Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Yeah....so it's been awhile again. Maybe we'll try for a seasonal blog???

Merry Christmas! I hope all of your families enjoyed the Christmas holiday, and have some exciting plans for the New Year.

We had a really fun, crazy Christmas with Matt's side of the family in Chicago. There are six grandkids now on his side, all of them 3 and under, so it was quite a riot at times. But it was tons of fun - the cousins got along great, the Christmas Eve service was beautiful, the adults enjoyed a ping-pong/kick-a-shay/euchre/marbles tournament, and we were able to run the kids around in a gym on Christmas day to tire them out.

We are heading down to Springfield to celebrate Christmas with my family on Monday, so I am really looking forward to that. Liz and Marc and little Drew will be down there as well, so we'll all be together.

Another bit of news - Matt accepted a sports medicine fellowship at UConn for the academic year 2009-10 (yep, another year of training), so we will be moving to Hartford, CT in about a year and a half. It's only a year, and then we expect to come back towards the midwest when Matt starts his practice. He is really excited about the fellowship and being able to cover all the UConn athletic teams, and I am excited to explore a new part of the country.

Here are a bunch of pictures from the last couple months so you can catch up with the kids. Luke is ridiculously tall still, and Hailey is quite petite but makes up for it with spunk. :-)

The kids at Halloween...Luke as Thomas, and Hailey the octopus.

I went to a conference in Orlando with Matt....


This is what I did all day.


Liz and I with the turkey at Thanksgiving.


Grandpa Rick and all the kiddos in their Mizzou gear - maybe next year....

The kids with Santa


Matt and Luke cutting down our Christmas tree


Hailey and Santa at a party we went to - she was quite smitten by him.


Getting together with friends in Chicago


Christmas morning! Hailey found her present fast!

Happy Fall!

Ah, fall.....my favorite season of the year. And it is so good to be back home to enjoy it. Luke has started preschool and is absolutely loving it. We've been to the apple orchard, and to pick out our pumpkins, and generally having a wonderful time. Here are some highlights from the season so far.

Luke and Hailey on Luke's first day of preschool!

This is a random photo, but it just sums up Hailey somehow. So silly....

Little pumpkin-heads at Gull Meadow Farms

Trying to share the wagon at Gene the Pumpkin Man's

Hailey in the pumpkin patch

We hope you are enjoying Fall as well!

St. Paul

Hi Everyone,

This is going to be short - I am in the library with the kids climbing all over me. :-)

We are doing well in Minnesota - love the neighborhood we are in. Right behind St. Paul's cathedral in St. Paul, MN with parks, coffee shops, and fun restaurants all over the place.

The weather is great - as it always seems to be in Fall. The kids and the dog like the condo we are renting, and Matt and I are reliving the med school days of urban living. I kind of like it, easier than I thought it would be with the kids.

I'll try to get some photos up soon - promise!

Hope you are all enjoying the weather and the beginning of the greatest sports season there is - football, of course.

We send our love!

ATL

Hey Everyone!

Yeah, so I really am not so great at the blogging thing. But I'll keep trying.

So we are in Atlanta now while Matt is doing an visiting residency thing with a sports med surgeon down here. He is having all sorts of fun not taking call, seeing Hank Aaron in the office, and hanging out with Joey Harrington and the Falcons.

The kids and I are having a pretty good time ourselves hanging out with Matt's brother Tim, his wife Krista, and their little one Jackson, as well as Matt's Uncle Phil and Aunt Stephanie (with whom we are staying), and their boys - Jonathan, Travis, and Drew. Luke thinks he has died and gone to heaven with a house full of boys AND all their old toys to play with. :-) Hailey has also won over the boys, and they keep her quite entertained as well.

It's been ridiculously hot down here so far, so we just go from house to poool to house to eat to house. Would love to be able to go on more walks or go to the park, but it's just too hot. On the plus side, all the trips to the pool have served Luke well. He is swimming on his own now (when he wants to), and loves loves loves the pool.

I'll try to get some photos up soon!

Hope everyone is enjoying August!

Month of June

Whoops! Didn't mean for this to be a monthly blog! Oh well, life happens I guess. We had a great month of June. We enjoyed the weather finally turning warmer for good, went strawberry picking (my jam actually turned into jam this year - hooray!), said sad goodbyes to some resident friends that moved away, and took a little family trip to Traverse City, MI where Matt presented at a conference.

