An Oreo for my birthday!

I feel bad because there have been many things I was going to record over the last two months. Like the church coming to video the youth in this ward and other things I can not recall right now. I hope they will come to me later, because I have not recorded them in my journal either. Oops!

Below is the cutest little gift I have received. I received some great things for my bday, I was touched by those who remembered my birthday. Dan even took the kids out and gave them each $5 bucks to buy me something, then surprised me with a cake he had made during nursery snack time.

Anyhow, back to the bunny. I noticed her in the bushes on our way into church on Sunday. When I came out of choir Danya told me they had a gift for me in the nursery bathroom in a box, but I should be careful opening it because it may leap out at me. So I went in and checked it out-sure enough they had found a box, and with help they caught the bunny. I could find no one at church that wanted her and the kids assured me they would be able to pick her up (I had to believe them since they had caught her after all) and so we brought her home. Emily wanted to name her Oreo and everyone quickly agreed!

She is so cute and fun. I think we have found the perfect pet for us! She is quiet and can be "put away" when things get too hectic. She leaves a lot of "pellets" for us to clean up, but it is easy to clean up and odorless. She bounces around and is so curious. The kids adore her and she is lucky to have a cage to keep her away from Carson's exuberance. This really is a lot of fun, what a surprise birthday gift!

2010 is off to a roaring good start!

The Tylers are off and running this year. Doesn't it always seem that way? We always think we will recover from the holidays in January, but it is always full of activity and busyness as well!

Looks like we will be working our way backward. We ended the month with Caleb's 7th bday. He elected to have strawberry cake and had a vision of a cake decorated with fresh strawberries picked the day before! Such an easy wish to grant! (I wish they were all this simple) He was thrilled with the cards and gifts he received. A big thank you to all you who helped us celebrate. We celebrated on Sunday because Dan left Monday for Brazil for a couple of weeks. He will be gone most weeks to Mexico and North Carolina, popping home here and there to take a quick break.


Sat. we started a new family tradition of picking strawberries at Knaus Berry Farms in Homestead, FL. Here is Carson picking with our friends, the Brown Family, who introduced us to this wonderful place. The best part comes afterward with homemade strawberry shakes and homemade cinnamon buns still warm from the oven sold at the Knaus Family's stand right there. It is a local attraction and one we plan on participating in as long as we are here in South Florida!

Here is Carson. He did this all day at Disney's Animal Kingdom. We asked him what he was doing, and he informed us he was looking for animals. This was on our Disney Trip over MLK weekend. He really had a terrific trip and LOVED Animal kingdom on our last day at the parks!

Here is the family with Tigger and Pooh. We did all 4 parks. Magic Kingdom and Epcott with Dan. Then he headed home to work and we stayed a couple more days for Disney's Hollywood studios and Animal Kingdom. My mom got us a beautiful 2 bedroom condo that was perfect for our time not in the parks, and gave us enough space to escape from one another for an hour or two in the evenings. Although Sunday night the kids and I just played games and had a party for a few hours. What a terrific vacation and special memory building experience. Best of all, Dan caught the Disney bug and wants to go back every year. (We'll see if we can snag deals the match the good ones we got this year!)

Lastly, we started out the year celebrating Dan's 40th bday. We left for Disney on his bday and so celebrated the night before. We had his traditional lemon cake and opened his gifts. Thank you to all who contributed to his birthday scrapbook. He said it was one of the best gifts he has ever been given and was really touched at all who took the time to send a message. It turned out really nice with the pictures and I used a really simple digital scrapbook program so I was able to put it all together rather simply. The best was just how surprised he was--he ALWAYS knows what I am giving him ahead of time.

Here is a quick video of Carson helping make Dan's bday cake. Nothing too amazing I just wanted to start attaching video. Let me know if it takes too long to load, not sure if I am doing this all right. It took a long time to upload!

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!