New Year's Resolutions

Happy New Year everyone! We had such a laid back New Year's eve and day it was great . . .
Dan and I have never been ones to go out among the "amateurs" on New Year's Eve, we typically stay home and have a nice dinner with a good bottle of wine. I can't even remember the last time that I was actually up at midnight on New Year's actually . . .
This year, we stayed home and after getting the kids fed and off to bed, we made a nice dinner for the two of us. It was so nice, delicious and relaxing.
I made a pan of caramel oven french toast to have the next morning, it's so nice to get up, put that in the oven and done!
We went over to Mark and Audrey's yesterday afternoon. Audrey is starting a blog and wanted some pointers on how to blog . . . because I'm such a dedicated blogger (ha ha). We ended up staying for dinner, they made an awesome grilled pork tenderloin and the pan of homemade macaroni and cheese that I'd made earlier in the day for us for dinner. Worked out great!
Today, it's back to work, blah! I would love to be home in my sweat pants sitting on the couch all day playing with Photoshop!
Anyhow, a couple of years ago, I made a resolution to take more pictures of my kids as a New Year's resolution. When I started taking more pictures with my crappy point and shoot camera, I realized that my resolution last year would be to take better pictures of my kids. . . . Well, that has snowballed into something much bigger. We got a new DSLR camera and some really nice "glass" to take some fabulous photos . . . but didn't know how to do that!
Currently, I'm in the middle of Karen Russell's Photographers' Workshop and my resolution this year is to tie it all together and take more better pictures of my kids . . . (how's that for fine use fo the English language? did I just say "more better?") You know what I mean . . . My goal this year is to use all the tools that I learned in Karen's class and have great pictures with a story of each of my kids. One very important thing I've taken away from this class is that you can take a lot of pictures, but unless they tell a story for you, what's the point??? I love that . . .
I have a bunch of other resolutions, but you don't need to know what they are . . .
(I guess the only other one worth sharing is that Dan and I have a resolution to get Louie potty trained, pronto! we're down to 1.5 packs of diapers in the closet and I really don't want to buy anymore!)

Food, glorious food . . .

UPDATE: The Sour Cream Gratin recipe from Kayotic Kitchen was divine! I made them on New Year's Eve for Dan and I. They were a great side dish to the Smoked Gouda and Carmelized Onion Smothered Pork Chops! (Dan made the pork chops for the first time on Valentine's Day, when Emily was just a newborn, he had surgery the week earlier and surprised me with them. He's made them for special occasions ever since, it is truly one of the best pork chop recipes ever!)


I stumbled upon this website earlier today called Kayotic Kitchen, when I was doing my daily perusing of the Pioneer Woman. I'm not sure if you've ever checked out the Pioneer Woman, but it's a great website. I find her writing very entertaining. She shares fabulous recipes and photography tips. PLUS, she has two sets of FREE, yes FREE Photoshop actions developed by the dude from Totally Rad Actions.
The Pioneer Woman has posted some amazing photos of her life on the ranch in Oklahoma. Check it out.
Back to the topic of food, the Pioneer Woman has a cooking section on her site about cooking and her love of cooking, recipes and cooks tools. Today's recipe was a contribution by Kay from the Netherlands, that's how I found Kayotic Kitchen. Anyhow, she's got a recipe out there for Sour Cream Gratin, sour cream and potatoes, butter and chives? what could be better than that?
Sounds delish, I'm going to have to give them a try!

Justin

This is Justin, our nephew that lives in Florida. He has the same birthday as Louie, but was born in 2007. He's such a cute little boy, but he's referred to as "the menace" and there's a really good reason! There isn't anything that he can't climb on top of or dump out and there isn't a cupboard door that he can't get open.
He was fun to get to know the short week that the Florida Jansen's were here.
His brothers enjoyed (loved) playing outside in the snow. It was nice that we had lots of it when they got here.
On Tuesday, Justin came over and spent some time at our house. When I got home from work, he was just getting up from a nap. We played and had a good time with all the trucks and he really loved the driving toy.



