Five Brown Kids

A few house updates.   The office got a gallery wall and a new extra large desk and some shelves.  The walls are painted a dark green.  I love it  - especially when the sun shines in.  First floor move in house tour  here  if you want to see the before.  Office shows up 32 seconds in....

Scotia is swimming year around now and they did a service project on MLK day. 

 I uploaded all of my family videos to Vimeo.  It's so fun to see them all in one spot.  When I had Taye in 2001 digital cameras were just barely arriving on the scene.  We bought a basic one from Walmart a week before he was born (prior to that still using a film camera).  That way I could send pictures home to my mom ASAP without using a whole roll of film, dropping it off at a camera place to be developed and then mailing the actual pictures home....  (Which is what I did from 1994-2001) We slowly added a video camera of our own and better and better digital cameras and then iPhones!!! Which means by the time I had Blythe I had too much footage!!!  And making videos meant cutting stuff out instead of just using everything I had.... I wish I had taken more videos of everyday stuff - cooking and cleaning and kids sleeping and Tyrone playing basketball and me at the gym etc. But I'm so glad for all the footage I have.  I love my four little brown ...

We drove up to visit the Ricks for the New Year's Weekend.  Taye's been dreaming about snowboarding since he was there last time and he and Jaxon had a great time.  The girls went tubing at camelback too. We walked the dogs and ate out for pizza and cooked a Thanksgiving dinner - so yummy!  I love hanging out with the Ricks.  We stayed at a timeshare nearby that Courtney has access too - we all had our own beds, woke up and got breakfast on our own, went swimming and then around lunch time we headed to the Ricks house- I think not being in their house every minute made the visit much more relaxed. 

Christmas Eve Eve I convinced all my kids to go on a hike along the lake as a Christmas present for Mom.  Five minutes in the boys were fencing with sticks and exploring just like when they were little.  It was a sweet afternoon for me. We made Smores on the Cleverly's outdoor fireplace Christmas eve.  And went to bed at a normal time because Scotia had already wrapped all the presents for me.

Blythe was a sheep in her preschool nativity program.  So sweet to hear them singing.

Blythe and Jaxon celebrated the big 5 and the big 15 last weekend!!!  They requested ice cream cakes so Scotia and I hunted down some recipes and then created these masterpieces.  They were baked, frozen and assembled by Scotia and tasted super.