Tuesday, March 3, 2009

It's "Lily Day"!

Hard to believe, but it was exactly one year ago today that Lily joined our family! In honor of "Lily Day", I'm *finally* going to update this blog. This is gonna be a LONG post. I'm going to pick up where I left off:


June 9, 2008




June 22, 2008

Lily's 1st birthday!

We didn't want to have a huge party with extended family because Lily hasn't been home that long and we didn't want to overwhelm her. So we took the kids to the Madison Zoo for the day, and then came home and had a little birthday party for her with just us and Grandma.




























June 24, 2008

Precarious position for a nap; no wonder she was mad when she woke up:



At Thomas's soccer game:










July 9, 2008

Typical summer day.






4th of July on Bill's deck waiting for the fireworks. Bill's friend Todd is holding Lily.






July 3, 2008

The kids and I went to "Little Switzerland" and "Little Norway" an hour and a half north of us in Wisconsin. Here we are at a Swiss restaurant for lunch.







August 2, 2008

Thomas's 6th birthday








August 8, 2008

My daughter is a little strange sometimes...








August 18, 2008

Back to school! Don't they look thrilled?




August 29, 2008

My brother Bill & Stefanie's wedding.





















September 2008

Two weeks at Disney World! I took about a bajillion pictures, so I had to severely limit the number I'm posting here. And hardly ANY food pictures posted--that was hard! We drove down and stayed at Pop Century resort for two weeks (FREE dining plan promotion, yeah!), and Bill, Stef, Kathryn & Calvin flew down and met us there for a week. So here's a sampling of the fun we had.

The candy lady in Japan at Epcot didn't pick Richard this time, poor kid. But William, Anna, & Thomas each got to pick an animal and she made them these candy art creations. She is amazing!
Would you believe...a DRAGON FRUIT tree??!!!


































October 4, 2008

William and Anna's 12th birthday:






Halloween 2008

The kids wore their Vietnamese garb trick-or-treating; we stopped at Grandma's house first. Lily stayed home with me while Don took the kids out, so she's not dressed up. Next year for sure.






November 20, 2008
Parent observation day at Anna's ballet class:






December 24, 2008 Christmas Eve

Decorating ginger bread men. We had Bill, Stef, Kathryn, Calvin & Grandma over for Christmas eve dinner that night. I don't know why I have no pictures of this?? Possibly because I was stressed out over my oven dying the night before, mid-cake-bake, and Don & Lauren had to take the half-baked cake over to Grandma's at 11:30 at night to finish baking it. And then on Christmas eve day, I had to go back and forth to Grandma's with everything that I needed to cook in an oven for our Christmas eve dinner too. That was a good time. So I guess I neglected the camera. Oops.




December 25, 2008 Christmas morning

Our poor, sad-looking tree with all of the breakable ornaments only on the top half:

We picked up Grandma so she could watch the kids open their presents. Lily was a bit overwhelmed and confused as to why we were suddenly telling her to rip the wrapping paper off the packages that we had spent the past few weeks telling her NOT to rip open! We just relaxed around the house all day, letting the kids have fun with their new toys. We got a Wii! Whee!










January 18, 2009
Two of my rock stars with their new guitars:






January 20, 2009

Lily and her buckets:





It's never too early to get children to help out around the house:




January 24, 2009





January 25, 2009

January 31, 2009