A week of Christmas

The entire week of Christmas (besides Christmas Day) Josh and I spent with his family. His cousin Marlo and her family flew down from Oregon, Lynnea and her little boy, Makenna, flew out from Hawaii, and Dreason flew here from Rome (he is on the US nat'l water polo team and tranes in Italy). The whole week we spent lounging around, going to see Christmas lights at Balboa, visiting Atlantis park, going out to dinner, etc. Over all it was a good time. Here are a few pictures from our week.

Paige, Griffen, and Makenna

i know. everyone wants my sun glasses. ;)

There were bunnies running around at the park! we got so close to one of them!

Josh was in love with little Aiden....

...but not as much as Janice..she was head over heals for the little guy. can't blame her though. he was adorable and always smiling.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas day went really well. Josh was able to spend the day with me, get the house ready, relax together, lots of family came over, and of course we all looked forward to seeing baby Landon. My cousin Eric and his wife Amber (whom i love dearly) gave birth to Landon 10 months ago ON MY BIRTHDAY! ha! so special. anyways, he is darling, and in love with animals: specifically dogs.

If any of you know my dog Missy, she is ever so hiper whenever anyone come to our house. she will jump on you and sit ON your foot until she gets your undivided attention. But when she sees babies, she definitly realizes how fragile they are and makes a point to keep her distance. She will push herself against you and be running around, but the second she sees a baby she will bow her head down, slowly walk over to the baby, sniff, and just sit there carefully, making sure no harm comes to him. This time she totally ignored the baby(which she has never done) and just let him coo and giggle at her as he was estatically trying to reach for her. It was the cutest thing.

Missy lay just out of Landon's reach as he would try to reach for her. Landon was shaking his arms uncontrolably at one point becuase he was so excited to see her. :)

Sadly, Missy was diagnosed with bone cancer on Christmast Eve and the vet does not expect her to last much longer. maybe another month. :( Tragic thought to think of losing such a key part of our family. Its hard to see her in pain, but i know that God will help us through this like he has carried us through everything else.

Work or Play?

So for the few of you who haven't heard...i don't babysit anymore!! well i do on occasion, but i have a real job now! I was casually praying about possibly needing a job and God obviously heard my prayers, and put it on the hearts of those at Calvary to ask me to work at the Bible College! so now i am the admissions, registar, and secretary to Erik Tribble at the extension campus at Costa Mesa. This is my third week and i am loving it so far! Jessica and i share the duties of running the Bible College, so it is really chill and we get along great. Now that i work 40 hours a week, it is hard for me to regularly see my peeps and thus i am missing you guys! come have lunch with me sometime and we'll catch up!
Yes, we had to work half day on Christmas Eve, but we spent the day having tons of fun playing Jenga, Mad Gab, and going to Brueggers Bagels for Breakfast.

In the EYE of the beholder

In this case, we are talking about a FISHeye. heck yes. I got a fisheye converter for Christmas. Let me just say that I am stoked. So I was browsing the internet one day..actually that sounds like most of my days..this time looking for fisheye lenses. I was getting discouraged when all i could find were $500-$1,000 lenses. Sheeeesh! I went on Yahoo!Answers and found out that you could get a lense converter that just sits on the end of your current lense, gets the same job done and only costs $30-$40! What a deal! So I told my mom this would be something that i would want for Christmas (cuz they are always asking and i never know what i want..until now!) so suprisngly my mom was like, "Ok, go ahead and get it!" So it came in the mail on Wednesday and I was able to take it to church and mess around with it a little bit before I had to surrender it to my mother to wrap for me..to REopen on Christmas morning. :)

aawwww...AbraHAM has a sensitive side. ;)

i love the angle of way the computer bends!

so its kind of weird using a fisheye because you have to get barely an inch away from whatever you are photographing for it to bubble like that. (Ex: Grant was so close to our faces when he took this last picture, that i honestly thought he was only taking a picture of Josh's eye. ha!) I'm so excited and can't wait to mess around with it some more.

School is out for the Winter!

First Time at Disneyland!

Well, it wasn't the first time for me to go to Disneyland, but it was for Adeh! Josh was given a free Disneyland ticket while working at Salvation Army and he saved it to take someone with us who didn't have a pass. I think Adeh really enjoyed it for the most part. He's not really a roller coaster type of person, but we convinced him to go on Space Mountain, and he didn't freak out too much..as you can tell in the first picture. haha. We took him on almost every ride worth riding for the perfect Disney experience. Josh and I haven't done a day trip to Disney on a Saterday in a while, so it was a shock for us to see it so packed! The lines that were normally 10-15 minutes long were up to a 45-60 minute wait! Crazy!