The kids had a great time at the beach in Traverse City, and both just played for hours and hours in the sand and water. Here are some fun beach pictures....




This is actually in South Haven - we went with some friends early last week. Matching swimsuit and hat, of course.



Smiling Hailey, walking the dock.


Luke digging, digging, then digging some more.



Here I go!



The official family photo from our trip.


Things we are looking forward to:

-In just a few short days, Matt will officially be a fourth resident - yipee! Finally some senority and a few less calls per month!

-Our family vacation with the Bolliers starts this Saturday at Snow Lake in Indiana - should be lots of fun, especially with all the cousins (there are five of them now!).

Happy 4th of July a little early, because I'm sure I won't write until after the holiday.

Hope everyone else is enjoying the warm weather!

P.S. Luke is taking swim lessons this week, and "dove" to the bottom to pick up a ring today. Go Luke! It's alright to brag on him a little, right?

A Lazy Weekend

Hello Everyone!

Happy Memorial Day weekend! As my title implies, we are having a very lazy 3-day weekend, and that suits me just fine. Matt is off all three days - woo hoo - but we decided just to stay in town and enjoy some family time.

Hailey officially turned one last Wednesday, May 23rd. We didn't really do much of anything since we had already celebrated down in Missouri. I'm afraid the most she got was Luke and I singing "Happy Birthday" a couple times. She is so, so, so close to walking. She stands up in the middle of the room all the time, looking like she's about to take off but then just plops back down. I think she just wants to let the anticipation build for a little while longer. :-) She's been fighting sleeping and naps this week, and I hoping it's just that her little brain is so busy learning how to walk that it is having trouble settling down to sleep. I've heard that can happen when they're learning something new. We'll see...

Luke played a whole lot of basketball this week - he loves shooting and attempting to dribble. After he makes a basket, he gives you this huge smile and shouts "I made the team!" What? I think it's a combination of "I made it!" and "Go team!", but I'm not sure. He's not too bad at shooting, so maybe basketball will be one of his sports - hey, he's got the size 12 feet already.

Luke and I took our first bike ride together on Friday night, that is with both of us on bikes. It was a neat moment - he's old enough now to do an activity together that we both really enjoy. I only crashed into him once (he does quite a bit of spontaneous braking).

Hope you and your family have enjoyed some fun moments this weekend as well!

Christy

Here we go!

Well, here we go.....my first blog! I am feeling lots of pressure to be interesting and exciting. But no one really knows I am blogging yet, so maybe I don't have to be so interesting...

Basically, this is just a new way to communicate with our family and friends that live far, far away - to let them in on the goings-on of our daily lives.

We just got back on Thursday from visiting my parents down in Springfield, Missouri. It was a really fun trip - although I don't think I drove down Battlefield Road once, so I feel I really did not experience Springfield fully. I think Liz drove down National to pick up some dinner one night, and came back ranting and raving about Springfield traffic - so maybe it's not so bad I missed Battlefield. Marc and Liz and little baby Drew were down visiting the same time we were, so we had a little miniature family reunion. Here's a photo of Luke, Hailey, and cousin Drew (2 months).



We took the kids down to Silver Dollar City - which none of you will have heard of unless you are from Missouri or Arkansas. It's a really neat amusement park done around the theme of the early 1900s - and I absolutely LOVED it as a kid, so it was really special to take my own kids there. Here's Luke after his ride on a real steam engine, and Hailey on her very first amusement park ride.




The kids did really well with the 11-hour drive down to Missouri and back. We only had maybe a 10-minute period of all out screaming from both of them :-). Let's just say the DVD player was well used. Luke and I did play some traditional car games, though. That was weird because I feel like it hasn't been that long since I was playing car games with my mom. How can Luke be that old already?

We had a little birthday party for Hailey while we were down there, since her birthday is coming up soon. She was much more fun to watch with her first piece of cake than Luke was! No offense Luke. She dove right in and destroyed it - good thing we were sitting outside. I know every mom says it, but I can't believe she is one already! She still seems so small. But she will be walking any day now, and is learning new words all the time. Some days it's a blessing that time goes so fast when they're little, and some days I want to yell "Wait! Hold on!"





That seems like enough (or too much) for my first day, so......

So Long,
Christy