Awww.. aren't my little guys handsome? We took these new pics today to send to the grandparents for Christmas. They cooperated better than usual! Not much to blog about. Trying to get the house in order for Christmas, send out Christmas cards way too late, finish Christmas shopping, etc. Dave's sister and her family are visiting so we've had a lot of cr-Azy cousin fun this past week. The boys have been loving it.
I know, I just never blog on here. I usually wonder if anyone is listening, but I try to psych myself up like every post will be read by all of my family and friends and they will love and cherish it.....
yeahhhhhh....
So, tonight we drove around to look at some Christmas lights... There is this coolest house on this street that always has a lot of houses decked out- two houses that go nuts (I think they're in competition). The first house has their lights set to music this year- you tune your radio into the station to hear the accompaniment! CRAZY! It was cool. Dave got a lil' video... I'm trying to embed it...
So, since no one really reads this, and not many people I know actually blog, I've never been blog-tagged... until now. Thanks to Allison, who only tagged me because she actually gets tagged and has probably already tagged everyone else before.... and who posted some really great pics of us from Girls' Camp like 10 years ago. So I guess in honor of my first tag, I'll actually do it... ;) I'm supposed to write six things about myself and then tag six people... which I will attempt to do, but I don't think I know six bloggers (personally, that is- I stalk plenty of blogs), and Miss Alley is the only one who really blogs reguarly. ha. Hope this doesn't seem out of place, since I usually only write about the kids.... ;)
Let's see....
1. I think I'm lactose intolerant.
Yuck... I've been trying to see what no-dairy does, so I'm off it for a couple weeks. I miss milk. Soy milk is not that good, and soy chocolate milk is just okay (Shannon, I have finally tried it, and it is NOT "soooooo good") And can I just say that EVERYTHING has milk in it. Yeah.
2. I loved girls' camp too.
Allison posted all the stuff she loved about all our years of girls' camp. My favorite years were those years as Stake Leaders, those were so much fun. We had such a great time- the girls were so awesome and the friendships and the spirit there- I'll just never forget thoase experiences.
I can't find my scanner cable (see#4) and can't take a picture of old pics (see#3) but I have these gems hanging around from an old website I had, I think...
Love these girls. We had a fourth girl for the (4 I think) years that I was on the Stake, but these two are the ones I remember most- I think Allison had the most years on the Stake. I miss you girls! Maybe when I come out to Utah next we need to have a Barker's Beauties reunion!
Cute Tiff and Smashley... love my old ward too...
Michelle- one of our other girls from the Stake one year. She is so awesome. I wish I was still in touch with her!
Spitting watermelon seeds- I love to think back on all the silly things. We played this funny game where you stuck three seeds to your forehead and named them names of boys, and the last one to fall off would be the one you married. haha.... Ah, the memories...
Thanks Allison for blogging about the camp days :) It's fun to think back- I'll have to pull out my pictures sometime.
3. My camera is broken.
My poor, poor baby had to fly to Canon and hopefully will come back fixed. I'm supposed to have a repair estimate by tomorrow, and if it's not an arm and a leg, I will hopefully have it back in time for most of the holiday schtuff. I think the problem is kind of a delayed reaction to the time a few months ago when I dropped it and broke my little f1.8 lens and had to get a new one- the focus points have been messed up since then. Luckily, I was taking Christmas sweater pictures that day when the bad error came up, so I had some okay pictures to do a Christmas card, which I am proud to say I finished EARLY! (last night) and if I can reassemble all of my addresses, I hope to get them out early too.
4. I am a horrible housekeeper.
This I may have mentioned before, but I'm just so bad at keeping stuff together. By nature, I just procrastinate and collect, and I'm kind of lazy when it comes to just getting stuff done. I'm terribly unorganized and we have wayyy too much junk around here. PILES of it. We still have never cleaned out our stuff from when we first got married. I need to seriously purge the junk. I need to get the house in order so I can get the Christmas decorations up.
5. I love Christmas.
I just wish I was better at getting things together and organized, because I always have so many things I want to do, and not enough time to do them. This year we are home. Last year was our first Christmas in our house, but we were in Utah, so I'm excited for our first big Christmas at home. We even put some lights up outside. I really want to get everything decked out in the next couple of weeks. I love Christmas music. Dave surprised me with two new Christmas CD's- Josh Groban and Sarah McLachlan, they are so good. I love Christmas music. Oh, and Christmas movies. I love how many TV ones there are. ABC Family and Hallmark channel at night... I'm a junkie.
Since there aren't enough pics in this post, here is last year's Christmas card for your reminiscing pleasure.... can't post this year's, you'll have to wait for that one in the mail ;)
6. This blog needs a new header for Christmas
Sorry, I have nothing else to say. This was a pretty big stretch to have five possibly-interesting things to write about. But a new header, that will be coming soon....
I have no blogging friends. Like three. One would be Allison-the-blog-tagger, so I guess I'm tagging the other two- Shannon and Christi =) Enjoy.
We had lots of fun. Ben LOVED trick-or-treating, while Chris had no interest whatsoever. They looked cute though! I took pictures of them in their costumes earlier in the month because they were just so darn cute and I knew it would be hard to get cute pics of them that night.