Can you see us sleeping behind Adeh? Apparently, we've been on the ride one too many times...or maybe we just know where the camera is. ;)
The Peter Pan Ride

waiting in the 45 minute line for Star Tours (this ride suprisingly made Adeah more sick then the roller coaster!)

Josh finding out the Disney character he relates most to is Scar. (He took the news fairly well)

[Another] Day in the Life of...

Instead of watching Natasha for 6 hours in the afternoon/evening, today I came over in the morning/afternoon! Even though it was the same amount of time it suprisingly went a lot quicker. I made her a delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs and buttered toast to start off our morning. After taking a few bites of her eggs (which were delicious by the way) she gets down and shuffles over to the pantry to grab a box of "pashta" instead. ( I normally make her lunch and we have pasta almost every time, so i think she was thrown off by making breakfast)

anywho, when it got time for lunch i told her that we could make our pasta now, and after stepping away for no more than a minute i hear the pasta going all over the floor. I ran back into the room to find Natasha at her play kitchen pouring the uncooked pasta into her toy pan! it was so cute! i couldnt get mad at her and instinctively ran to get my camera and took a picture of the mess before we cleaned it up.

Natasha loves taking pictures, and had even more fun being silly when she found out it could make a video as well. I'll have to video tape some of the conversations we have. I've put up so many pictures of this girl so i thought it would be fun to "watch her" too

(sorry the video is sideways..thought you would still appreciate the humor)

This Weeks Update

As some of you know, Josh was in the hospital on his birthday undergoing tests on his stomach/colon, so our plans to go out to dinner got cancelled. Sunday night Josh and I went out to the Jazz Kitchen at Downtown Disney to celebrate his belated 22nd birthday. It was both our first times there and it was amazing! We sat on the balcony (which was a cool view), and snuck down stairs afterwards to listen to the live jazz music, which was ridiculously awsome. After our dinner of a New York strip steak and beer battered catfish, we made our way down to the movies and saw 007 Quantom of Solace! i dont know if it was as good as the first, but it definitly kept me awake. :)

(this was my dinner..DELICIOUS!)

Yesterday I spent the afternoon with my favorite little girls and the lovely Nina as they prepared for their trip to Fresno. I think my favorite moment from the afternoon was watching Charlotte climb into one of the suitcases, soon followed by Nevaeh. They had so much fun playing with/in those suitcases! Have fun on your trip Nina! I'll miss you all for sure!

First Day of Christmas!

Day 1 of Christmas at Disneyland. Josh and I met up with Bri and Billy at Disneyland Friday night and experienced their first day of Christmas this year! There were five story tall Christmas trees and even authentic, soapy snow. :) it was delightful.

See the snow??

This has nothing to do with anything..just a fun sidenote. So last Sunday morning after church most of the kids had already left and we looked over to see one of the boys had fallen asleep! tisk tisk. haha. how do you fall asleep during worship? espeically the way we do it, its rather loud..and purty upbeat. anyways.. i grabbed my camera and took a picture of him really quick, just as josh started pelting him with pencils! o man. and he STILL didn't wake up. so our buddy Christian walks over to him and puts his arm around him, just talking with him. haha. FINALLY he woke up. it was so funny. and then he got up and just walked out. SOO funny.

Double Date Night!

Josh and i met up with Bri and Billy at the Irvine spectrum for a delicous dinner of pizza and salad at CPK. However, this was no ordinary double date. Bri and Billy are high school counselors at Ocean Hills and it was their "counselor scanvenger hunt" night. for those of you who have never had the pleasure of participating in such an event, the object of the hunt is for the high schoolers to wander around the shopping center looking for their counselors, whichever team finds the most counselors wins. It gets kinda tricky because the leaders are typically dressed up and hopefully unrecognizable. So we joined Bri and Billy for dinner, hoping to keep them hidden from the high schoolers. and it worked! only one group found them in the very beginning. I didnt even recognize them at first. Billy looked like a modern hick (in my opinion) with a gottee (made of 'real man hair'..eww) and glued it on his face, and bri bought a wig and a huge ugly freckle. haha. they looked awsome. billy couldnt laugh (or hardly eat his pizza) with the fear of his gottee coming off, so it was quite the experience. With that said, we just had a great night of fellowship and thoroughly enjoyed spending some time with another couple.

Summer already?

My neighbor works for SugarShoes and asked me if I would take pictures of their upcoming summer line of shoes for their website (sugarshoes.com)! A lot of it is geared for younger girls, so Natasha and I spent some time taking 'sample pictures' to give the company an idea of what we could do. I'm sending the pictures in today so we'll see if they like 'em or not. But here is some ideas that I had: any suggestions or ideas??Please excuse the dirt clod :)