Before dinner, Uncle Mark took all the little kids outside to play in the snow a little bit. Justin enjoyed it a little bit at first.

But then, his mittens came off and he didn't like the snow that much anymore.

Jared made snow angels and Drew enjoyed just sitting in the snow.

Christmas Photos

I finally spent some time today trying to figure out how to move pictures from my CF card to the blog. As I mentioned earlier, I decided to shoot our Christmas pictures in RAW. . . well, I had no idea how to get them to the computer and edited?? But, I installed CS4 and also downloaded some Photoshop actions from the Pioneer Woman and was good to go.
Here's a couple of pictures from Pam and Jerry's on Christmas Eve
Andrea and Emily
Andrea and Lorenzo
Everyone loved Emily's cute snowman slippers
Drew and Jared were determined to lead the pack at the Assumption Children's Mass on Christmas Eve. The kids pull Baby Jesus up to the Creche in an old wooden sled full of hay.

Santa came to Grandma's house, right after he apparently stopped by Nordstrom . . . Emily and Drew could hardly stand it.

Louie immediately dumped out his stocking, in search of Thomas the Tank Engine socks. They weren't in the stocking at Grandma's house.


The Tapio boys and Santa

The Florida Jansen Boys, minus Justin who had already gone to bed.

The St. Paul Jansen Family


Drew got a Tampa Bay Buccaneer's Football uniform (it's got pirate stuff on it)

Christmas morning. Emily was still half asleep when Louie pounded on her door and dragged her out to the living room . . .

He opened his first present (Mac and the King and Lightening McQueen) and didn't care about anything else.
Emily got a dollhouse with furniture and a family, she LOVES it!
Then we opened the stockings and somebody got Thomas socks and all was well with the world.

Over at the Pelletier Christmas celebration . . . guess what Bella got for Christmas?
This little cutie was out at my mom's house on Christmas night. Billy Walsh III, he's got two big sister's and he's a doll!

Merry Christmas!

A day late . . .
We had a really nice Christmas this year, despite it being the first one without my Dad.
I've got tons of pictures to share, BUT I made the big move before Christmas to begin shooting all my pictures in RAW. In order to do that, Dan gave me Photoshop CS4 for Christmas and also a 1 TB external hard drive, plus an 8G memory card for the camera.
Shooting in RAW gives you TONS more options in the editing process and enables you to fix just about anything that went wrong with the picture when you took it (except for not focusing on your subject). But, if your white balance is not set correctly, you can fix that; if your over exposed or under exposed, you can fix that. The list goes on and on.
BUT, and this is a HUGE BUT, I don't have a workflow developed to get my photos from my camera to my computer and to my new back up storage yet. Not to mention that shooting in RAW adds a step or two to the process of transferring, editing and converting to jPEG. See, I really have no idea what I'm talking about.
The bottom line is that until I can get CS4 installed on my computer and get my external hard drive up and running (not to mention, we ordered the wrong model) I can't begin to upload the hundreds of pictures from the CF card. I'm just not comfortable doing that just yet . . .
I've heard a few horror stories from various people in my photography class of losing pictures and I really don't want that to happen.

Big news despite all of this:

Louie and Emily are tickled pink with all the fun things that they received from Santa and family! Louie did receive his Thomas socks and all is well! (Santa came to my mom's house on Christmas eve and brought stockings for all the kids, his didn't contain Thomas socks and he was not happy about that, not one little bit!) But they were in his stocking on Christmas morning and all is well!
Emily LOVES her doll house and can't wait to take all the furniture out of the boxes and arrange the house.
Fun times had by all!

The Big Show!

