Lydia 6 months old

Miss Lydia is 6 months old! Where did the time go?! I can't believe how fast this little girl is growing. She is doing great. She got croup a month back and fought off that cold. She regressed in sleeping when sick, but is pretty much back on track, sleeping through the night. She is such a happy baby and so good natured. The boys shower her with attention and kisses. We absolutely adore this girl!

I had to take this pic with her leggings and skirt! I love dressing a girl!

She likes sitting in her bumbo but is doing pretty good on her own. She is now grabbing toys and things constantly and sucking on them. It's fun to what her develop. She will start solids this week, I've been lazy.

She moved right when I took this, but I thought it was too cute!

This little girl is truly "one of a kind" We are so blessed to have her in our family!

Good Bye Old Friend, Hello New

After 12 long years and many maintenance apts. it was finally time to say good bye to our "red car". Jared has been commuting in what I call "death trap" and it broke down again. To fix it was about half of what it was worth and it had different problems already that we hadn't fixed. We decided to sell it and move on and get Jared a better commuter car that was more reliable.



Jared cleaning it out before he delivered it to the new owner. We sold it to a guy in our ward pretty cheap, so we still see it and Tagg many times has seen it and says "there's Daddy's car!"


So the searching began...we hate making big decisions, so this was agonizing. I looked, and looked and looked online. We narrowed it to a Hyundai Accent and spent a painful 3 hrs. at a Hertz dealership. Stuck to our plan and walked. We later that night found a great deal with a private owner...went the next day and this is our new "red car" that we bought.

It was cheaper and had a few extra perks! The boys love taking Dad's new car places.

Christmas 2011

It's been a little while. Here is a quick summary of Christmas. After going back and forth if we should travel or not we opted to stay here in Oregon and have Christmas here and get some projects done. Jared needed to work on some articles, we needed to switch all the bedrooms around, Lydia was no longer welcome in ours so we needed to do an overhaul. And we were on the hunt for a new car. We didn't do anything too spectacular, but did some things off our winter break bucket list.

The boys had their school winter performance. It was hard to see and maybe I'm a terrible mother, but nothing too amazing. They stood, sang, and sat down. Short and sweet. I like that.

Darin is in the middle there staring at something.

Christmas Eve: we decided to just hang out, nothing fancy. We made snack foods for dinner, watched Christmas Story and sent the boys to bed. The 3 older boys slept in Rees' room and they pretty much went to sleep.

Sporting grandmas pjs.

Some of the loot before total chaos began.

Let the present opening begin!

Lydia's first Christmas...she was oblivious, but I was so excited for her!

I made each kid pose by their Santa loot.

Rees was so excited that they got this football Wii game!

Tagg had candy in his mouth no doubt.

The aftermath. I think they scored pretty good.

We ate our traditional Christmas brunch after presents, headed to church and then home. The boys tore into their legos from Grandparents since they could do that on Sunday.

Posing with their legos. I think I told them to say "thank you grandma!" We relaxed played some games and enjoyed being together as a family.
Later that week we reorganized our rooms. We bought new bunk beds, mattresses and some things. I guess I didn't take any pictures. Probably because the house was such a mess, I could barely think straight. But the boys are situated, Rees with Luke and Darin with Tagg and princess Lydia gets her own room. :) And Jared and I finally have our room back. Yeah!