Daddy Daughter Dates

I love that Nate dates our daughters.  He took each of us out individually this week. 

He and Austin Kate enjoyed Ruth's Chris for Restaurant Week. 

He took Ave to her favorite restaurant, Olive Garden. 

 Ata and I went on a lunch date with him for Mexican, because that Bitty loves some chips, cheese dip and salsa.

And we went out with some friends this weekend to Capital Grill, also for Restaurant Week. 

In summery, Nate had an expensive week and ate very well!

*All pictures are cell phone pictures. I'm getting pretty slack with the real camera!*

Ski Trip 2012

 We took some of our students skiing in West Virginia this weekend.
It was a great trip with some of our wonderful students. 

The fearless chaperones... Todd, Trey, Shannon and us..

I love going on trips like this with our students because we get to spend so much individual time with them.  It is always a great time to build relationships with a smaller group of students.  Some of them introduced me to the highly addictive Temple Run, and the girls in my room performed a late night dance off.  They keep me young.. 

Our friend, Todd Hollins was the speaker for the weekend and we enjoyed a study of King Saul and Samuel.  We had weird weather because it was warm for WV in February and we had some rain, but there was almost no crowd, so we got lots of skiing and tubing in.  We have been taking students to Winterplace for years and look forward to many more trips up there in the future.

Happy Birthday AK!

On a snowy day 9 years ago, our Austin Kate was born.
She has been warming our hearts ever since. 

Happy Birthday Nugget!  We LOVE you!!

A Visit from the Turks

My little brother Jordan and his wife Lindsay, moved to Turkey this summer.  Jordan is in the Air Force and he is stationed there for a few years.  Lindsay has been here visiting since December, but Jordan had to stay in Turkey through Christmas. This past week, he got to come home and visit!!  Atalie and I went with Aunt Buttercup to pick him up from the airport.  We were all so excited to see each other!

 We spent lots of special time together over the week, and even ALL spent the weekend together in SC.

We miss you already Judi and Buttercup!!  

Little Mama

It's Still Looking A Lot Like Christmas

Yep.  Our Christmas decorations are still up. We talked about taking them down the week after Christmas, but I didn't want to spend one minute of our Christmas break on that boring task.  Maybe this weekend?  Maybe we will just put some hearts on everything and call them Valentine's Day decorations..

Back to it

Today Nate went back to work and the bigs went back to school after a glorious Christmas break.  The big girls had a pretty good morning and only asked about a dozen times each if I would "PAALEEEEZ homeschool them again".

Atalie slept until 9 since I had to get up at 6, where as she has been getting up at 6 during the break when I could have slept until 9.

This is blurry cell phone picture, but I think it's cute and captures her attitude this morning. 

This is how our conversation went when she woke up...

Ata: "Where Daddy?"
Me: "Daddy is at work."
Ata: "Where AK?"

Me: "AK is at school."

Ata: "Where Averie?"

Me: "Averie is at school."

Ata: throws her paci and yells, "NOOOO!" as she falls into the floor in despair... then she looks up at me and says, "Daddy HOME.  Averie HOME. AK HOME.  NOW."

We have repeated this conversation at least a dozen times already today...

Some Videos of Ata

Nate and the big girls ran into the church office yesterday on the way home while Atalie and I sat in the car since she's in a wild and crazy, "I will tear Daddy's office up if you let me near it" stage of life.

We decided to make a few little videos to entertain ourselves while we waited. 

*Notice, I ignore her when she calls me Jaime!

The Sleepy Poet

Today was our last day of Christmas vacation, so we had a lazy morning together, went out to lunch and then somewhere we've been trying to get to since we moved here, the Sleepy Poet. 

And don't think I had to twist any arms to go there.  

Our whole bunch enjoys a good treasure hunt.

I don't think I've ever seen this much Amethyst all together. 

pretty greens..

pretty blues..

love it.

I almost spent my Christmas money on this piece of stained glass, but didn't..

This antique dental cabinet was the coolest piece I saw all day.  Each drawer still had all of the original milk glass organizers in them.  At $500, I couldn't bring it home though. 

Hello?

It was a swell bit of family time.  

All we took home was a coke bottle for Nate's collection, and some good little memories. 

::All pictures are taken with my phone in instagram::

Happy 2012

I took some sweet pictures of us celebrating with friends and the kids all jumping up and down as the ball fell at midnight, but my laptop ate them.  I have about 30,000 pictures on here and can't come up with an organized way to move them to my external hard drive, so it's acting a little kooky until I figure that out.. so Happy New Year!

Our prayer is that the Lord moves in your life immeasurably more than you can imagine in 2012.