Birthday Bowling

We enjoyed an all-day celebration of my mom's birthday last week.  Ellea painted one of mom's favorite bible verses in art class as a gift.  She was very touched and made us all cry when she told us through tears that this verse got her through the difficult time after my dad died. ("This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.")

After lunch, we drove to Lewiston to go bowling.

None of us played especially well, but sure had fun doing it!

Then it was off to Costco. We rarely go to Lewiston without stopping at Costco!  Nicole was sad that she walked half way around the store with food dribbled down her front after sampling some yummy guacamole.  Hopefully, no cute guys noticed her mess! :)

After Costco, we had a yummy dinner at Applebee's.  No pictures, you just have to take my word for it.  We were too busy eating to take photos.

And finally, we took in the Christmas lights display in a downtown park before leaving town.  It was beautiful and COLD, so it was a brief stroll.

Happy, happy birthday, mom!  Hope the coming year is filled up with many blessings and happy times.  Love you!

Baby Wrangling

Two weekends in a row now Ellea and I got to go hold these sweet babies.  Mom and dad loved having a couple extra sets of hands to help with baby duties.

Ellea holding BOTH of her cousins.

Nothing better than snuggling with a sleeping baby.

The expert baby wrangler.  We'd move in if we could.  And they'd happily welcome us! :)

Photo Booth Fun

One of my favorite things at Jeanene and Phil's wedding this summer was the photo booth.  A friend of the bride's brought the whole set up as her gift to them.  Camera with remote and a printer.  Each session printed out two strips so you could take one with you and glue one into a memory book for the bride and groom to keep.  Isn't that awesome?!

Morgan talked the groom (his Godfather, who he is rather fond of) into doing it with him.

And, of course, our family had to get in on the action.  Good times.

June Wedding

 I blogged about the beautiful family wedding we had this summer, but life quickly got away from me and I got busy with other summer activities and failed to post all the great pictures we took.  I was digging back through old photos today, and found some I'd like to share.

This couple is beautiful inside and out and it was a joy to be a part of their special day.

The groom, Phil, is Morgan's Godfather and Morgan was touched to be asked to be a server in the wedding.  It was only his second time serving in Mass, and his first wedding.  He did great.

Phil is also Glenn's nephew (his sister, Dori's son).  He asked Glenn to participate as a groomsman which was fun.  He cleans up pretty nice.

And of course, with dressed up kiddos, we had to take some pictures.

They clean up pretty well, too.

If I do say so myself.

Pink House Pictures

Of course, no family photo session is complete without some pics of me and my man.  Ellea is a great little photographer.  This is the first shot she took and I think it's my favorite.

We'd been outside taking pics for quite some time at this point.  We were cold.  We're attempting to keep our hands warm.

We took these pictures in front of Glenn's grandfather's old house just down the road from our house.  It's no longer inhabited.  Yes, it's painted pink.  I've never understood that.  Apparently that's the color that was chosen many years ago.  I've seen more than one pink house around these parts. Not many more, but more than one, so pink houses must have been a thing.

 
We interrupt this photo shoot for a pesky little brother.

And we always bring along our old red chair to our photo sessions.  You may remember, my family was super skeptical the first time this thing was brought along for a photo shoot, but it has served us well.  We didn't use it much this time, but it had to make an appearance.

It's unfortunate that I'm not a photoshop user... I would remove that ugly black cord behind us.  Oh well.  Maybe someday.

Glenn was over having his picture taken.  That's enough.  We're done.  Go away.

I thought I'd be a good sport and join him in making faces at the photographer.

 No, really, he's over it.  He started threatening the camera with a large stick.  We must be done.

Good Times

Crazy kids.  They cooperate so well with photos.  Usually.

And they do such a great job being silly.

Certain individual(s) were not enjoying the photos so much, so they were all told to scowl.  No smiling.

I mean it.

Okay, never mind.  You can smile, I guess.

So deep in thought.

Morgan thought they could hold him.  Awkward start.

Awkward finish, too.

Good times.

Pickup Pictures

As promised, here are our family pics for 2015.  Some of them are a tad blurry which was disappointing, but we had fun with it.  

This is my fav, but it's blurry when you blow it up. :(

Again, so thankful that my kids and hubby are cooperative with this.  Well, most of them were.  You know who you are.....  :)

Chairs in the Pickup

We took some family pics last weekend for our Christmas card.  We took out my dad'd old black Chevy and had fun with it.  And, of course we brought along our old beat up chairs that we have used in our Christmas pictures the last couple years.  So, why not ride in the back of the pickup on these lovely chairs like these two did?

And of course, I don't have any pictures of my kids sitting in chairs in the back of the black Chevy, so I must take some.  I'm so grateful my kiddos have been well-trained to cooperate with taking lots of pictures.  And I rarely take just one photo.  I have to take them from every angle.  Maybe someday they'll appreciate having thousands of digital photos of their childhood to sort through.  Probably not.

Family Pics

Our church is putting together a photo directory and we went to have our family picture taken last night.

Lots of debating and consideration went into what to wear so a selfie seemed like a good idea.  We bought a couple 8x10's of the kids.  Our plan is to go out this weekend and take our annual family portraits for the Christmas card.  We could have bought pictures from the photographer, but what's the fun it that when we can set up the tripod and take our own in the beautiful outdoors?

Family Science, or My Family are Good Sports

Two of the teachers at the high school where I work agreed to help me put on a fun science night as one of my parent activities I'm required to host every year.  It is SO hard to get parents of high schoolers to come to one more school activity.  I get it.  I'd rather stay home too on the one night we don't have anything else going on.  So it's always a challenge to try to come up with a meaningful and something to get them out of the house for.

We didn't have the stellar turn out I always dream of, but we had a decent turn out and the people who came had a fun time.  That's all that really matters to me.

We had 9 different math and science stations that family teams rotated around to.  My family came, of course.  They don't usually have a choice.  Looked like they mostly had fun, though.

This station was the Melt-an-Ice-Cube Race.  Roll a die and follow the instructions.  Shake salt on the ice, hold it in your hands, put it under your armpit (Brr!), blow on it, etc.  You're racing with another person to see who can melt their ice cube first.

Another station was building a balloon car with life savers for wheels.  It was fun, but most cars seemed to go in circles (including mine from testing the instructions!).  Hard to test the distance a car travels when it drives in a circle!

Nicole decided to lay on her belly to both blow up and test her car!  You can see both hers and Morgan's are beginning to drift to the left of their lanes.  Circle, circle, circle.

This activity was stacking cups without touching them.  They had to use a rubber band with string tied to it to pick up the cups.  This is often used as a team building activity.  My family's team skills weren't great.  They were getting frustrated with each other and Glenn kept saying, "We sure don't communicate very well."  Might have to work on that one a little.

So grateful for all the help from staff and my family (especially Ellea!)  Also very grateful it's over!  Now I can start planning the next one.