Catching Up... or Trying to...

My life has been in a serious state of disarray for some time now. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the sorry state of my toenail polish a few weeks ago:





What's funny about that is my toenails ALWAYS used to look like that, until my digital camera arrived. Not sure what the connection is, but anyway.

I have managed to paint my nails since then, but only because we had family in town and pretty much the only shoes I own are sandals. I painted my nails literally less than an hour before they arrived, and only had time to do it because they arrived an hour later than I thought they would. Whew! ;) (Though, truth be told, I would've rather had one more hour with them than painted toenails, but that's another story.)


I will most definitely blog about this most recent family visit, but first I just have to get caught up on all the random stuff that probably no one cares about but me. Here are the last several weeks (sans politics) in brief:


A long time ago, Aunt Katy gave Ben this cool art board. It has a dry erase board on one side and a chalkboard on the other. We use this ALL the time, for one reason or another. Often, it's just a handy place for random drawings.

One day Chris was in the office with me as I was working on the computer. During a break, I drew the little girl in black. The next time I turned around, Chris had added the girl in green.





I know I'm the mom and totally biased, but I thought that was pretty good. He noticed that the heart didn't quite match though:

So he fixed it:

One of our frequent uses for the board is for Family Home Evenings. For the FHE before Veteran's Day, my plan was to have a "Why America is Great" themed evening. As I was looking for ideas online, however, I came across a few lessons built around Moroni's Title of Liberty and decided to go with that instead.

This turned out to be a great theme to explore, and gets at the heart of why we have veterans in the first place. What are we fighting for anyway? I noticed things in that story I never really paid attention to before. We had a great discussion about it.

Oh, and I can't fail to mention the clogged kitchen sink that (long story short) ended up as a water leak that ruined the carpet and some drywall in our bedroom.

When the water damage people came, they moved dressers, emptied the closet, etc, etc, all of which ended up crammed around and on top of our bed:

That was a lovely pile to sort out, let me tell you. But the best part was the giant dehumidifier they put in our room for five straight days:

They told us to keep it running 24/7, but there was no way we could sleep with that thing roaring at the foot of our bed. Sorry!


While the dehumidifier is finally gone, we don't have anything repaired yet. Soon I hope!



In much more exciting news, this is Nate's fiance Maryann:




Isn't she a cutie? She's a sweetheart too. But get this, we have an Ann, a Leeanne, and now a Maryann. I told Travis that leaves Betty Ann, or Annabelle, or Annie for him. Something along those lines. ;)



These pics are just general sillyness:

Chris in Ben's jammies:

He had a hard time getting up:

But he managed it:

Then John said, "Take a picture of my foot."

How weird. ;)

And lastly, a picture of me and Brian that gives me very happy memories.

I love him so much. :)