Christmas cards through the years...

Since I finished up my Christmas cards and have mailed them out I thought I would look back through Daniel and I's Christmas cards through the years...

Christmas 2006, our first Christmas. Now, when I picked this card I was just trying to pick a card that semi-matched our wedding picture...little did I know everyone would think it was some kind of pregnancy announcement. It is clever though; think I might store the idea away for sometime in the distant future... :)

Christmas 2007 was our first Christmas in Massachusetts. Our dear friend and photog extraordinaire Ryan Flynn happened to be visiting us in November, so we had a little impromptu photo shoot for the sake of the Christmas cards. :) We loved the pictures and have a few framed in our room still. :)

Christmas 2008 we were on our own this year and we actually took the picture ourselves, which I think I blogged about here. It came out quite good considering. And the cards were awesome. We definitely splurged on them, but I fell in love with a few designs and couldn't resist. :)

And here is Christmas 2009. I mailed them out a week ago so hopefully most of you recipients should have received them by now. This year we had the wonderful and talented Nick Wasch, one of our good friends here take our Christmas card picture(s). We have many talented photog friends here, but Nick offered at the right time and was able to do the shoot and get us back some pictures to choose from in less than a week! (the cards were on sale, I couldn't miss out on such a good deal!) Thanks again Nick! We love having some nice, professional pictures of us again. :) And other friends, we are available whenever you are. :) Actually I would prefer Daniel to shave and cut his hair again before we take any nice pictures... :)

Here are the 4 pictures Nick gave us to choose from, in case you want to see them full size.

And here is the lovely blooper picture (of me) Nick posted on my facebook wall...

fun times...Merry Christmas everyone!

trimming the tree!

Well, we went back and forth. At first it was an easy decision because we were informed that we were no longer allowed to have live Christmas trees in our apartment. Then they retracted that statement and we had to decide for ourselves. See we travel home for Christmas every year, so we have less time to actually enjoy the tree. This year we are leaving especially early (2 weeks from today!) and therefore have such a short window of Christmas tree time. In the end we decided we would be sad if we didn't get one. So yesterday, after I returned home from work, we went to the most magical place in all of Massachusetts to get our tree...

The home depot! :) The price was actually less than half what we paid last year for our fatty tree, so we were very happy about that. Those Beverly little league folks were quite the rip off. :)

It just so happened that Tuesday is one of the nights our favorite pizza place does their $5.99 large cheese pizza deal, so we splurged. :) It is surely the tree decorating meal of champions.

Giving our little buddy some water. Please ignore the paper towel and spillage on the floor.

Maybe our new Massachusetts christmas tree tradition will be having to run to CVS at the last minute to pick up some crucial christmas tree accessory. This year it was lights. 2 strands had a broken light. While the broken light didn't make the whole strand go out, it had these uncovered sparking wires that we didn't think was too safe to put on the tree. Whilst trying to remove said sparking wires we [Daniel] somehow made half the lights go out in the whole strand...twice. So off to CVS Daniel ran to get many more packs of lights. :) I can't be too mad at the lights though...they have been with our family since waay back in 2003, when I used them to ask Daniel to tolo (my high schools formal, winter, girl ask boy dance) my senior year of high school. See evidence below...

The duct tape is a very classy way to hand christmas lights so I am told.

So here's the finished product; she is a little cutie. :)

My little student, studying away (as usual).

The whole Christmas montage, complete with out new stocking from my most favorite store (come christmas time especially!) And yes they are hanging from our sconces at the moment...one christmas decoration purchase at a time people!

And the self-timer makes a re-appearance! I love that thing. :) Daniel insisted on one without flash so the tree would "glow". See "glowing" picture below...

I personally think the picture is a little too much on the blue-green side...but boy does that tree glow!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Reflections on Advent

Hello all,

Advent is upon us. Please enjoy this video from the leader of the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

Thanksgiving!

We had a lot of fun this Thanksgiving up in Lincoln, NH with a few of our friends. My parents have a time share up there so we all thought it would be fun to take a trip up there for the long weekend. Plus there was a full sized stove in the condo, which always beats our mini stoves, especially when you have to cook a whole turkey plus a few sides! :)

Our deluxe kitchen. :)

And cute little living room.

The day of thanksgiving the boys kept themselves pretty entertained while the girls were slaving away in the kitchen. :)

Playing some cards...

And horseshoes. :)

We even squeezed in some time for all of us to watch Twilight before we ate. Now, a little background. I do quite a bit of reading in my spare time, but until lately I had avoided reading Twilight like the plague. Mostly because it was so popular and looked so lame and stupid (sorry, but it is true). One of my dear friends asked me to read just the first book, so I agreed to for her. I read it about a month ago, and while it was better than I expected, I by no means really liked it. It was entertaining, but I had no desire to read anymore of the series. While we were making thanksgiving plans Beck and I were discussing the book and it came up that she actually owned it. She actually did not like the movie at all, but I thought it might be funny to watch a few scenes (mostly the super speed running and sparkling skin). Well, it turned out the boys wanted to watch too so we all watched it together. Now, I am not exactly sure why, but somehow after watching the movie it made me like the book more! Maybe it was my low expectations going into the movie, but now I have plans to read the rest of the series. A little embarrassing I know, but I promise I still am not a twilight fanatic.

Team Edward.

Moving on...

Miss Emily making a silly face.

And setting the table for dinner. :)

Yes, Daniel is participating in "no-shave November".

A group photo. :)

The boys were very sweet and cleaned up the whole kitchen for us. Here is Daniel finishing off the turkey carcass. :)

The next day we lounged around the condo (no black Friday shopping for us) and went to the indoor pool/hot tub in the early afternoon.

We came back and played a little wii...

And then spent WAAY too long designing little mii's for each of us. :) Here is a picture of us all parading as couples, though Daniel and I are off in the outskirts...Daniel in dark blue looks like the lumberjack, I am in purple and about 1/4 the size of everyone else, Reed is in yellow, Emily is in blue with her sunglasses on, Nick is in orange with his awesome soul patch, and Beck is in green. :)

Here is a little closer up picture of us again, with Beck leading the parade. :)

Here are the girls while playing a few round of Catan. Emily won the first game and I won the second, woo hoo! :)

Cute little pic of Nick and Beck. :)

Daniel setting up our second game...

Later that evening we watched my sister's keeper. Since Daniel and I had already seen in (in theaters in fact!) we busied ourselves with a little card playing. :)

And then Daniel took random pictures of me while I was making the cinnamon rolls that we would eat the next AM for breakfast. He also took candid videos of me while I was cooking, but they are very awkward. I don't think I will be getting a food network show anytime in the near future... :)

We unfortunately left Saturday morning, but we had a fun time with our friends while we were there! We stopped on the way home to try and get a kick start on some Christmas shopping but unfortunately only ended up with things for ourselves. :) Oops. Happy Sunday and yay the Seahawks won! :)