Game night!

Last night was a rare Friday night during the high school basketball season, Dan didn't have a game to run out the door to after dinner. So, we thought it would be fun to have game night! Emily and Louie loved it! We played the memory game and Candyland . . . I did get a little hint on the memory game with little ones, only put out 4-5 matches, so 10 cards total! I was so tired of 50 card pickup. Candyland was lots of fun too.












Then we had some delicious snowman shaped ice cream treats and someone got an ice cream headache!


Fun times!

my favorite things . . . .

I forgot to post this earlier. My favorite sister-in-law (wink wink) got me this for Christmas. I have been watching the my funky camera website for months waiting for one of these to be listed for sale, I mentioned it to Stacy that this was one of the things that I would love for Christmas and she got it! Those of you that think I'm the master of web shopping, have yet to meet Stacy! I bow to the master and LOVE this camera strap!

More pictures!

Here's a mixture of pictures that I took over the last couple of weeks.
When the Florida Jansen's were here, we went to Tapio's after sliding at Como! I caught these three "playing" the piano.

Emily also likes to play with the trains in Louie's room.

Louie's in the beginning stages of potty training.

Emily's gloves have fingers on them. So different than mittens. We went outside yesterday afternoon to shoot some pictures for my photography class assignments.





And Louie wanted to make a snow angel. They wanted to make a snowman, but I didn't have the patience for that. Not yet. Besides, we didn't have our snowpants on . . .maybe this weekend.

Stay tuned . . .

My new card reader arrived via UPS tonight at 5:48pm. I have spent the night getting all of my assignments for my photography class caught up and posted. We should have some pictures ready to post here sometime tomorrow.
Patience is not one of my strong suits.

On a side note, I took today off from work. Louie was up twice last night and I ended up not getting to sleep until almost 2am. I was so tired and my cold is borderline back. It was nice to stay home, sleep in until 9am (both kids slept until 9:30). I got to see Emily off to school this morning. It was her first day back after vacation. She was so happy to get back into her normal routine. We have learned, no napping for her past 4pm. She'll be banging around in her room until 10:30pm if she sleeps any later. Even though she usually is in desperate need of a nap on most days, 4pm is the cutoff!

No pictures, again!

I really hate a blog post with no pictures! But, the new card reader that I got back in November doesn't work with the 8gb CF card or maybe it just doens't work period? regardless, I can't download any pictures from our camera . . . bugs me. I'm waiting for the new one to arrive, should be here any day.
We had a fun, but restful weekend. Friday, I went home from work a little early to get a little nap in. Got home to find Dan down on the couch with an even worse cold and cough than I had. Boy, when he gets one, it's bad. Anyhow, we were all in bed sleeping by 8:30 on Friday night. Very exciting life we lead.
Saturday, I took the kids out to my mom's house to help her take the Christmas tree down. Emily was such a good helper, she helped her wind up all the strings of lights on the tree. While I love the smell of a fresh Christmas tree, I've really grown accustomed to the no-mess factor of an artificial tree. There were needles everywhere when I finally got that thing moved out the door and up the hill to the curb!
After we got that finished up, we headed over to the White Bear Lake VFW for some dinner. Dan was out in Stillwater reffing a basketball game and met us there. The highlight of going there for Emily and Louie is picking tickets for the meat raffle that they always have. Emily won the last time we were there, she picked out the walleye fillets. On Saturday night, Louie won the second round. It was so funny! He got out of his chair and ran up to the stand where the guy announced the winner with his hands over his head, like a football player (Philadelphia Eagles player) scoring a touchdown in the end zone. It was great! So, Louie picked out his pack of meat (a double pack of bonelss chuck roasts, HUGE). Emily wanted to win so bad and had a very tired meltdown when she didn't win as we were leaving.
Yesterday, we had the Provost's over for the Vikings game and we had a panini party. Santa brought Dan an indoor panini grill for Christmas and we picked up assorted meats, cheeses and breads from Cecils. It was so good! We'll for sure do that again!
Too bad, the Vikings lost, but did people really expect that they would actually win?

Hopefully, the card reader will be here soon so I can be back to posting with pictures! the lack of a card is also keeping me behind of my Photographers' Workshop assignments! I tried hard this past weekend to get caught up on them and now I can't do anything with the pictures. grrrr, it's so frustrating.

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!