Emily, Louie and I were supposed to have a play date over at Brandt's house this morning, but Louie work up with an even worse cold than he had yesterday. We opted to stay home and get better, rather than spread that around to the boys the week before Chrismtas.
It's been snowing since 6am and we've already got about 5 inches on the ground. I have shoveled the snow twice since Dan's been gone. I hate shoveling. I decided to fire up the snow blower this afternoon. It won't work very well if the snow gets too deep . . . I opted to do it even thought it is still snowing out.
Well, Dan and his crew made it to Salem late last night and were there to do the big game this morning. I have only seen the first half and a few minutes of the second half. But the kids were VERY excited to see their Daddy on TV! We got a good look at him just a minute or two into the second half. He very energetically threw a penalty flag when some players were doing a little pushing and shoving.
We'll watch the rest of the second half after naps. (of course Emily's not napping because she slept until 10:15 this morning! following in the footsteps of her Auntie M!)
Ugh, it's snowing even harder now! I think we'll just order a pizza and then have popcorn and a movie. The kids think it is so special to have popcorn! Of course, the love of popcorn reminds me of my Dad. The man LOVED popcorn and we made popcorn all the time!

This is NASCAR country!

Well, I talked to Dan a little while ago. He and the rest of the guys rented cars in Atlanta and are driving to Salem. It's about a 7 hour drive, they were later than they hoped getting out of Atlanta because they were trying to retrieve their luggage from Delta. After about 3.5 hours of getting nowhere, they left only to be told that their luggage should alread be at the Salem airport?? how, you might ask since all flights were cancelled? no clue.
Thankfully, they were all smart enough to NOT check their refereeing uniforms so they at least have that for the game tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon, they are supposed to leave Salem immediately after the game and drive to Greensboro for their return flight on Sunday morning. Hopefully, they can find their luggage and not have to spend the whole evening at the airport looking for it.
Anyhow, keep watching tomorrow at 10am, as of now, they'll be there . . .
Funny, Dan did call me to give them directions to get to Salem??? thank goodness for googlemaps.com!

Update: Dan's travels to Salem, Virginia

Well, I just talked to Dan. He and his crew left Minneapolis enroute to Salem, Virigina (via Atlanta) this morning at 5am. He just called me from Atlanta and they are stuck there. All flights to Roanoke, Virginia have been cancelled due to excessive fog. All flights to airports in the general vicinity of Roanoke have been overbooked and are delayed.
They were supposed to be in Salem for a meeting with the NCAA at 6pm tonight. Right now, they are trying to get their luggage back from Delta so they can rent cars and drive the 8 hours to Salem.
There are severe weather conditions out on the eastern seaboard and being the Friday before Christmas, everything is BOOKED!
Hopefully, they will make it to Salem in time for the game tomorrow and hopefully, the NCAA doesn't assign another crew to do the game!

Let's keep our fingers crossed for the Florida Jansen's travels today too! They are heading to Greenville, SC for Stacy's cousin David's wedding tomorrow. I'd hate for them to be re-routed or delayed with the three little kids in tow!
Also, let's hope that they make it here on Sunday! They're flying here from Greenville via Memphis on Sunday morning. . . . I'm so glad that we only have to drive to White Bear Lake and to West St. Paul to celebrate Christmas this year!

Dan's Big Dance . . .

SORRY, didn't mention that the game is Saturday, December 20.

Dan and his MIAC football crew are heading off to Salem, Virginia for the Stagg Bowl . . . The Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl is the NCAA Division 3 National Championship game.
Mount Union of Ohio will play UW Whitewater at 10am CST on ESPN2.
He and his crewmates are unbelievably excited about being selected to officiate this game. It will, undoubtably be the highlight of all their referee careers!
Tune in on Saturday to watch the big game and see if Dan gets any TV time . . .
if you don't have cable or satellite, stop over, we'll be watching at our house!

My Fairy Princesses . . .

Emily got a trunk of dress-ups from Auntie M. It is one of her favorite things and she and Louie are having a ball playing with them.
Louie will hate us later for these pictures . . . but they were too good to not share with everyone . . .














We have our tree lights controlled by the remote control outlet and every morning we tell Louie to say "abbra, cadabra!" and they will turn on . . . he says, "Abby Cadabby" and thinks it's the coolest thing that they actually are magic lights and turn on when he tells them . . .