My Blogging Hiatus - What you missed

I know I said you didn't miss much during my 5 months of zero blog posts, and I know I said I wasn't going to fill you in; but after receiving dozens of emails begging me to update anyway, I finally decided to relent and just do it. Ok fine, I really didn't receive any emails asking me to update. I'm doing this all out of the goodness of my heart. And because I can't, for the life of me, think of anything else to blog about. So here you are. August - December 2010. Here's what you missed...

AUGUST

2010 was the year of the wedding! Between Brandon and I, we had only 3 siblings who had yet to be married. All 3 said their "I do's" in 2010. What fun, eh? Aleisha was the last of the three and we all spent the latter part of August celebrating her wedded bliss to Rory. On the day of the actual wedding, I was (once again) fantastic at ignoring the happy couple completely and managed only to get a picture of my own little family. Who says I don't have my priorities straight??



The reception was held the day after the wedding, and all sarcasm aside, it really was beautiful. Dave and Susan (with lots of help from others) turned their incredible backyard into a dream setting for a reception. It was truly breathtaking. In spite of a bit of rain (and frantic moving of reception food and decor in and out of the house), the night was fantastic. Pictures? I've got plenty from the reception. Here's a few of my favorites...





And, you won't believe it, but this time, I really did take a picture of the bride and groom. See??



And for my last picture of the wedding events, I offer you this... When the heavens decide to rain down upon your wedding/reception day, the least they can do is offer up a beautiful rainbow for an apology.



Moving on...

SEPTEMBER

The month of September brings us McKenna's 9th birthday. Due to McKenna and her friend Savannah having the same birthday, it's always a party. A big thanks to Amanda for coming up with the idea of how to celebrate this one. The day began with taking lunch to the girls at school, like always.



Followed up by a girls night that rewarded Amanda and I just as much as the birthday girls. That beats hosting a late-over for 8 screaming girls any day of the week!



The four of us enjoyed pedicures, dinner, mall shopping, and a movie (with lots of popcorn and cherry coke). Seriously... this is how to celebrate! McKenna can have a birthday any day of the week! Well, provided I can have another few months to save up plenty of cash for the occasion. The best way to wrap the whole day up, is by copy & pasting the facebook status I put up at the end of that day:

I know this is so overused, but I have to do it - taking lunch to McKenna at school $10, birthday treats for her class $10, pedicures $40, shopping at the mall $20, dinner out $12, movie tickets $14, movie snacks $10, frostys $2, calories consumed... let's skip this one, tucking her in and having her say, "Mom, thanks for the most awesome birthday ever"... Yep, you know it's coming... PRICELESS.

Next up...

OCTOBER

October is, by far, my favorite month of the year. The weather is usually perfect and there's just something extra fun about fall festivities. While I didn't get out nearly as much as I would have liked to, we did manage our annual trip to Gardner Village to enjoy the witches (along with every other stay-at-home mom and her 4 children within a 50 mile radius... or so it seemed).





We also paid way too much money to take a trip up the Haunted Canyon on the Heber Valley Railroad. Too much money... but lots of fun (and mostly worth it) all the same. It was dark, and my camera is only one step up from the cheap disposable kind you buy at gas stations. My apologies, these very low quality pictures are all we captured. Still, memories are memories, so up on the blog they go!



In the 1st picture, the flash is (obviously) unbearably bright. In the 2nd picture, the flash is almost non-existent because I'm... uh... covering it with my thumb. Needless to say, I've never won any awards for photography.

This brings us to the main event... Halloween Day! Or technically, the day before Halloween Day-Day! Since Halloween fell on a Sunday this year, we Utahns like to celebrate on Saturday instead. We're cool like that. We braved the rain in pursuit of candy at both the neighborhood Trunk-or-Treat, and your typical door-to-door "Trick-or-Treat!" We got lots of candy. That's all I'm going to say about that. Here's pictures!

May I present (in no particular order)...

Indiana Mathew! *insert Indiana Jones theme song*



Nathaniel Mouse! (and Dad) Em-eye-see-kay-ee-why-em-o-you-es-ee!



