we had some birthdays

We celebrated birthdays while in St George. First came Emma

Aunt Lauren made her a yummy pink with sprinkles cake. Emma is now 6. 6!! Seriously where does time go? She is still our funny crazy girl who still will not wear anything but a dress or skirt and loves make-up. Then it was Jonas who insisted on a brobee cake (from yo gabba gabba). This was the best I could do. He loved it.

Jonas is 4. He is getting so big. Its a big year for him since he will now start pre-k. So crazy!! He loves anything electronic. You can always find him on the computer/ipod/ipad...whatever and if he doesn't have one he will find out who does and become fast friends. Happy Birthday Emma and Jonas!!

the bucket

While in St George Noah made a big mess with a rootbeer float. So I decided the only way to clean him and everything around him up would be to just hose it all down. Somehow we ended up with him in this small bucket that had a hole in the bottom. He sat this way for a good hour before I had to finally take him out kicking and screaming.... who knows how long he would have sat there.

Sweet tan line showing through the bucket

His "angry face" always makes me smile. Love him!

off to utah for the summer... part 1

As soon as school was out in Virginia my brother Nick flew out to make the long drive to Utah with me and the kids. The kids were surprisingly really good up until the last few hours of the third day, but we made it! We then spent a lot of time just hanging out. We went to my parents house in St George doing a lot of swimming a little bit of hiking.

We celebrated the 4th and nothing says "american" more than a demolition derby.

we have moved

We left our home in Virginia, but not without spending one more day doing our favorite family bike ride through D.C. We already miss it. Here are some of my favorite pictures.

photographer in the making??

Santa was kind enough to bring Abby a camera this past Christmas and it's always interesting to see what she takes pictures of. Here is a sampling of her work







we sure do love her

This is Aaron

We call him "daddy" around these parts.
I love him. We all love him.
He is truly an amazing dad and an even better husband. I wish I could show you all how incredibly awesome he really is. Im more excited to get to texas just so that he can feel like he can breath again.

This last 7 or so months have been so crazy for our family and mostly for Aaron. Just to give you a small glimpse into the life of aaron at the moment...He is trying to get his masters and man I can not believe sometimes how much he just has to READ for his classes. The other day he came home with a very tall stack of books. These were the books he had just read. I should take a picture next time. I was dumbfounded. Now that we know we are going to be having a baby soon Aaron has been going in at night to work on his thesis so he can hopefully finish early so we can get to Texas as soon as we can. His promotion test is coming up in a few weeks so when he can (usually late at night or super early in the morning... kids are no help when they are awake) he is studying for that. Add church responsibilities, 4 kids, and a sick pregnant wife... he is busy and I honestly do not know how he does it all. And if you know Aaron he never takes the easy way out or never ever settles for mediocrity. He just amazes me. And even with all of this you will never hear him complain.

I just had to share.

He keeps telling me he is already thinking about getting his Doctorate. He may be a little crazy as well. Oh well we love him anyway.



abby took this picture of aaron.

hoping today for a miracle

Yesterday Aaron took our computer in to find out why it just stopped working. Found out it was the hard drive. Not a big deal we had been backing up all our stuff after the last time our computer crashed and we lost all of Emma's baby pictures. Or so we thought. Turns out the backup to an external hard drive (im pretending to know what im talking about... aaron tells me and I just repeat) didn't work because of damage to "something". this is the last picture we have that was saved



That is Noah just days old. Everything else is gone. Aaron is taking in the old hard drive to (cross your fingers) see if anything can be saved.

I feel sick.