Oh. My Blog...

Ya, so there is this thing called my blog, and there is this thing called life, and the two don't seem to be mixing well these days. Know that we are still alive, doing well, and only suffering from a minor case of home (aka Longan) sickness.

And While We are Talking about Christmas...

...I must also post photos from our second Christmas in St.G. We got there the day after the big flood, but we did get to see waterfalls in the George which almost made up for it. The drive to St.G seems to have tripled instead of doubled. The way down was nice, we drove 6 hours the first day, mostly while the kids slept. We spent the night in the van and drove the remaining 4 in the morning. The way back was not as smooth, but that deserves a post of it's own. For now I'll just share a few of my favorite photos from Christmas week in St.G.

Family hikes and ORV excursions. Not pictured, me wrecking my brothers motorcycle, which by wrecking it I ended up fixing a problem it had been having for quite some time. Your Welcome.

Family Christmas party. 50% of my kids loved Santa Pause. The other 50% loathed him.

Lot's of family photos. With a crew this big, it's not often we're all together.

Early Christmas in Reno

I think I'm finally going to blog about Christmas. For posterity's sake of course... AND I want to brag about my Christmas gifts. The only thing I really wanted for Christmas was some artwork for the house, a family centered sort of piece. Well, I got two. One from Ari and one from Joe. I love them. Check out these two renditions of our family (and no, I'm not pregnant, the worm represents K-So).

The one thing Ari asked for was a train. A train that roomvs by itself, a big one, a train that he described in great detail with the detail changing from day to day. The only ones we could find were either really nice and cost around $500 or they were really cheap Christmas trains from Toys-R-Us and looked like they could fall apart by noon on Christmas day. Thankfully my Mom asked me to go to Big Lots to get something for her, while we were there Ari spotted THE train he wanted. He freaked when he saw it because it was "the special one he always wanted." Thankfully it was also greatly discounted from it's original price. So glad we went to Big LOts that day. So is Ari.

A few photo from Reno Christmas morning, because I really only took a few...

Sacramento Zoo

If I blogged in December I also would have shared some photos of our trip to the Sacramento Zoo. Joe was at the ESA Conference for what seemed like 3 months (really just 5 days) and got a ride as far as Sacramento, so we picked him up and toured the town. Not pictured here is me getting lost on my way to pick up Joe. Not written here, are the things I muttered to Joe on the phone every time I took another wrong turn. Navigating on a cell phone with two kids after a long week is NOT as fun as it sounds. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that we got to ride a carousel and see and anteater.

Reno Rails

Can you believe there is a store dedicated solely to toy trains! We found this place while exploring one day. The cute little old fella in the store spent a very very long time showing Ari all the model trains and how they worked on his big fancy track.

Other places/things we discovered on this particular day included a train museum, the biggest Christmas parade I had ever seen (had no idea Sparks had so many girl scout troops and hot rods), the road by the train tracks where all the homeless people hag out and build "huts", and some delicious Mexican food. And might I add a note about restaurants here; I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone else in a restaurant in Reno with kids. It's very strange.

It was fun to be city folk, but just for a day.

Thanksgiving Outing in an Egg

Our Thanksgiving dinner party was not until 4:00 (still awaiting photos on that) so we took a day trip out to Pyramid Lake. It was FREEZING and windy. We spent the whole time running from wind shelter to wind shelter. The place was totally desolate, both in lack of people and in lack of plants. The water was REALLY clear and apparently has a PH of 9. The Truckee river flows into this lake, but nothing flows out (insert erie music here). It's a crazy cool place with really funky geology (Lance, if your out there we need you to come look at this place). The coolest part was this rock, which we called "egg rock" for obvious reasons.

Christmas Decorations

Remember those plastic "kid friendly" ornaments I put up every year, the ones I didn't mind seeing Ari and Cora throw around the house, the ones I thought Lou would enjoy throwing as well. Trust Lou to make a kid friendly ornament dangerous; he started eating the paint off them. I kept finding ornaments that looked like a rodent had gotten ahold of them, two every distinctive lower teeth looking lines... And rodents were definitely in the house, look how they clustered all the ornaments in a little stash...

The tree quickly became one of those "only decorate the top 1/4 of the tree" sort of trees.