I {heart} You

For Valentine's Day this year I thought I'd keep it simple. I had a few different ideas and settled on a Valentine's picture of the boys tied to some goodies in a cellophane bag tied with red ribbon. Cute and simple, I decided.

In theory.

The "Valentine's picture": Henry and William dressed in matching white t-shirts, each holding a sign (either "Happy Valentine's Day" or a decorative heart). I really thought it would work. I could see the picture hanging from ribbon off the cute little goody bag. I imagined the boys giving them to our friends and family. Below is what transpired.














Not a keeper in the bunch. And there were a bunch--I took almost 100 pictures! Now in hindsight I realize that getting both boys to pose with objects in their hands at the same time is probably asking a bit much. They were both such good sports and really tried their best. While we didn't get a print worthy picture, we actually cracked up and had a lot of fun which made this whole crazy idea worth it.

I'm sorry to say that this blog post is our Valentine to you this year. Happy Valentine's Day! We love you family and friends!

p.s. We owe you a cute little ribbon tied goody bag with some yummy treat inside.

Love Tea

Henry and Me

Love Tea - 2009

I continue to be so impressed and happy with Henry's preschool. I love that his teachers include parents in so many special ways. Last Tuesday, in honor of Valentine's Day, I was invited to Henry's classroom for a "Love Tea". My official invitation, decorated by Henry, arrived via backpack mail while Patrick and I were in Mexico. The Tuesday Tea snuck up on me and I hadn't made any arrangements for someone to watch William, so I brought him with me. Ideally I would have been able to focus all of my attention on Henry, but it was still special to share the morning with him at school and William loved it, too!

His teachers set up different activity centers around the classroom and we visited each one at our own pace. There were games, crafts, a book corner, and even a temporary tattoo station complete with wet sponges for application! They really thought of everything. Actually, they would make amazing birthday party planners. I digress. After we visited each center we went downstairs to the all-purpose room for cookies and pink lemonade. It was fun to be at school with Henry and have him lead us around his classroom and school. Definitely a sweet way to celebrate Valentine's Day!

Henry at the rice table.

His teachers hid little heart people and the children had to find the one with their name on it. Henry's heart man!William also loved this rice table. He was a bit of a rice flinger.Henry and William
Downstairs, enjoying cookies and lemonade.Henry made the purple placemat as a Valentine's gift for me. It's darling and has a picture of him in the middle of the big purple flower. The three amigos at the Love Tea
2-10-09

Home

Vacation is great.
Truly, wonderfully, blissfully great.

But home is much better.Much much better.

We're home safely and so thankful for your prayers during the past week. I missed these two precious little boys so much every day while we were gone. Knowing they were in good, loving hands put our hearts at ease and we really did enjoy every minute of relaxation, indulgence and warm Mexico sun bliss. The funny thing about being away is that I spent much of the time wishing that Henry and William were with us or us with them; they really would have loved it there. Now that we're home I find myself thinking, wow that week went by really fast and I wish I could have hung on to it a little bit longer. So goes the "grass is greener" dichotomy of life.

Nuevo Vallarta was wonderful, I promise to post more about that soon and share some of our lazy days in paradise pictures. For now, I'm savoring being home and, feeling recharged, spending the days with my two precious little boys. I love being a mom. Along with Henry and William, I also missed that while we were away.

My new camera

Is it possible to really like something but be scared to death of it at the same time? I'm thinking that this best describes my sentiments for my new camera.

Patrick lovingly took notice of my constant (complaining) requests for a new camera. I know I should just be thankful to have a camera and I hope I was. It's just that our camera was falling apart. I dropped it on the floor as a flustered new mom when Henry was only a few weeks old causing the battery compartment door to break and stay constantly open. I had to cover it with tape to keep it closed. Then on our first trip to Destin, FL. in 2006 I left it laying on my beach towel and sand got into it and must have caused a few things to go wrong -- the movie feature only recorded 30 second or less movies from that point on and my pictures turned out generally blurry. It also made the shutter speed so super slow causing me constant frustration at missing good shots of the boys who are always in motion. That frustration coupled with my latest hobby, stalking blogs of uber talented camera users (aka photographers, I suppose), drew me to wishfully wanting a new "nice" camera.

After doing just a small bit of research, mostly on those aforementioned blogs, I narrowed my wish list down to two cameras, either of which I thought would be perfect. The week of Christmas Patrick was very busy surfing the net. When I came into the office he'd quickly minimize the window on the screen, but not before I caught glances of such words as "Canon" and "Nikon". I reprimanded him for even thinking about buying me a gift since we had agreed that we would only give to the boys this year. Nonetheless he surprised me on Christmas with a picture in an envelope. Not just any picture though. A picture of the Nikon camera that would be coming for me in the mail. I was thrilled! Fast forward to a week or so later when my camera arrived. My excitement started to turn to terror and fear of this new beast of a camera. No problem, I thought, it's easy to read a user's manual. I for sure thought I could figure this thing out. I read my user's manual late into the night and started to feel overwhelmed. Words like "aperture", and phrases like "manipulating ISO and shutter speed" started to haunt me.

