The holiday aftermath

Okay, so I didn't blog about the holidays. They were wonderful. We went to wonderful parties, enjoyed our wonderful traditions (although we skipped the neighborhood candy houses and just did our 4 kids, I learned my lesson though and won't let my neglected neighbors down next year!), we spend time with wonderful friends and opened our wonderful gifts.

The only noteworthy things were braving the Orlando cold so Dan could run his annual marathon. Way to go Dan!

Celebrate 15 years of marriage by leaving the kids and heading to the gulf coast for a little kayaking, shelling, musueming (is that a verb), and boating. My goal was to do some things we wanted to do, but the kids wouldn't enjoy, Dan's goal was to escape the chaos. We did both and Dan commented that he wasn't used to doing things without a bunch of noise. Isn't that the truth! In 15 more years I expect the noise will have dimmed, but it may take 30 more years before I will miss it!

The other thing of note that we did was take the girls to Phantom. While Dan and I loved it, the girls were a little more on the fence. The words are just a little difficult to understand, but the sets are amazing and the music is beautiful. I loved it and am looking forward to Wicked! again on my birthday.

Here are some pictures of the yard and decorations I took of the front yard upon our return from our relaxing two and a half day jaunt. The holidays were definitely over!

Things to be thankful for

Okay, here are some things we have to be thankful for. A couple of items may look boastful, but hey! we can be thankful for those things too, right?!

1) Emily can be thankful for a great volleyball season with great improvement over this time last year. The team lost the championship game, but Emily played one of her best games, so-Way to Go Emily!

I don't know why Emily wouldn't smile any bigger than that!

2) Dan can be thankful for a big promotion at work.

There are been MAJOR changes with the the selling of Trane by American Standard, the aquisition of Trane by Ingersoll Rand, and now the Merger of Trane with Hussman and ThermoKing. So while I can not explain everything, because I don't exactly have details, Dan's job (which was unruly before) has now become mammoth! I don't know that he is being paid more, hmph! But I can tell you he is working a lot more! (We are back to the schedule he kept in San Antonio) This will be a big, busy year, as there will be a lot of changes over the next year as the transition takes place. But he definitely deserves congratulations, and we are very thankful as not everyone has fared as well in the recent (or upcoming) changes!


3)Danya is thankful for chorus. She loves music and is a bit of a performer at heart I think. She always has assignments for me. This week I was to make her a scarf and a skirt. She is pretty gracious and ambitious herself, so I don't mind helping out when I can. Today is her first chorus concert, they have two shows at school and one tonight. She couldn't sleep last night with all of the anticipation. I am thankful she is allowed to sing in the choir at church too.

4) Caleb is thankful for reading and playing outside. He was declared to have significant reading deficiencies at the beginning of the year, which floored us. But his teacher told me yesterday that he no longer needs morning tutorial camp (he's only been there 2 weeks) and she and the camp teacher agree the deficiencies are gone. I caught him reading in Time Out the other day- yahoo! He also loves to be outdoors and really wants to be able to climb our tree in the backyard, so he is really working on that!

5) Carson is thankful for werewolves, something he has seen everywhere he goes since Halloween. He is also thankful for jingle bells which he sings every chance he gets. He must be thankful for nursery since he gets so excited after sitting in the chapel or entering the church, saying, "Oh, my nursery class! My nursery class! No, not go chapel, go nursery class!"

6) I am thankful my rolls turned out for Thanksgiving dinner. They were light and fluffy like Grandma Kartchner's rolls.

We had a very nice time. We had a few ladies from church over and one family (just the dad and two boys came, mom stayed home with their new baby). After dinner we did a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle--I didn't force it on anyone, they all just happened to enjoy puzzles, someone else picked the 1000 pc one. We did the whole thing in one night.
Meanwhile my kids watched TV and beat a couple of teenage deliquents (Joyce's boys) that were also at dinner with swimming noodles and had a blast as well!

Back to Blogging-October

Okay, so there are a lot of pictures and I thought it would be easier to do it in a couple of posts.


October was its usually fun self and here are a few pictures to prove it!


Danya went to a girl scout field trip called Camp Creepy! It was at a girl scout camp and was a collection of haunted houses put on by the older scouts. After the first one about half of our girls didn't want to go in anymore, but they were good sports and Danya went in all the haunted houses but one. Here is Danya doing the Eurobungee, she said she didn't enjoy it. I guess she just didn't like the sensation of jumping so high.

