Bronanza

In mid-November Aaron carved out a few days to meet up with some of his "mission brothers." Their gathering is an annual thing normally dubbed "Bronanza." They plan all year and one weekend they coordinate their schedules in order to get together.

We piled in the car and took Aaron to the airport. Grace flexed her photography muscles a wee bit.

As per usual, Aaron updated us with his goings on. Hello Mt. Vernon.

 And I updated him with our goings on at home.

After the Blue Mountain mystery was solved, and the kids put to bed, I indulged in a chick Flick. Hello Zac Efron.

The boys had a blast and ate well. Trey, Mark, Aaron, and Graham.

And we flew.

But despite all the fun had on both ends, we loved being back together again

November Randoms

I'm doing my best to make up for lost ground. My pictures are all on Aaron's computer so I have kidnapped it for purely blog-related purposes. Without further ado, here are the November Randoms.

Raspberries lead to monster fingers.

When Dad is at school on Friday nights, dinner is always my choice. One Mom, two kids, and of course, Five Guys.

If I'm really tired in the morning sometimes I can convince Grace to come sit with me while I rest on the couch. Sometimes she brings all her gear with her leading to a full house. I'm cool with it.

I have two kids. It still blows my mind. What also blows my mind is that we still have a plaid couch.

An injury that occurred from taking too many grocery bags up the stairs to our third level apartment to avoid making more than two trips.

Styrofoam boxes are fun, especially when you get to break them. Not fun: cleaning up the mess after a styrofoam box is destroyed.

Sometimes I'm okay when our Costco trips just happen to overlap with lunchtime.

I love my cute boy.

Dressed and ready for church.

Christian's first tie.

I love the stick figures that Grace draws. When she finished this masterpiece she told me "This is Daddy. He's like a potato."

I heard a call for help from my closet and I walked in and saw that Grace had somehow gotten her hair completely twisted in my clothes. She didn't seem too phased about it though...

I love the group of kids that Grace gets to hang with in our area. This is just a fraction of them.

 Hey-ooooooo

Sometimes I wonder why I even attempt to keep things organized.

Sometimes Computers Die

We are alive and well. Tucked safely in my in-laws house surrounded by what can only be defined as a "winter wonderland." The mountains loom large and serve as a constant reminder of how beautiful the world is and how small I am in comparison (although at times I swear my muffin top could give them a run for their money...). Aaron, Grace, and Christian are all taking naps. We're all recovering from a cold Grace caught right before Thanksgiving that has spread like wildfire through our whole family. We have loved our time here, have witnessed the marriage and sealing of Rachel and Jake, played in the snow, spent time with family, and have loved on our friends. More details, hopefully, will come in the later days and weeks. And in case you were wondering, my kids are still adorable and Christian has basically doubled in size.

But, despite all of the glorious and wonderful things that we have taken part in, the big reason for my absence has to do with the untimely death of my computer.

I asked Aaron to bring my computer with him when he flew out to Utah after his finals were over. Coupled with other important things I left behind (like a jacket and all of my jewelry) the man delivered. I was happy to be reunited with my computer. I promptly uploaded my new photos and clicked "Install" when my computer asked if I wanted to install my new updates. Then everything tanked pretty fast. My computer went from normal speed to "slower than a sloth in a pool of molasses." It took 20 minutes for my computer to turn on, at least 10 minutes to pull up anything I clicked on, and navigating the internet lead to eyeball-gauging and hair pulling. Something was wrong. I thought it might be the pictures or the updates. We scheduled an appointment, ran some tests, and learned two things. 1.) My hard-drive was toast. 2.) I had three days left on my extended warranty. Bless my parents for that extended warranty. Aaron spent 3 days (yes 3) driving 45 minutes both ways to the Mac store getting the hard-drive taken care of. The tricky part of the hard-drive being toast was the fact that I had not run a back-up on my computer since before Christian was born. I didn't want to lose all of the pictures and videos of him as a tiny baby. During Aaron's 3 day hard-drive adventure he was able to figure out a way to get all of my information off of my computer and onto his computer. Once my information was safe-the hard-drive was replaced and my software was completely updated.

Despite the older shell my computer was brand-spakin' new. She was running like a dream. Aaron then followed the advice of the Genius Bar employee and attempted to transfer all of my information back onto the computer. It was a quick and simple procedure (or so we thought). My information, when on my computer was at a certain updated level, when transferred to Aaron's computer it needed to be updated to operate on his operating system. The brand new update on my computer when it was fixed was different and none of my transferred applications would work. (Please note that I am translating computer speak into "I'm a huge idiot with computers" speak because the latter is the language I understand.) Aaron and two of my brother-in-laws spent days trying any (and every) little thing they could get to bring my computer back into normal operation mode. Aaron's 3 day adventure had now turned into a week long confusion fest mixed with multiple computers and far too many online opinions. Every time I turned my computer on the screen would be blue. After the wedding, the help Aaron had, needed to head back home and get back to their normal non-totally-confused lives.

