New Camera

I posted before Christmas about our new camera purchase.  I'm very happy with what we ended up getting, but I still have a LOT to learn about the camera.  As of right now, I'm still mastering the art of learning how to take a damn picture! :-)

Anyway, here are a few pictures I snapped after we opened the camera.

Christmas 2009 (obviously!)

The in-laws

Out at my parents house

Parents house again

Bear & his cousin, Addie, "fighting" over a treat

My Parents dog, Samantha

Playing in the snow

And again....

Needless to say, Bear slept pretty well on the 1.5 hour drive home! :-)

These are just a few of the pictures I took, but there will be more to come.... Have a wonderful Tuesday! :-)

The Aftermath

Can you believe Christmas 2009 is officially over?  The presents are unwrapped and all that's left is to take down the Christmas decorations!  It's hard to believe that another Christmas has come and gone!  Makes me feel old actually.

We had a wonderful Christmas filled with lots of family.  We were so blessed this Christmas season and I cannot wait to see what Christmas 2010 will bring! 

I'll be back later this week to share some of the loot we got :-)

In the mean time, I hope you enjoy the upcoming week and have a wonderful New Years celebration!!

We Cheated....

Well, I'm horrible with surprises and I'm horrible at keeping surprises.... Only because I can.not.wait. to figure the surprise out, only to be disappointed because I never really wanted to ruin it in the first place.  I also hate buying Christmas gifts early because I want to give them way before Christmas......

With that said, Hubby & I cheated on Christmas this year.

We opened our gifts to and from each other on the 13th!  Yes, the 13th!  We don't get to wake up on Christmas day just the two of us so we always do it early, but never weeks this early!  Anyway, he did an excellent job!!

I don't have pictures yet, but I'll put them up later... 

Anyway, we set a limit for Christmas gifts because we have so many other people to buy for and it just gets too expensive.  We agreed on our limit and I went over by about $10, so what did Hubby do?  go over by about $15! :-) O, I do love him :-)

I've been telling him how much I want to pick up running again, but that the cold -25 freezing my butt off weather is really putting a camp in my style.  I hate spending tons of money on really nice workout clothes, so what did he do...?  He went out and spent enough money to put our future child through college what he thought was a good amount on some decent running clothes!

He got me a pair of under-armor cold-weather black pants with an Iowa Hawkeyes logo on them!  Along with a matching running jacket with the Hawks logo again.  They are SUPER warm and I love them!!!  I also got a really warm Hawks headband that is fleece. 

Hubby did an awesome job because I never would have expected that he would buy these gifts for me.

I got him some lame awesome tools that he's been wanting along with the obligatory jeans & underwear that he gets every year!  

So, that's that!  We are done with presents for each other.  I hated doing it early, but at the same time I knew hubby would love his gift so I couldn't wait any longer!  AND he was dying to give my gifts to me!  So it all worked out!  Next year we are waiting until at least December 16th Christmas Eve to do gifts! {Grin}

Take 1.....2....3....4...

So, over Thanksgiving weekend, we attempted to take our Christmas card picture!

In the past, we've involved all 3 of our pets:

Such as here in 2008. 

But that takes almost a whole year in itself a long time with a lot of pictures and a lot of frustrating people! (Jesse, me, the person taking the picture! )

So, here we are, all 5 of us!  From left to right:

Bear, Allie, Me, Jesse & Josie.

So this year, we've decided that we would only put Bear in the picture.  Just makes life a lot easier!

It took a few takes, but it wasn't too bad. Here are a few of the "crappy" ones.

 

We called it quits after this last one, and decided to use it! 

Not the best, but it will have to do! :-)

So, there you have it!  our 2009 Christmas card picture! 

Happy Friday!! :)

3D!

This weekend we were able to go see Disney's A Christmas Carol in 3D!

I LOVED this movie!  My hubby & my in-laws went with.  I've never been to a 3D movie before, but it was very cool.  I think I'll be buying it when it comes out, hopefully in 3D!  I would not recommend it for children under 10 though as some parts are quite scary.  They added a bit to this version, but again, I really enjoyed it.  Things jumped out at you and felt as if you could touch them!  Very creative!   Definitely a Must See.

Catching up!

It's been a few days since my last post and I have no real good reason why.... I mean, I'm busy, but I could have sat down to type something up.  Nothing was blog worthy, but now that I have a few minutes, I thought I would catch you all up on what's going on.

This weekend was great since we were able to spend it at home!  Jesse was home sick on Friday, so most of the weekend was spent taking care of him and watching movies.  I have my first draft of my lit review for my research paper due this Sunday (which I was able to START on this past weekend)  I'm only about 2 pages in, so I've got a long way to go.  We did get to see some great movies though.  We watched The Proposal which was cute and a must see!  We also watched Lies & Illusions which was the worst movie we've ever seen a very odd movie to say the least. State of Play was the other one we watched and it was ok, not my favorite, and not my least favorite.

Other than that, Saturday, hubby drug me kicking and screaming took me to a speaker competition.... Yes, I said speaker competition.  More on that in a later post, but really, it wasn't that bad.  It was quite humorous and fun to see how creative people are when it comes to building speakers that sound really great.  It's hubby's new found passion in his free time.  He's working on a new project for our movie theater room, so I'll have to show pictures of that soon as well! 

I'm currently loathing my research class.... It's got to be the most waste of time class I have ever taken.  There is so much busy work.  AND get this, the research project we are putting together, well we aren't even following through with the research (or at least we aren't required to and since I'm not currently working in a school, it's quite difficult to do so).  So, I'm going along, doing whats required of us, but not really learning a damn thing in the process... I keep thinking only 7 more weeks to go and I'm finished with the class!!! (I wish it seemed like a short amount of time!)

I'm having a crap-tastic week, I can't really share a lot of the happenings, but just know that I could use some prayers to help fix things... 

I'm excited for this weekend, it's our biggest annual fundraiser for Big Brothers Big Sisters called Bowl for Kids Sake.  Hubby and I are bowling with two of my co-workers, Angie & Katie.  We've raised our money and now we are ready to celebrate!  We'll be bowling, enjoying food, hopefully some prizes and just having fun.  Afterwords, my parents are coming to visit and go out to dinner with us.  I haven't decided on a place yet, but I'm sure I'll think of something! :-) I'll be working on my lit-review the rest of the week/weekend, so no other fun will be had!

Lastly, I just want you all to know that there's only 66 days until Christmas!!! I'm very excited, can you tell?  Although, I'm also almost as equally excited for Thanksgiving when both sides of our families will join us for a home cooked meal by ME!  Yeahhh!! 

I hope everyone is having a crappy week like me great week! (No really, I hope it's better than mine!)