I went on Caleb's field trip with him to the play "Room on the Broom" the kids laughed so hard. It was a lot of fun. This is Caleb with his friend Jeremy. Caleb's hair is blowing in the wind, I promise I did not let him go to school with bedhead!


We had a fun girl scout rededication/Halloween party. They wore their costums, Danya is the Skeleton Bride. All of the kids, even Caleb and Carson got to play the Donut on a String game. Carson even got the idea and didn't use his hands.
Emily couldn't go because of Volleyball practice, but she did get one of the caramel apples the kids made, so she didn't complain!
We had a fun trunk or treat the Saturday before Halloween. It was strictly trunk or treat, and with two wards together there was a lot of candy floating around our house for the next week.

Danya was the Skeleton Bride, Emily was a Candy Corn Witch (with the addition of shorts since the skirt didn't even cover her underwear!), Caleb was a phantom with glowing red eyes (his first scary costume, of course he lost the mask before Halloween, but we avoided a melt down since he had worn it for trunk or treat and there was a party in the front yard before trick or treating), Carson was Batman.

Halloween we had a last minute gathering when I invited neighbors to stop by and get pizza before we all went trick or treating. I also invited Carson's buddy from church Kyle and his parents. Danya invited a couple of girls who are in class and ride the bus with her as well. So we ended up having a little block party which was fun. These are the girls from our neighborhood, about a few more girls joined us by the end of the night.
We never could get everyone together for a picture, this is the best one I got! By the end of the night there were about 5 or six more kids joined us.
I had to put this picure in, because while she is just posing in this picture, I get this look from Emily about a 100 times a day.
Carson spent in overwhelming majority of his time that night looking through Mister Kenny's candy.

We all trick or treated with each other and came back and one of the neighbors brought out their music and the dancing started (not by me, mind you, I am not quite that comfortable with my neighbors!)Carson turns out to be quite the dancer. Here he is his doing the "Cuban Shuffle" or something(?). Here is Danya doing one of the dances too, she had taken off her costume by this point in the night. My pictures really didn't turn out that well at night!

Back to Blogging-Sept.

I know Holiday season is when most people drop off their activities such as blogging, but I have missed pretty much all of fall, so I thought I needed to send the highlights so that I will not get even further behind!

Here we go...In September...We decided we had better take a trip to the temple, since we hadn't been in about 6 months. So while Dan was doing his session, I took the kids to Downtown Disney. (Which is basically an outdoor Disney shopping mall) It was neat though, they have a rainforest cafe, only Dinosaur style! We will have to eat lunch there next time! This time though we checked out the lego statues around the lego store, danya enjoyed the building tables the most! I thought the Lego Sea Creature was cool, but we spent the most time looking at the small, moving models of major world cities.

Also in September we did the International Coastal Cleanup. I think our group picked up about as much trash as the rest of the groups, which isn't saying much considering our group was sitting on their rear ends half the time. We went with the Girl Scouts, fortunately the 3 girl scouts in our troop were working harder than their older siblings (and their mom in one case!) Can you see Emily's rip roaring attitude in the middle picture? But afterward we were rewarded for sticking it out with free admission to Miami Seaquarium. Something I have wanted to do, but wasn't sure I wanted to pay for. The shows were neat, but after a few hours there was nothing else to do-definitely NOT worth what it would have cost to get in. But always fun to see Dolphins, orcas, and sealions do their tricks, so definitely a great day! Emily just liked being able to wander around with the older siblings WITHOUT me. A little taste of independence despite the fact we kept running into each other!




Carson also started a little music class this fall. It is free at the community center by a military spouses group. I have gotten lots of ideas for my new calling as nursery leader (which I love, even though I haven't figured out how to tame the wild rumpus that ensues the last 20 minutes of class).
I am in an "Iron Chef-Pembroke Pines" group. We all cook something with the chosen ingredient and bring it to the luncheon. October was tomato and November was pumpkin. Then we rate each others items and the winner gets a small prize provided by the host. I have not won the prize (no surprise there), but I have been a winner each month as I have found a way to get my friends to cook a truly delicious lunch for me each month!!!! And I usually have some of my dish left over for an afterschool snack that makes my kids very happy!

Here is Carson as a little cowboy, I think every child goes through this phase! Ours only lasted a few days, but I don't want to forget the way he would ride his hobby horse and raise he hat shouting "WOOHOO!" So precious!