Grace's Recent Adventures

Grace has been very busy lately. She has learned to crawl, is trying to add a few more teeth to her collection, and keeping mommy and daddy busy by getting into everything now that she is mobile. Here are a few videos of her recent endeavors. The first one is Grace enjoying one of her new favorite foods, avocados. The second video is the first time Grace actually moved forward. Daddy's toast was great incentive. While the third is one of her playing with her blocks.

A Trip to the Beach

This weekend Andrea, Grace, and I took a trip to our parent's house.  Saturday was a beautiful day so we went to the beach and took some senior pictures for my brother Joel.  I can't believe he is going to graduate this year. My little brother isn't so little any more.  Here are a few pictures of the event.

Snow

I know I'm a little behind but.... a couple of weeks ago I looked out the window and was surprised to see it snowing.  So we bundled up our daughter and went outside for some pictures.  Couldn't miss the oportunity to document her first snowfall (and try out the new lense I got for Christmas).

Grace's First Christmas

Grace has now experienced her first Christmas.  Here are just a few of the highlights of the day:
Stocking Time

Grandpa helping Grace open one of her presents.  Being the first grandchild, she sure got spoiled.

This is my mom and Grace with her new rocking horse.  She loves this thing and gets so excited whenever she gets to play with it. Hopefully soon I will post a video of her response.

Uncle Jonathan got her a camo outfit which he insisted she wear all day.  Pretty cute!

Christmas Photo Shoot

The hardest part was trying to get her not to eat the lights.  Joe was on light duty while I took the pictures.  It was his job to try and keep the things out of her mouth... something about not wanting our baby to put electrical wires in her mouth while plugged it.  We used the last one for our Christmas card.

Christmas Baking

My sister and I recently endeavored to make some cake balls. We got both the idea and the recipe from my good friend Lyndsey Brown. It's really pretty easy... Bake a cake, let it cool, dump it in a bowl, add a can of cream cheese frosting, mix together with hands, form into balls, freeze, dip, and cover in chocolate. After several hours and much tweaking of our technique, we were victorious. We found that adding just a little bit of shortening to the chocolate and making sure the cake balls were completely frozen produced the best result. Here are some pictures of the event:

Okay so the cookie cutters were for sugar cookies which we didn't get to, but I liked the picture.

Grace decided she wanted to help.

Here is our finished product and just some of the mess we made.

Our New Toy

This is actually Joe posting. Don't get used to it. I have a philosophical aversion to the whole idea of blogging... or maybe I'm just disinterested... or lazy.

Each Thanksgiving and Christmas, the parent organization at my school gives teachers a $25 gift card to Safeway. We're cheap... we shop at Winco.

Being the compulsive savers that we are, we figured that we would just hold onto them and put them together for something we really wanted. What I love about those things is that some stores let you buy gift cards to other stores with gift cards.

After two years, we had $75 in gift cards (haven't gotten the one for this Christmas yet). We used those to purchase Best Buy cards. We put those together with a similarly converted gift card from my parents (Fred Meyer) and a Best Buy card we had already been given by Ashley's aunt and uncle (last Christmas). That left us with $150 to Best Buy. Thanks to a sweet online Thanksgiving deal ($100 off), we bought a nice little Canon digital video camera for a grand total of $50 of our own money.

Here's a few little clips showing some of the fun we've been having with it.









Merry Christmas to us.