I signed up for a community ed class that starts next month. I hope that will help me figure out what all of those crazy words mean. In the meantime I am having fun with our new camera and even with my bare user knowledge I have definitely noticed a vast improvement in picture quality. And it is fun to feel a little bit like that paparazzi with that lens!

Here's a peek at a few recent pics ---

Henry gets really excited about this camera. I have a whole montage of "excited face" pictures I took (one after the next) of Henry looking at me taking his picture with the new camera. How sweet!Rachel
Love this picture of her!

Practicing for the paparazzi.

I think it makes Patrick laugh when I try to get really into it - he took this picture of me!We have another budding photographer in the house!
I took these with our old camera to compare.Look at that picture he took of me!
I look like an old man! LOL!

Lunch with Daddy

On New Year's Eve Henry, William and I went to visit Patrick at his office. We all went out to lunch with his assistant and her family for a late Christmas celebration. Since Patrick's office is about an hour from home and we don't go to visit him there often, it's a big, fun deal for the boys to go. Henry's very favorite thing in the entire office building is the water cooler and styrofoam cups. He usually fills up a cup for each person at the office, including William, and when he's done with that he keeps filling them up until we notice the conference room table is lined and ask him to stop!

I love the little town that Patrick works in and like trying the different local cuisine. Soon it will be our little town and our local cuisine. I'm trying to have an open mind and get familiar with it. I'm so proud of Patrick for his commitment to his job and the positive attitude he keeps every day driving an hour there and an hour back home again. (I wouldn't want to do it every day!) As much as I don't love the idea of leaving our house and starting over in a new town with strangers and strange places, there are some things I am really looking forward to. One of them is being able to visit Patrick at work on a whim. The boys love being there and playing with all of his "office-y" stuff (i.e. the water cooler). And it will be grrrrrrrrreat having Patrick home an hour earlier at night!

Henry at the water cooler, marveling at the glurping bubbles.

Patrick hard at work.Patrick's wonderful assistant Anita. She's so sweet to the boys. And they love her. They always flock around her desk when we're there. She keeps a stash of toys at the office for them, too. Very sweet.
Last but not least, check out the gorgeous view from Patrick's back office window...Mickey-D's + greasy nugget omissions = not good for Patrick's resolve.

Christmas with our families

We spent Christmas Eve with the Hogans. It's the holiday we traditionally spend with my Grandma and Grandpa and I really love it. It's a whirl of activity and commotion even more so with all of the great-grandbabies running around.

Grandma with Evajane and William. I love the way he's resting his arm on her knee.This year Dan and Grandpa read the Christmas story before we started opening presents. Gabe was a huge (and hilarious) helper. He sat quietly through the whole reading even though something was troubling him. When Dan and Grandpa were done reading he blurted to Grandpa, "You said clothes! It's supposed to be cloth."!!!! So observant and sweet! Love him!!

Caleb and William stayed busy mixing up some treats in the kitchen.

Grandma and William

Evajane and CalebEvajane loved giving Caleb spoonfuls of imaginary food from the play kitchen. He was a gracious recipient and loved accepting every bite!

Christmas morning we exchanged presents with my Dad and Sandi.

Sandi and Henry looking at his new, HUGE book including stickers and dry-erase markers! So much fun!

Love that William and my Dad are in a deep conversation in this one.

We spent Christmas Day and night at my Mom's.

The table set and ready for dinner.

Time to eat!

We woke Henry up from a deep-sleep nap when it was time to eat. Here he still isn't quite awake and ready to pose for me, even though he slept for a few hours!

William loved my Mom's tree! He stayed busy snatching ornaments off and running away.

The biggest thrill of Christmas!!! Throwing the Christmas garbage down the trash chute (and listening to it drop)!My Mom bought the boys matching pjs. We tried very hard to get a good picture of all four of them. It was tough!Oops, we lost one! Where could Caleb be?Surprise!!
My Mom bought this adorable tent and these sleeping bags for the big boys to have a camp-out.

Christmas with the Vances

Cousins! Henry, Caleb and Isaac

William got a big blue tractor.

Caleb, Isaac and Henry

Patrick opening Henry's new forklift (with remote).

We had a wonderful Christmas. It felt different this year; really meaningful. Christmas has always been very meaningful to me, but this year it was even more so. It was special having both boys to celebrate with and make things special for. And Henry really understood the meaning of Christmas and celebrating Jesus' birth. His excitement in the days leading up to Christmas made me feel giddy in anticipation. I'm so thankful for our family. We loved having the chance to celebrate with them. We've had lots of pj days in the past few weeks trying to catch up and settle back in to our normal, post-holiday routine. I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas.

Happy New Year!