The Best of 2009

Here is our year in review!

January

Audrey completes her first quilt top!

February

Hill turns one!

March

Spring Break at the beach and the fishing was good!

April

Hill takes his first steps!

May

We welcomed Rex into our lives.

June

Audrey is a graduation girl!

We celebrated 10 years together!

July

Audrey and I playing in the car with the camera on the way to the GA mountains.

4th of July in the backyard by the pool!

August

We were part of a very special wedding.

Audrey started kindergarten.

September

She turned 6.

He went to a Gator game.

October

We took LOTS of pictures in the pumpkin patch.

November

Tribute to Tim Tebow on Senior Day in the Swamp!

December

Cray turned four.

Christmas morning at our house.

So there it is a quick flashback through 2009. Man that was hard to just pick one (sometimes 2) photos from each month. It is amazing to see how much they have grown and changed! Sooo cool!!

I am working on our to do list for 2010. A new decade is HUGE! I can’t wait to see all that Gd has in store for our family in the years to come. One of my favorite songs right now is by Sidewalk Prophets called “These are the Words I would Say” and it says “God’s got His hands on you — He’s gonna do great things –I already know!” Just can’t wait to see what those things are!!

Toothless Wonder!

Well it happened tonight! Audrey lost her first tooth! So the tooth fairy has come and gone and I thought I’d post a quick photo to document that our life in December can get even more eventful than just Christmas and birthdays!! She makes a cute snaggle tooth though — and I am pretty thankful now that I didn’t get around to taking Christmas pictures this afternoon!!

Our trip to the Pumpkin Patch!!

Every year we troop out to the pumpkin patch for some annual pictures and to enjoy the new crisp fall breeze, this year was no different! We went to a little farm that has an apple orchard and pumpkins on the vine, a horse drawn carriage and a tractor pulled hay ride! They also have little wagons hooked up to tricycles, a swing, a pond for fishing — really everything we could possibly imagine!! The day was absolutely perfect — the perfect temperature and completely carefree!! These are some of my favorite pictures of the day!

Thanks for looking!

Scrappy Goodness!

It has been a while since I have added something crafty to the blog — don’t worry the hands have not been idle — I have just been making lots of stuff that is top secret!! However this little book I made back in July for our scrap class and I thought I’d share it with you!! I have been making more and more mini albums using the idea of just gluing two photos back to back as the page. This is especially handy when you want to go back and add pictures later. For instance a Halloween album where you want to add just a couple of photos of the costumes each year — I think these will be the books the kids look at and laugh at later because they will just show the growth, and the style changes, and the hair-dos so much more clearly!! Anyway — here is what I did to show our summer fun!

I used the Summer Book Template from the House of Three and the paper is all WeRMemory Keepers. Thanks for looking.

Dazzling!

Today was vocabulary day at school! Audrey was dazzling! Lots of fun!!

ready and waiting!

We have made it to Gainesville and now we are just waiting for the game! The anticipation really is half of the excitement! Can’t wait to see Tebow out there leading the charge against Tennessee — these are the weekends we live for!

See you on the other side!

You know you’re big…

when you get your sister’s iPod (all by yourself), bring it downstairs (all by yourself), actually get it on your head (all by yourself), and get it to play something (all by yourself)!! Holy cow — I could not stop laughing when Hill just showed up Saturday morning jamming to Elmo’s Word on the Street! He was SOOO proud of himself!! (I was too actually!)

So I guess I am going to have to give in to the fact that EVERYONE is getting big at my house! Especially if you look at it from this perspective!

Birthday pics as promised!!

Here are just a few of the many taken on Audrey’s birthday! I think the girls (and brothers) had a great time!!

This was our first pinata experience!

See! I told you we had a great time!

Happy Birthday Audrey!

She is SIX! It really is impossible for me to wrap my head around and yet it happened, right before our eyes!

The birthday fairy came!

The school lunch, and snack, and song and dance came!

The party of SIX girls (and two little brothers who will be there whether you like it or NOT!) came!

The teacher came (to the party! and jumped into the pool with the girls, fully clothed!!)

The dance class came!

And then bedtime came!

It was a blur — but she is OFFICIALLY SIX!

(before she went to sleep she said, no lie, “Next year, I’ll be seven you know!”)

and with that we begin a new journey — forget SIX — we are on the countdown to SEVEN!!

pee ess: pictures are still on the camera — coming soon!

First Day of Kindergarten

I can’t tell you just how busy the first week of school is for a teacher, but being new to this again and being in a new place and starting all over seems really monumental, AND THEN add on the first experience as a school “parent”! Man — I really can’t keep up! But Audrey — man she hasn’t missed a beat!! She thinks school is the absolutely the greatest thing since sliced bread — so my independent little miss has taken kindergarten by storm (and I certainly wouldn’t have it any other way!) Now if we can just get the tennis shoes on ON the RIGHT DAY!!

Here are some photos from the first day!!