Daniel's Priorites

Daniel's bedtime prayer last night:

"Heavenly Father, please bless that I will write my name all by myself; please bless that I will beat daddy at the breaking ice game and not make the ice fall down; thankful for my toys, thankful mommy plays DeBlob with me... *burp*... scuse me... Amen."

Thought that was worth sharing.

Again, I don't have time for an original blog post, but my sister-in-law does a fantastic job of putting together a Family Newsletter based on snippets we send her, so I will copy the snippets we send, so my in-laws aren't the only ones who hear what's up for us currently. Sorry, in-laws, for being repetitive:

• Kenny continues to train for his marathon on October 28th. He is running a minimum of 6 miles a day, but usually more.
• Daniel has started preschool and likes it a lot.

• Daniel continues to take swimming lessons on the weekend at the gym and loves it.
• Daniel has taken a special liking to one of the care takers at the child care center in the gym, Ashley. Kenny asked Ashley if she would be interested in baby-sitting Daniel and Camille, and she had been hoping we would ask. Kenny and Jenni got to go out for their first date while in Georgia. They said it was to celebrate their 6th anniversary (even though it was a week late). They went to a fancy French restaurant and then to go see The Bourne Legacy.

• Jenni surprised Kenny with some home-made Mario fridge magnets for their anniversary. She had a lot of fun making them. Kenny surprised Jenni with a not-home-made sapphire necklace.
• Jenni has been promoted to a management position as the Director of Implementation Services. She enjoys helping out her colleagues in their tasks.
• Jenni got a Vitamix blender for her birthday. She enjoys making lots of smoothies and blending in spinach/kale to help make the treats a little healthier.
• Camille is starting to say lots of words such as: light, nose, mom, dad, leg, ball, dog, car, truck, Daniel.
• Kenny has been missing his regular game group that he had in Houston and has not been able to find enough interested and committed people to start another one. He did however find a gaming store very near his new home that hosts Magic tournaments. Kenny is now using that to feed his gaming needs. Every Thursday night, Kenny gets to go play in a Magic tournament. He was worried that after about 10 years of being out of the game he wouldn't do so well, but quite to the contrary, in his first tournament he placed 2nd out of 24 people. In his third tournament he placed first out of 30 people. He is now king of the nerds. (I added that part)
• Jenni is enjoying practicing and singing in church choir every week.
• Daniel earned his first Lego set ever.

Quick catch-up

I've been daunted about restarting the blog, it has been so long and SO much has happened (oh, by the way, we sold our Houston house and live in Atlanta now).

But I just wrote an email to a friend updating her on the last few months, and figured the least I could do was copy and paste that:

Things are going great. We LOVE Atlanta. And I just got a promotion to a mentoring/management roll that I think will be a good fit. We've gotten a gym membership and I've been doing boot-camp style team workouts that have completely been kicking my butt, plus we got a vitamix and I've been sneaking spinache into my smoothies (and kenny is training for his first marathon) so we're feeling healthier (and tireder).
Camille is starting to talk, saying things like "dog" and "duck" and "car". We're thinking of starting potty training with her soon, since she is showing a lot of the signs of readiness. Daniel starts pre-k (it's free in Georgia) on Monday- woohoo!

We attended a family reunion (with my 2 parents, 4 siblings, 4 siblings-in-law, and 13.5 nieces/nephews) a few weeks ago in Washington and had such a wonderful time- honestly, I can't think of how it could have been better.
I have about 7 months worth of pictures to post, but I'll go ahead and just post the recent family pictures my sister Lori took (as taken from her Elby Photography website):

So many more at the album, go check it out!

And the family reunion pics:

My cute parents:

With all of their grandkids!

December 2011

Oh my, so much to catch up on, and December was a crazy crazy month. This post may be a tad dry, but since this blog serves as the family journal as well, I feel I need to detail some of the fun that was had.
First, I had a week-long business trip to NYC- what was the last of my regular trips. I may still travel for work but not this every-other-week thing anymore. It was a fun trip- a friend took me to a bar at the top of a building, just to see the view. It's cold enough that the bar keeps thick red hooded bathrobes and everyone wears one to stay warm- kind of freaky and cult-ish. But it was fun, and the view was incredible.

I was home from that trip for a few days, then my sister Becky arrived from Portland to watch the kids while Kenny and I went to Utah for my company's Christmas Party. Becky hadn't seen Daniel since he was 15 months old, and had never even met Camille, but Kenny and I both couldn't think of someone we'd trust our kids to more. She brought her youngest, Tyler, who is just a few months older than Daniel. They hit it off pretty well, even if it was hard for Daniel to have someone in his space playing with his toys (he needs more practice at that). Much fun was had, though:


Kenny and I missed Daniel's Preschool Christmas Program, much to my dismay. But Aunt Becky went and video taped it, just so I could see Daniel have a bit of a breakdown in front of the whole audience. Poor kid, apparently musical performance does not come naturally to him (yet).
Meanwhile, Kenny and I had an absolute blast in Utah. My company went all out. Most of us work remotely so we don't see each other very often. We got to stay in nice hotels (sans kids), go inner tubing at Soldier's Hollow, and go snowmobiling near Heber, not to mention much karaoke-ing. It was so so so much fun, and it once again showed me that I'm working for the right company (not just because they spoil us so, but also because we got to discuss where the company was headed and what we've accomplished this year). Though while snowmobiling, I may have taken a corner a bit fast and gone off course and hit a tree. It could have been much much worse, I'm very lucky. Kenny had been in front of me and took a few minutes to figure out I wasn't following him anymore. A coworker was behind me, though, and helped me get out of the deep snow once we were sure I hadn't broken my leg (and that I wasn't going to pass out).
Unfortunately, my camera fell out of the snowmobile's "trunk", so I lost all my pictures from the trip (not to mention my beloved camera). And my leg had a nasty bruise for a week afterwords:

Also, semi-unfortunately, my cellphone stopped working, so we had no choice but to buy new iphones. Oh, boo ;)
When we got back home, my oldest brother Chris and his family were in town from Denver. Camille and I went by ourselves to NASA to spend the day with them (Daniel was sick so he missed out). We see them so rarely, it was so nice to spend time with them. They have delightful daughters and Camille seemed to take a shine to them all.
Then, Christmas! And such a delightful Christmas. Really, it was perfect, minus a few minor germs we had floating around. Camille got a pink wagon she loves to sit and be pulled in, Daniel got Cars 2 and a few fun race tracks, Kenny got some board game expansions, and I got a new wool coat and some books/DVDs. But mostly, we got a lot of time together. My company gave me the week between Christmas and New Years as some additional paid time off, so we had a full week. And what do we do? Nothing much at all, and it was delightful.
The downside was that I caught MRSA ("the superbug"- drug-resistant staph infection). It started off as what looked like a spider bite and ended up with my entire forearm red, swollen, and throbbing. In summary: it hurts a lot, looks AWFUL, and needs treatment. Bleh.
In happier news, New Year's Eve, our Best Man Ben (he will always be that to me) came out to visit from North Carolina for a few days. We went folfing and played games and had a lot of fun. We miss him so much.

Camille is now walking like a pro, but here are some of those first steps from december:

Many more pics up at our December Album.