Look at this HANDSOME Boy

Best Christmas Present Yet Part II

As most of you know, Noel gave me a super fantastic Christmas present this year...tickets to see Brad Paisley. I love Brad Paisley!

The concert was last Thursday. We went with our friends Bart and Emily. Bart is the one who gave Noel the idea to get the tickets. Nice work! We went to dinner together and then it was off to the concert. At the concert, Noel made the observation that you can definitely tell the difference between the real cowboys and the poser cowboys. :)

Justin Moore and Miranda Lambert were the opening acts. Blake Shelton also made a surprise appearance. But of course Brad was the best! He played all of my favorite songs; it was a blast! I will definitely remember this Christmas present for years and years to come. Thanks again, Noel for the fantastic present!

I forgot my camera (oops), so thanks to Emily and Bart for giving me their pictures.

Christmas 2009

We enjoyed a very happy Christmas once again this year. Noel was grateful for a break from school. Let's be honest, I was glad that he had a break too. He's been working really hard, and it was nice to get to see him a ton. Greg was old enough to kind of get opening presents this year, especially after seeing his cousins' spectacular present-opening form!

Before visiting Noel's family, we opened our gifts from my parents and sister and the gifts to each other. While we opened presents, Greg would just tear open the end of his presents and then lift out the gift.

My spectacular gift to Noel so he won't freeze completely when riding his bike to school.

Christmas Eve: Had a delicious meal, then opened our new pjs, read Luke 2.

My beautiful sister-in-law Hayley.

Cutie-pants niece Julia

Greg with Grandma

Hayley sporting her new onesie pajamas

Hayley and Rusty

The love sacks were a big hit! The kids loved to run and jump on them. Here is LesliAnn, Julia, Greg, Noel and Luke enjoying the comfort of the love sack.

Noel's birthday is the 28th. I always feel bad for him because it is right in between Christmas and New Years, and I always neglect it a bit (not on purpose...I just do. What kind of wife am I?!?!) For his birthday, we (Noel, Maren, Jordan, Hayley, Chris, and I) went to his all-time favorite eating establishment, Empire Hots. It is this hole in the wall that he would go to all the time when he was in high school. Empire Hots is famous for their trash plate. It consists of home fries and cold-mac (aka macaroni salad) with two hamburger patties on top covered with chili sauce. Sounds disgusting and looks disgusting to be completely honest, but it is really quite tasty.

Then what's a birthday without some birthday cake, ice cream, and several rousing games of KILLER BUNNIES?!?! That game was a big hit!

One of the days of our vacation, LesliAnn and I took the kids to this place called The Sandbox. It had a bunch of fun stuff for the kids to play with: slides, a sandbox, costumes, puppets, a jump house, etc.

Luke playing with the trains and Greg in the pretty pink car.

Julia in her beautiful princess skirt.

By far, Greg's favorite thing was to ride around in these little cars. If he got out of one, he would just go get in another.

Greg had a ton of fun with Luke and Julia. He absolutely loved Julia and would follow her everywhere and mimic her every move. It was too cute.

New Year's Day: The Stockmans and the Lanes came over for dinner. It was super fun to see them. Here's a picture of the fam on New Years.

Greg with Grandpa

We had such a great time. One thing about living far from family is that I miss them like crazy. I call my mom and sisters saying that I'm homesick more times than I'd care to admit. But being away makes the time together that much more precious! I just love it!

Last picture...I promise. Greg got this little shirt for Christmas from Lynne and Gordie. He wore it the other day, and I was so excited to put on his cape that Aunt Adele made him. Of course, he didn't quite cooperate with the cape. Can you tell he cut four molars this week? He has had his hand in his mouth non-stop!

Random

Noel was so kind to put my pictures from my memory disk onto the computer. For whatever reason, I have been avoiding it. Some of the pictures on there were from before Thanksgiving, but I think they are too fun not to keep a record of them.

This is what happens when you give a baby a bowl of yogurt for breakfast and leave him alone while you check email and Facebook. Lesson learned. Too funny!

For whatever reason, Greg loves to play in the kitchen and this is how my kitchen looks almost all the time.

Love that face!!!

Helping Grandpa with one of the many projects we had him do while he was here for Thanksgiving.

Wearing Noel's fleece skull cap.

Just like his dad!

Greg's favorite place to play

Best Christmas Present Yet!

This year we are traveling to New York for Christmas. Because it is pointless to drag all of our presents to New York and then back to Lexington, we decided to open our presents before we left. Greg had the the most presents to open (though none of them were cool like a PS3 or an HD large screen TV). Amber surprised me again this year with some of the best presents...3 awesome Tour de France water bottles for my bikes and a cool pull over for biking to and from school in the morning.

But the highlight of this year was my gift to Amber. You see, Amber is quite humble and every time I ask her what she wants for Christmas she always responds with, "Just to spend time with you."...Oh Please!!!! So to make a long story short, my previous four years of Christmas presents for Amber were horrible. But this year different.

Without further ado, I present Amber's Christmas card cover:

And a video of her opening the present:

Nice Kicks!

