part of it

I've had a couple of requests to see pictures of our house.  I don't have a comprehensive photo tour ready, but since I finally took photos off my camera, I have a few.

Here is the view from our side yard, taken earlier this year:

Here is the girls drawing on the retaining wall  in our back yard:

Here is our dining room and kitchen before we painted.  Unfortunately, I forgot to take the picture before Wilda removed the lovely grapevine wallpaper border that ran along the top of the wall you are looking at:

(I took this picture standing by the double doors in the picture above):

Here is a view of our kitchen standing at the top of the stairs. The living room is on the right.

Here is the dining room being prepped for painting (from the kitchen):

Here is our living room, standing at the top of the steps (near the kitchen):

Here is looking down the steps:

And this is looking at the living room from the end of the hallway:

Don't worry, we now have furniture in our living room, but I haven't taken the time, while it's clean, to take any pictures of it, so you'll have to wait on those.

Happy New Years everyone!

A New Year

One of my New Year's resolutions (well, actually, my only one at the moment), is to write consistently on the blog again.  So here I am, January 1st--and trying to start on the right foot.

My mother-in-law keeps pictures of all of her grandkids in frames in her livingroom, and the ones of Emilia and Mira are currently over a year old.  Mira was 6 months in the picture that's up.  So today, Steve bathed the girls and they had clean, matching outfits, so I forced them to sit in front of the camera for a few minutes so I could take some new pictures of them.  Mira has been sick for 4 days now and was REALLY cranky this morning, so I only got a few good ones of her, but I only needed 1! So I'm happy.

I wanted to not have the processing of the pictures hanging over my head, so while Mira naps and Steve and Emilia are out with Grandpa Watts and cousins sledding, I am processing pictures.

My girls are difficult to take good pictures of, especially when you put both of them together, but they sure are cute!  Here you go!

Winter Wonderland

Out our front window when we woke up this morning:

naked

I have tons of naked pictures of Emilia and I realized the other day that I have very few of Mira.  "I must remedy this situation!" I thought.  Of course!

 Emilia couldn't go through a whole shoot without being photographed.  She gave me a winning smile for this one.

I love sleeping babies

playing around

When I cleaned up the living room in anticipation of getting our new furniture, the girls thought it was great fun to have so much space to run around in. Here are some pictures of then being their adorable silly selves.

Halloween

For Halloween, we had lots of fun this year. Emilia was Ladybug Girl (she is a character in a series of really cute books), and Mira took over as Princess Leia. Steve had a work party where they had games for the kids and food for everyone. Emilia got some candy there.

Then we went to the ward's trunk-or-treat. I had never heard of a trunk-or-treat growing up, but they are pretty popular here. Instead of kids going around the neighborhood to trick-or-treat, a bunch of people decorate the trunks of their cars and park in the same parking lot (our church building for this one) and the kids go around to the different cars to get their halloween candy. My girls wouldn't eat the pulled pork at the work party, so we got some chicken nuggets and french fries. They ate those while waiting to get more candy at the trunk or treat.

After the trunk-or-treat, we went to Grandma and Grandpa Watts' house, where Steve took Emilia door to door for about a 1/2 hour. Then we got a picture tour of France from Nick and Wilda who had just returned from a week-long trip to Paris. All in all, it was a fun Halloween for all of us!