Family Pictures!

Here are some of our oh sooo many pictures we took. Usually, and I think this is true for people especially people with at least a few kids in their family, it gets crazy trying to get everyone to cooperate and get the pictures done quickly as possible. BUT amazingly we did awesome and got them done quick! Thank goodness! So everyone afterwards was a happy camper instead of a party pooper. We had a lot of fun getting together and have some serious smiling ones and also some crazy funny ones. This year we also tried the "Zoolander Look" :-D.... go look!

I love Ben and me in the 4th one down! We sat there, doing that pose forever (because we had the camera on a timer, so a red light would flash right before it takes a picture), finally we asked if it had taken the picture yet, cuz no one had said anything yet, since we couldn't see if it had taken the picture yet.

The two big ones at the bottom are my favorite out of the pictures we took.

The best day...

My birthday was on Friday, the 18th, and Ben made it the best day for me! He woke me up with breakfast in bed with the new bed tray he got for me. Then we went and got my hair cut (I've been meaning to do it FOREVER and could never get around to it, so it was perfect that Ben set me an appointment that day). After that we went to "P.S. I Love You", which I loved! Then we went to my parents for my favorite dinner, steak and baked potatoes! And instead of cake for desserts, we had my favorite dessert... Apple Pie! YUM! :-D

My day was a perfect mix of activities but relaxing day! Btw, I'm 21!

Winter Break FUN

I didn't take very many pictures at Christmas, because I have bad habit of forgetting my camera. But I did get some pictures from my mom.

Between Christmas and New Years, my brother had his open house at my parents house. Aren't they such a cute couple?

During the several days that Ben and I were at my parents house for the holidays, we played dance revolution (I think thats what its called) on my brother's Wii. I had a lot fun doing it, even though I'm not very good! My family and I were finally able to convince Ben to do it, but only after he saw everyone else do it, :-). Each song has 4 levels, the hardest level is extremely hard that we would have 4 people play on one pad (1 person per direction), look at the 3rd picture down. On the 4th picture below, my nephew would love to "help" me by sneaking a few steps (look at the boy in red sweats with his foot on the pad :-D).

My dad loves doing puzzles, so we make sure that he gets a puzzle every year for Christmas. We love helping do the puzzle, sometimes there's 5 or 6 people helping! This was one of our many activities on New Years' Eve.

Here's Ben and I at New Years! I love all of our holidays' firsts as a married couple, and I'm looking forward to the rest of them.

Things were a little crazy in the house if we let all 3 dogs in the house (2 of my brothers each have one,Sampson the German Shepherd/Husky and Jules is pit bull/lab, and Ben and I have Brewster. Especially when we have treats for them, look at them being good for a split second!

It was so much fun to hang out with my new sister-in-law, Angelina! Especially since they live so far awar in St. Louis. Here we are with our "step-dogs" :-D.

Ben and I love it when we get to see my nephews and nieces, we always have so much fun with them! Here's Ben and Abigail, they love to tickle/tease each other.

And here's one of favorite reasons to get together with family... to play games. Usually my family gets so into it, that once someone is laughing so hard until they're crying, literally... we all start crying, haha!

Duck Hunting (from Dec 1st, 2007)

I finally found my camera (how sad is that, that I lose my camera for a month?)!

Ben and I went duck hunting and camping a month ago, and it was such a fun experience! We went with some of Ben's friends from Flagstaff (the McReynolds). This was my first hunting experience, and it was all and nothing like I thought it would be.

We went to the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge (Topock Marsh near Needles, CA).

View Larger Map

We drove up there on Nov 30th, and the drive there was extremely long for two reasons: we still had to pick up some supplies and pick up our license and duck hunting stamp. It also took a long time because it was the weekend of best rain storm of the year, so traffic was bad and there were some flooded areas on the way there.
Here’s a wash that actually washed out the road with a foot or so of mud.

We finally got to the campsite, that Ben’s friends were already at, close to 1 AM (after going to wrong campsite… its hard to find the right place in the dark, especially if you never been there). It was really cold that night, since it was raining while we were trying to sleep. We had to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to go make the drawing (everyone who wanted to hunt had to draw to find out which blind we were sitting in). I didn’t take any pictures of our camping site, but here are a couple of pictures of the blind we had on the first day.

This is where we sit and wait for the ducks to fly by so we can shoot at them.

Since we had just got the huge rain storm, it was soo muddy, that Joe McReynolds daughter, Ariel, had too much fun in the mud.

All together (both days that we went), we got about 20-25 ducks. Joe put on his waders and had to go out into the water to get the ducks. Here are the ducks we got on the first day. The second day, the mud in the water was not solid enough for us to retrieve the ducks. Ben would just sink deep into the mud each time he took a step.

Here are some pictures of me, while I was in the blind.

Ben and I had a lot fun, despite of a few frustrations (i.e. we were missing a stamp on our license, so we had to drive all the way into town to get the 2nd stamp before we could go into the blind). We were happy to go home, relax, crawl into our warm bed, and go to sleep.