Noel's cousin Scotty and his wife Jessie gave Greg the cutest Converse shoes last year around Christmas time. They are size 5, so at the time, they were too big. A few months ago I figured they would probably fit. So cute! Too bad they won't fit for too much longer; it's getting hard to fit his chubby feet in there.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This year for Thanksgiving, Noel's parents and grandparents came to visit. It is always a treat to have them around. They got in Wednesday night and the cooking frenzy began Thursday morning. No pictures of Thanksgiving dinner. Oops. We had a magnificent feast. True to form, Gordie made (I think) 7 or 8 pies. They were delish, and we are still enjoying them. We also had some great rolls, mashed potatoes, broccoli, sweet potatoes, stuffing, and of course turkey. It was fantastic! Noel's cousin Kristi, her husband Justin, and their son Landon came up from Bowling Green. We also had the Jones family, Jackson family, and our friend Pat from our ward. It was so fun!!!

Noel ran a turkey trot Thursday morning out at Keeneland (a few other people from the ward were in it too). Probably one of the funniest things from the race was the lady completing the course in a tiny buggy being pulled by a little pony. I don't know why I never get my camera out. I think that it stems from the fact that Noel is so good at taking pictures that I usually rely on him to do it. So because he was running the race, no pictures.

Of course, Greg was totally spoiled by all the attention that he received with 4 extra people in the house. He had such a fun time with his grandparents and great-grandparents. Now it's just boring ol' mom around the house all day. I'm sure he is wondering where the fun people went!

On Friday, we played volleyball at the church with some friends in the ward. We had a really fun time. I was especially excited because growing up, my family would get together to play volleyball the day after Thanksgiving. So even though I wasn't with them for the holiday, I still got to do one of the traditions.

Here are some cute pictures that Noel took while we were at the park on Saturday. It was such a beautiful day.

Home and Adventures

This is Noel again. I know that I said I wouldn't post on this blog anymore, but Amber has trouble navigating through my picture archives in order to post pictures. As such, I thought I would post some pictures of Greg for the grandparents and tell a little bit about school, life, and adventures.

The following pictures are from this morning and demonstrate Greg's most recent developments. First off, Greg has turned into a climbing maniac. For his birthday Grandma and Grandpa Dickens gave him a little jungle set with a slide and platform. Since conquering climbing onto the platform he has decided that he can climb onto anything. In particular he likes to climb up onto any seat (especially the piano bench and the computer chair). Amber and I gave up on trying to keep off things. In the meantime we are working on the concept of "down." That is...don't stand up! Greg is also quite mobile and loves to run around the backyard with his basketball and soccer ball. Great Grandpa Dickens would be quite proud of his great grandson as Greg also loves to make motor noises while he drives his car. Fortunately he hasn't learned how to use the horn, but he does love to shout, "GO!!!!" and point in any direction. We are doomed :(

School has kept me quite busy, but I have been fortunate to balance my studies with exercise, fun, and extracurricular activities. This fall I have been training for the Iron Man - Louisville. My goal before Christmas is to swim a mile in under 40 minutes. In the spring I will work on my running as I need to drop my half marathon time to under 2 hours. So far so good and I have been injury free, although I recently came down with the swine flu...YUCK!

This past weekend was the Race for the Fig Adventure Race. The race consists of running, biking, rappelling, and kayaking/canoeing for 60 miles combined in Red River Gorge. Our team name was the "Occlusal Crushers" as we consisted of myself and 3 second year dental students. It was a great experience. Our team did very well despite two of us recently recuperating from the flu. On Sunday all of us were quite sore. But despite Bryce Jones saying, "Hell is defined as fire and brimstone. Better put, it is the adventure race." we are already planning on doing it next year.

 My family has a rich tradition of military service and I would like to take the time to thank them for their service and example. Thank you for sacrificing your time and efforts to guarantee a better tomorrow. Happy Veteran's Day and may your lives be blessed.

October Festivities

October has been a busy month. Here is a little look at what we have been up to this month.

Of course, we carved pumpkins with Jeff and Melea. I scooped out the seeds, and Noel did the carving. Nice work. I do have to say that Noel's pumpkin carving skills have come a long way since the first year we did this with the Birds. It's a skull and cross bones, just in case you couldn't tell.

I was so excited to dress Greg up for Halloween this year. Since I am lacking in craft/sewing abilities and didn't want to spend too much on a costume, I went with our friend Kristen to Kid-2-Kid and found this adorable elephant costume for $7. I thought that Greg would be all for it. Wrong. He was quite distraught about having the elephant head on his head (he has never been a fan of wearing hats).

"Dad, why is she doing this to me?!?!"

Of course his life in an elephant costume got much better with a graham cracker.

Greg and I went to our ward's annual trunk-or-treat activity. It was very fun to see all the cute costumes and decorated trunks.

Our friends, the Willburs (aka Harry Potter, Hermoine Granger, Luigi, and Toad). Blurry, but such cute costumes...nice work, Joy!

Greg and I again. It sure did take a lot of graham crackers to keep that kid happy.

This is how a guy in our ward dressed up. It was so cool. He is a tall guy to begin with, then he was standing on these stilt things that made him probably 10 feet tall. He also had paper mache hands and head. Very spooky!

Last but not least, the kids in Fayette County schools had their fall break for 2 days this month. One afternoon that she had off, Grace came over to play with Greg. He loves her!!! It was so fun to watch him play with her; he was so happy and excited.

I hope that everyone had a wonderfully spooky Halloween and that you got tons of candy! :)