McKenna the Pirate...ess! (and Dad) *insert Pirates of the Caribbean theme song*



And finally, Gracee the baby chick! (and Dad) *insert... uh... a chick chirping... I guess...?*



For the true night of Halloween, we spent the evening at Grandpa Dave and Grandma Susan's for their traditional Halloween party, which always includes delicious soups, trick-or-treating down the hallway (at all the best and most prestigious bedrooms in the house), and "fishing" for prizes. We all love it. More pictures? Why, yes!





And that, my friends, concludes October. Onto...

NOVEMBER

In November, McKenna's grade put on a Veteran's Day program that made me cry...



It snowed... A LOT...



And my brother, Lynn, and his unusually productive wife, Vicki, hosted a fun and very delicious Thanksgiving Dinner. (Sorry, no pics. Or by this point, maybe I should say, "No pics... you're welcome).

And last but not least...

DECEMBER

Ah, Christmas. It would be such a wonderful time of year if I didn't have to work until 3:00 in the morning (yes, literally) pretty much every night. And wake up to feed a baby at 5:00 am. And get up to get kids off to school at 7:30 am. Yuck. I don't remember much, but judging by the pictures I took, here's what we did!

We saw Santa...



McKenna created her own Santa costume and provided us with an excellent blackmail picture for the future. (yes, the sheet of lined paper hanging from her chin is indeed supposed to be a beard)



We decorated the tree...



On a side note, I should mention that we decided to buy, for the first time, a real, live Christmas tree this year. The result? Branches that wouldn't support our ornaments, pine needles EVERYWHERE, and worst of all... nearly a dozen baby spiders hatching while we hung ornaments. Needless to say, it was a fun idea in theory, but I highly doubt we will ever do it again. If I ever start thinking about it again, maybe several years down the road, someone please be sure to remind me about the spiders.

We met up with fun friends and saw lights at Temple Square...



Nathaniel turned THREE...



And, dressed in their Christmas jammie best, the kiddos received a very generous visit from Santa...
(My apologies for the hazy pictures. I must've had fingerprints all over the camera lense, courtesy of one - or more - of my 4, grubby fingered children)



The stockings were hung from the partition wall with care...



(Stockings provided by the amazing talent of my fabulous Mother)

Well, there you have it! Five months of posts in one! I have been working on this dang post for nearly 3 hours! (You can find the point I started becoming restless with it by noting the lack of commentary through November and December). If you made it through all that... cookies to you! I really hope you didn't have anything better to do with the last 20 or so minutes of your life. In the future, I vow to try my best to be better about frequent, normal size posts. Rather than twice yearly mega posts. Until then... BYE!

And.... We're Back!

Well, hello! Apparently I have a blog, and even more surprising is that there are a few people who still read it. Who knew? And here I thought the entire blogging world would simply crumble and fall as soon as I started losing interest. I guess society really doesn't adjust it's courses to meet my fancies. Ah, well. It's a new year, and what better time to aim for improvement than the month of January? So here I am, for better or worse.

I'm afraid this post will be picture-less (and a bit pointless). I'm sure I have a few photos stashed away in my camera from Christmas. But quite honestly, I was too sleep-deprived on Christmas to remember if I took any pictures. And I'm too lazy right now to go find it and see if I did. Because really... what if there are some cute pictures? Then I have to download them, add them to this here blog, write clever little captions... Honestly, it's just way too much work. I assure you, we had a delightful Holiday season (at least, I think we did... Did I mention I was sleep-deprived?). There's really no need to bore you all with specifics. We'll sum it up with: Brandon worked too many hours and went to bed before me most nights (this is unheard of any other time of the year). I worked too many late nights and can't recall much of December, though I'm sure I ate too much because I'm several pounds heavier than I was a couple months ago. The kids were giddy and excited and surprisingly content and well-behaved. As a family, we spent way too much money, but sure had a lot of fun doing it.

Not much has happened in my 6-month blogging hiatus. Or at least not much that I feel like talking about at 10:30 at night. I'm mainly here to say I'm still here, and to make vague and most likely empty promises that I'm going to try to post more often. Who knows, if I get crazy ambitious, I might even have a picture or two to show off next time. Until then, Happy New Year to you all! Best wishes for meeting all the goals you made last year and weren't able to reach! (Please tell me I'm not the only one who's just recycling resolutions from years past...) It's never too late! This is the year of the fresh start - I can just feel it!