A New Year

2009 was not the year for blogging for me. I lost the heart for it when I blogged about how I was feeling when a friend was mistreating me (I did not use her name in my post). She attacked me for it and couldn't believe that that I would blog about these things because people from church read my blog. Well, it really hurt me and really turned me off to my blog.

But, I have decided that I don't care. This is my blog. If I want to blog about how silly people look in skinny jeans or how depressed I am feeling about the weather; I will.

So, as I look forward to the year 2010, I wanted to document some of my goals and resolutions.

1. Finish reading The Bible. I started late last January with the goal to finish it in a year. I am about 75% finished.
2. Run my first half marathon in April, continue running 1/2 marathons for the rest of the year. (I'd love to run a marathon in 2011).
3. Get back to healthy eating habits. I did a 10 week Farrells Extreme Bodyshaping and it totally killed my healthy eating and running. Need to get it back!
4. Finish my schooling by spring! This might be a stretch, but I REALLY need to get it done and get working!
5. Focus on family fun nights more.
6. Blog more often. As I was writing my Christmas letter, I realized how important my blog is in documenting our memories and the few posts I had this past year really helped me remember the fun things that we did as a family.

I am looking forward to our vacation this summer and all of the other great things that we have planned. I am also looking forward to getting a job in a new career and bringing in some additional income for our family!

I pray all of you have a wonderful and safe start to the new year!

Halloween 2

Here are the Jedi's battling it out, trick or treating and enjoying a treat!

Halloween

Here are a few of the things that we did on Saturday to get ready for Halloween. We carved pumpkins. We made a haunted house out of kleenex boxes and we had a jack o latern cheeseball and pumpkin pie.

Our first family camping outing

We went to Two Rivers to camp on Friday last week and had a great time. We cooked our dinner, smores, and breakfast over an open fire, played, ran around like crazies and slept in a tent. The kids had a blast and so did we. We hope to get a few more trips in this fall as we prefer camping in the chillier weather. We took our monarch tagging supplies and even tagged a female monarch there, so hopefully we will get a certificate from Mexico once she makes her way down there. We had to get the fire going in the morning and the kids were hungry. I had meant to buy doughnuts for such an occassion as this, but forgot. So, since they waited so patiently to eat, we all got to have smores after our breakfast. One of my best ideas yet!

Two Wheeling It

It was only a few months ago that I was blogging about how Skyler learned how to ride his bike without training wheels. Well, here I am letting you know about Lily's triumph over the training wheels. Hers came three years earlier than her brother's, but there are a few reasons for that. Lily is quite a daredevil and not so scared to try new things. She doesn't stop with failure, she keeps at it until she has it, she will not give up. And, she had no choice if she wanted to ride her bike because her training wheel broke and we refused to replace it. So, there you have it in a nutshell. She loves to ride her bike. She wants to do it all day long, everyday!

Monarch Tagging

We had quite an exciting experience this weekend. We went to Hitchcock Nature Center in Iowa to participate in their annual Monarch Tagging event. They have a nice little presentation about monarchs and their migration patterns and then they let you loose in the forest with butterfly nets to try to catch some monarchs to help them tag them so that their migration patterns can be studied. This is all part of Monarch Watch a program run by the University of Kansas. We were fortunate enough to help both Skyler and Lily catch monarchs. We took them in and they each got to put the tag on them and then we let them loose. If they are found in Mexico by a tagger, they will receive a certificate of appreciation for helping the Monarch Watch program. We were also given more tags so that we could tag some at home. We were able to tag one, as we found a nice place along the creek where about a
hundred monarchs live. We still have four more tags to place, but we are waiting on our butterfly net, because it is almost impossible without one! We had a blast and the kids learned a lot about monarchs!

The Airshow

Ever since I was a little girl, one of the things I looked forward to every year was the Offutt Air Show. It was always so thrilling to see all of the different planes flying above the house. We would just watch them all weekend long. A few times we went to the base to watch it, but most of the time when I was young we would watch it from the back yard. Back then, there were no houses or trees blocking the view of the base. Now, I actually live in the neighborhood that blocks the view of the base from my parents' house. Sad, I know. But, we get to go to the base and sit on the flightline and enjoy the show. Everyone had a blast and we were lucky enough to be able to watch the show four times, since they started on Thursday!