Going to the movies....

A very rare occasion for our family. We had a gift card to the movies from Christmas 2010, we had not yet used. We wanted to go see "The Muppets", but they were completely sold out. Instead we are going to see "We Bought a Zoo". We had fun getting these pictures I thought I would share.

Ethan Birthday Surprise!

Ethan's birthday is very difficult to actually celebrate with friends since it is on Christmas Eve. Today Ethan celebrated his birthday with his grown up friends, "Daddy's Firefighters". We had a Mexican feast and cake. It was loads of fun, especially playing a game to see who would be stuck doing dishes. Ethan helped Firefighter Matt roll the dice with some birthday luck. Caleb needed some of his brother's birthday luck though, b/c he lost and had to do dishes. Here are a few pictures of the birthday celebration.

Happy 6th Birthday Ethan!

I wanted to share a few picture over the past year of Ethan. His birthday is hard to celebrate with his friends this time of year. Since Richie works on his birthday, (Christmas Eve) we are planning a surprise birthday party with the Firefighters. I will post more later. We love our Ethan!

Merry Christmas

We celebrated our family Christmas today, (December 23) for a couple reasons. First is b/c Richie is working Christmas Eve. Second, since Christmas is on Sunday we can prepare for worship without the added stress of opening gift and then trying to get ready to worship.
We have a tradition that my children love, we give them PJ's on Christmas Eve. Since we celebrated early I wanted to share some of our Christmas Eve pictures with you.
In these pictures you will see Autumn is upset b/c she found her PJ's several weeks before Christmas Eve, she thought I would get different ones since she found them. (A picture of how sinful we all are.) Josh to me looks so much like Richie when he was a little boy in these pictures. The picture of Caleb and Josh together I love Caleb's beautiful (I mean handsome) smile in this picture. Wish he would have smiled like that for family pictures.:-) Enjoy!!!

Firefighter Rusty

My brother Rusty spent a shift at the Fire Station with Richie a couple years ago while home on RR from his 3rd deployment in Iraq. Today Rusty is in Afghanistan on his 4th deployment. While on this deployment a fellow pilot got a great picture of him flying his Apache helicopter. He asked me to develop the picture, frame it, and give it to Richie and his guys at the Fire Station. The Firefighters will be hanging it in their day room. Here are a few picture of Rusty as a Firefighter and the guys with the picture he gave them.

Ethan lost his 2nd tooth....

But his first tooth naturally.:-) When he was about 10 or 11 months old he lost his balance and hit his tooth on the front screen door, 2 days later he lost his top right front tooth, root and all. I love this picture on the top our friend and photographer Rhonda Probst captured this past October, as you can see his top tooth he lost 5 years ago. The picture on the bottom I took with my iPhone, it's not that good, but you can see he lost the bottom tooth.