These are my favorites:
Here is "the pumpkin". We got a medium-ish pumpkin out at the pumpkin farm and then some smaller ones at a local pumpkin "patch" church fundraiser. We fully intended to carve the bigger on but never did... one of the smaller ones got the Mr. PotatoHead pumpkin accessories. Ben thought this was pretty cool- he loves Potatoheads... we did this a couple days before...
And here they are earlier in the day, in their Halloween shirts. We went to a puppet show at the library, but other than that, Halloween during the day is pretty boring.
Here is the picture of the one time Chris went to the door. You can see he is trying to pull the neighbors door open, that's Chris- always trying to pull things out or escape or whatever. Ben wouldn't let us empty part of his candy, but he was getting a lot and tripped and spilled it a couple of times.... he just kept saying "Let's go get MORE candy!" We have a really cool neighborhood for trick-or-treating. There are tons of people everywhere and a lot of houses go all out with the decorations. It's fun. Next year I think I want to skip the other stuff and just stick around the neighborhood.
Hey look! A picture of me... hahaha... you don't see THAT everyday ;)
Our ward did their trunk-or-treat on Halloween this year (last year they did one the weekend before) so we went there after some neighbhorhood candy collecting. We were kind of late and way on the end of the line of cars, and Chris is not very cooperative, so I put him back in the wagon and we walked around with our candy while Ben passed it out. Chris just dumped the little bags all over himself and over the sides of the wagon-- he thought it was great fun. I think that was the best part of the night for him ;)
We have a really cool pumpkin farm out here. We discovered it last year and i just love it. I decided it should be a tradition :) The boys had fun, there was tons to do there.
Ben got to pet some pigs, and a few other things...
Chris just watched....
Christopher and Nicole were so happy to see each other. Nicole got a big smile and then they leaned in like this for a hug or something... so cute!
We took the hayride out to the fields to pick a pumpkin. Apparently this drought in the Southeast has been pretty hard on the crops in our area and they lost a lot at this farm, but there were lots of pumpkins! Ben was just examining them. He and Papa were checking them out trying to find the perfect one.
And back on the hayride with our pumpkin... Chris wanted to be free and eat the hay.
Here they are in the "corn crib" a big wooden bin full of big dried corn (like animal feed, not popcorn). They loooved it. Ben and Jenny thought it was so much fun.
Chris was crazy throwing handfuls up in the air and just laughing and laughing! That's his very favorite kind of game, dropping or throwing something up and then doing something like "oops" or "oh no" ... so this was awesome to him. :P
And I just wanted one cute fall picture of them with pumpkins. It was so hot that day, even the jeans were probably too much- but we didn't want them getting all scraped up. But I put on the cute fall-ish shirts I had wanted them to wear (last year it was freezing out there!) and tried... but no luck there either. And Dave was NOT helping. Seems like I got a lot of the back of Chris' head...
And then Mr. Tuff-guy is pulling all the pumpkins off of the shelves on the pumpkin house...
And back home- once back to the car we went back to short sleeves and swapped the jeans for shorts... I just thought this was cute- love the stickers on the back of the kids' shirts there...
And just for fun--- here are a few from our Pumpkin farm outing last year... it's so fun to compare and see how much they've grown in that time...
Ben was not a fan of the corn crib last year, nothing like how Chris was this year. He was done in about a minute, I think the sinking in made him nervous or something, he was not a fan.
This was cute- we tried for a shot like this again, but it didn't happen. Last year we had Abby to hold Chris up in there too...
And here is little Ben... you can see if you look at the other pic above that he was right about the same size as Chris was this year (he was about 2 months older than Chris is now).
And Ben doing the EXACT same thing with the pumpkins on the house- they are just there for taking off I guess....
And I did manage an okay shot of them last year... they have changed so much- so cute to see. I think that's a lot of the fun of making this a tradition, the photos! :)
I hoped to keep this blog a little more up-to-date... just as much for me (helps me to remember dates and stories, etc. for scrapbooking and stuff) as for the 3 other people that read it (hi mom).
So here's a recap - some favorite pics and stuff from the last month or so....
Trying on the Halloween costumes. I actually did something early for a change. I was at Target and saw the cute costumes, and rather than missing out on the right sizes like last year, I snapped them up. We tried them on and they loved wearing them. They were watching Wiggles and dancing to "Do the Monkey"...
This was cute, they love to play piano with Daddy. Chris was really getting into it this day, he loved it. He just looked so cute.
This was the next day- we noticed across the river from our normal spot that it looked like there was a beach, so we set out the next evening with another picnic in search of the beach. We ate on the grass up above the riverfront....
We've been having nap issues... so I got this shirt for Ben to commemorate a lovely time of toddlerhood... it says "NAPS are the enemy" I love to buy the funny shirts when they are just "sooo them".
and not to forget Chris in one of his favorite spots in the backyard lately- sitting under the trees messing with all the nasty old peach pits... his shirt used to be Ben's- it's says "My Dad is the Man!" Totally was Ben at that age, and still- and totally Chris now too... they love their daddy.
