …
Ski Trip 2014 – Take 2
I hate to say Mallory jinxed the football team, but I think Mallory jinxed the football team. Back in the summer she asked if the next time Michigan didn’t make it to a bowl game, if we could go to Colorado to ski at Christmas.
Well, we didn’t make it to a bowl game. Or even Colorado. But we did go skiing up north before Christmas. And we had a fabulous time.
These are all iPhone pictures so ignore the selfie-ism-ness of them :-D
We arrived around 5p on Saturday, thinking we’d get unpacked, swim (outside!), grab dinner and watch my Broncos play …
Lime Island – 2013
In August 2013, my dad took his favorite daughter and most of the grandkids (Shane, Lauren, Mallory, Liam & Carson) up north to Lime Island to go “camping”. My sister offered to let us take Cameron too but we were all set.
Lime Island is located in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the St. Mary’s River and you can only reach it by boat. It took us like eight trips to get all of our crap across – no thanks to my engineer dad’s inability to do anything “rustic”.
We were camping in cabins without electricity and plumbing so my dad …
It was two more weeks…
We had two healthy weeks, and then Carson got sick again and I missed two-plus more days of work. Luckily no one else got it again (so far), but the birthdays in our family that bookend the month of April were a complete disaster because of sickness.
I think I should get more of these to have birthday redos.
Five weeks after the tornado
I haven’t written about the tornado since we were a week-ish out.
It’s funny when I go back and read about the damage, or rather lack of damage, I thought we had. We knew we had some missing shingles and some damaged siding, and a busted up garage door and screen, but in the past month, we’ve discovered other damage.
We had a structural engineer come inspect our house a few weeks ago; he determined that we were very lucky in that we had lots of bracing in our attic space and that it probably saved our house from losing …
Punta Cana–the end
Here are the last of the pictures from our big vacation. We had a great time – once we got past the leaky ceiling and long day of travel. We spent all day everyday at the pool, except when we were at the snack bar or lunch buffet eating enormous amounts of french fries, pizza or nachos with nasty liquid cheese. My dad & Emily did go scuba-diving one day, and the grown-up boys went deep-sea fishing (Rick also did some deep-sea puking…)
Um, can you say sunburn? My only sunscreen screwup of the week…
Me & my darling sister.
My mom. She …
2010 Christmas Card
Remember these two posts from November (© Mallory Photography and Happy Thanksgiving) – with outtakes from Christmas card photo sessions? Well, here is our actual Christmas card, with some more outtakes below…
the front:
the back:
And here are some more that didn’t make the cut but were still super cute!
We cheated
I think it killed my husband a little bit today, but we bought a fake Christmas tree this year. Rick grew up working for his grandparent’s garden center in Cincinnati and at Christmas time, he was on tree delivery duty. He’s a little bit thorough (ok, a LOT thorough) when we shop for Christmas trees (well, he’s thorough about really anything we’re going to spend money on) – and buying a tree usually takes us an hour or so (and that’s even just going to a place where they have the trees already cut – it’s not like we’re hiking …
A Thanksgiving Pictorial
A teething baby…
A reading of Pinkalicious by Grandpa…Two of the silliest girls ever…An attempt to get all six in one picture…Decorating Thanksgiving cookies (notice Tank is already eating his…)…After dinner…Zombies watching Charlie Brown.
So much to be thankful for.