As of right now my computer is still a hot hot mess. We've set up another appointment to get some much needed help, but in the meantime I don't have a lot of computer access and although I haven been dying to blog and update I haven't been able to.

Keep your fingers crossed for something to make sense, or I'm probably just going to chuck my computer out a window.

October Randoms

There is no rhyme or reason to the following photos. I'm sure if I was keeping things up to date these would result in multiple posts, but since I'm so far behind they are all going to be combined. I am determined to catch up to what is going on currently. I'm so close to posting about November activities I can feel it in my bones.

Without further ado, here are the randoms of October.

I swear, her hair is normally cute before nap-time. After nap-time is a different story. And, yes, she is wearing last year's Christmas jammies in October.

 Lunch time.

This is Kayson. He is one of our favorites. I just die over this picture of him and Grace cracking up.

Grace wanted a last minute snack before bath-time. I gave her a slice of bread and proceeded to finish up the dishes. Suddenly I hear Grace making gagging spitting noises I turn around and there is salt all over the table.

She had a horrible look on her face and keeps spitting and I ask her what is wrong. She keeps telling me "It's yucky. It's yucky." I then look down at her piece of bread and she had poured a mound of salt on it and then took a bite. I'd be gagging to.

Pumpkin spice cookies happened a lot in the month of October.

I found this gem at the grocery store. So festive and delicious.

Christian with the Rose twins at a church activity. It was baby row in the back.

We started putting the kids together in the same room at night. Grace stopped fighting us at night and stopped refusing to go to bed when Christian was asleep in her room. Putting them together had the opposite effect of what I was expecting, and it had amazing results. We usually move Christian out at some point in the night because he still wakes up at night, and wakes up earlier than Grace in the morning.

Mavs Jammies! Aaron's first purchase for Christian when we knew we were having a boy.

Aaron participated in a mandatory team building field trip with his MBA class. They had to wake up ridiculously early in the morning and bus out to a ropes course. They were there until the afternoon and did a variety of the classic team-building exercises (I think there might have even been a trust circle at one point). Aaron has been so busy with school that he rarely gets more than 5 or 6 hours of sleep at night. So when opportunities for sleep arise, he just can't resist. A classmate of his snapped this picture of Aaron on their way home from the ropes course. He's out like a champion.

This is my favorite picture of all time. These two really do love each other and i was miraculously able to capture both of them smiling at the same time.

Apparently fort building turns Grace into a hoarder.

I love this kid.

We voted! Thank heavens for early voting and for volunteers who are so nice to kids. And also for all of the people who didn't pass judgement on us for our ragamuffin appearance whilst voting.

I started sleep training Christian and set up the monitor in my room. Grace was under the impression that the monitor was a telephone of some sort. When Christian would cry she would attempt to soothe him through the monitor. "It's okay Christian, don't cry."

Even when both kids are awake super early, we try our best to catch and extra couple of Zzzs.

Grace loves her Princess dress-ups. We have been fortunate to be on the receiving end of dress-up hand-me-downs, and Grace has been in Princess heaven. He go to dress up is Belle, and since every princess needs a side-kick, she enlisted Christian to be Aurora.

Sleeping beauty just got a whole lot more handsome.

I was also enlisted to be Cinderella, although the dress-up was too small so I looked like a T-Rex with a crown on. The skirt also fit around my thigh, which is a whole new level of sad for my poor thunder thighs. Grace snapped this picture. She's getting pretty good at taking pictures with my phone.

The blissful moments when you sneak in and watch your babies sleep are some of my favorite moments. On this night I couldn't resist taking a picture since Grace's hands were clasped.

The day before Halloween Grace came down with a nasty fever. We made a little bed on Aaron's recliner and watched movies.

Unfortunately her temperature got pretty high fast. After it hit 103.9 we headed to the doctor's office. It peaked out at 104.2. I sent pictures and texts to Aaron to keep him updated. This picture broke my heart. She looked so sick and she was trying so hard to smile. My poor baby.

She got a lot of tests done to figure out what was going on, so we spent a lot of time in this room. I loved the quote on the wall.

All of her tests came back negative and we were told it was a nasty virus and it would be over in a few days. Her fever stayed pretty high for awhile but thankfully went down the next day.

Sometimes I think I'm funny.