Happy Valentine's Day!!!

Happy Valentine's Day! Ok, so I know I am a little early but I just created these online and wanted to share them. They aren't going to pass them out, but I thought they would be cute for their scrapbooks.

A few praises, because I serve an awesome and wonderful God:

I had gestational diabetes with 2 of the 4 pregnancies, and a 3rd was borderline (the last one was insulin dependent), so I have to be checked every year to make sure I haven't developed regular diabetes. I have a cut on the bottom of my foot, and have had it for almost 1 1/2 years. I had convinced myself I had diabetes (a sore on the foot that will not heal is one of the #1 symptoms). I finally decided I needed to know one way or the other and denial wouldn't help anything. So I went and got tested, and after an extremely long 4 day wait I found out I do NOT have diabetes! WOO HOO! Now we just have to figure out how to get the cut to heal.

Also this week, Dustin's dad was having some pains and went to the ER on Sunday. They ran all kinds of tests and ended up keeping him through Wednesday afternoon. He does have a blockage in his heart, but his body created its own bypass and he does not need surgery to fix it. What a major praise!

A few prayer requests:

The last 2 weeks we have been hit with a major sick bug (or several). Everyone has been sick, just feeling yuck with high fevers. Thankfully, not more than 2 of us have been sick at a time, but it is dragging on. As soon as 1 person gets better another gets sick. We even got the family the boys stay with during the day involved. Now Dustin is sick, and I leave on Sunday to go to a conference in Austin for the entire week. Please pray that he gets to feeling better, that no one else gets sick, and that the Lord would work out all the little details of juggling 4 kiddos and work and school schedules while I am gone.

9 months old

Today Brennan turned 9 months old. It is amazing how quickly time is flying! He is such a wonderful baby.

Enjoying his bathtime tonight
He is such a little ham. He was laughing so hard at silly faces.
His new trick! He started pulling up a few days ago, and now everytime he wakes up morning or naptime he immediately stands up. He is way faster on this then any of our other kiddos were.
He can also get on all 4s now. He does still army crawl, but he is super close to regular crawling now.
Peek-a-boo! His favorite game by far. I am a sucker for those eyes!

Christmas...just a little late!

Whew, it has been crazy around here, and I am just now getting Christmas pictures up. We had a really nice Christmas. We spent Christmas morning at our house and Dustin's parents drove over early so they were here by the time the boys woke up. At our house we give each of the boys 3 gifts to symbolize the 3 gifts the wise men brought. Then Santa brings one big gift to all 4 boys. This year Santa brought them a Wii, several games, and some accessories. They have been LOVING it, and it is really fun family time (and we have had several friends over for dinner and it has been a hit with all of them as well). I buy most of the boys presents throughout the year when they are on clearance, and I love it because it allows us to do more for them then we would otherwise be able to do.

The boys' pjs came from the M&M World Store in Las Vegas. They are hard to see, but they are solid colored with a M&M on the front. They didn't have any just like them in Brennan's size, so he got a slightly different striped set. I think they are a cute souvenir from our trip, and the boys have been wearing those almost every night...my washer is getting tired of seeing them. haha
Brandt opening a huge Lego set. He LOVES Legos, they are by far his favorite thing. He is unbelievable at them as well. This set has 434 pieces and is for 7-14 year olds. He completed it by himself in less than 2 hours. He very carefully follows the directions, and counts each lego to make sure it is exactly the right one. We also gave him a remote control transformer, and a Star Wars Transformer with Hans Solo and Chewy (his favorite character).

Brayden loves Webkinz and asked for several of them. In fact, he said "I want Webkinz for Christmas, and more than one please". lol He ended up with 3: 2 dogs and a cat. We gave him a Furreal parrot, a nerf transformer gun, and a L-Max Leapster.

Bryson was much more tame then we thought he would be. He also listened very well, and stacked his gifts together as he opened them. In fact I asked him to "go sit it on top of his pile". I was referring to him stacking a toy, and when I turned around he was sitting on his pile of toys waiting for me to tell him what to do next. lol We got him a Leapster, Diego Aquadoodle, and several Geo Trax sets.

Triple Trouble!!! Dustin's parents bought the boys A&M jerseys, and they had to put them on right away, and they wore them the rest of the day. Bryson especially wants to wear it as his shirt almost everyday.

After we finished opening presents, we drove the hour to my parents' house. My 2 younger sisters, my brother, brother-in-law, grandmother, 2 nephews, and 1 niece were also there.

My grandma bought Brennan this Santa hat and Baby's 1st Christmas bib and had his name put on it. He was not impressed at all with it, and was trying to yank it off his head.

He was a little more relaxed here, but still trying to get the hat off...it didn't last long.

This is one of my favorite pictures. My sister was holding Brennan and he reached for my nephew's Clone Wars helmet. So they put it on him, and he sat there quietly with it on, and it was almost as big as he was.

This was the attempt at getting all 4 boys in a picture. Too bad not one of them is looking at me. lol

My "baby" sister Kim and Brennan. Man, he sure loves his thumb...I hope that won't be too hard to break him of.

Bridgett at Christmas, just over 3 weeks old.

What happens when you try to take a picture with 6 kids! Only my sis and oldest nephew are even looking. lol

After my parents' house we all drove the 20 minutes over to my aunt & uncle's house. A lot of my extended family was there, and I love getting to spend time with them. We do a mens and ladies gift exchange there since we never know how many or who all is going to show up. It is always fun to see what gets brought.

This is my oldest 3, my nephew, and my cousin. They were really swinging high.

I am little sad Christmas is over, it is by far my favorite time of the year. A time for celebrating our Lord Jesus Christ, and spending wonderful time with family and friends. Dustin and I both have off 2 weeks every year around Christmas time, and I always look forward to it...it is the best 2 weeks.

Road Trip

I have always been really close with my Granny (my dad's mom). We even lived with her as a family for a while when I was a freshman in high school, and then I lived with her for a year as I finished out high school, as my parents had moved away and I didn't want to change schools for my senior year. She has lived alone in the house she bought when my dad was in junior high since I was a little girl. In October 2004 she moved to Arkansas with my aunt, and I have missed her like crazy ever since. She has not been in good health for a while, but last Thanksgiving she came down here and was in intense pain. She has been in and out of the hospital since, and she has slow moving pancreatic cancer. Finally, after a year, of extreme pain she is somewhat comfortable. She has signed up for hospice, since they have a lot more pain options available than regular doctors, and she is living in a private home now. She weighs in at a whopping 99 pounds, but that is a lot better than the 87 pounds she was in May. She had not met Brennan before since she was already in extreme pain by the time he was born and just not up for company. So when she said she felt like she could handle a short visit, my sister and I jumped at the chance and made a last minute trip to Arkansas for her to meet our babies. Yep, we went over 800 miles with a 3 week old and 8 month old. It was a wild ride, but honestly it went very well considering. Going we stretched a 7 hour drive into a 10 hour trip, but coming home we shortened it to 8 1/2 hours. Thankfully, Dustin kept all the older boys here, since it would have been overwhelming to her, plus we only had 3 days total including driving time since we didn't leave until Dec. 28th, and I did not want to be on the road on New Year's Eve.
This is a picture of us from last Thanksgiving when she was here. I was pregnant with Brennan and feeling pretty yucky, I was still having some major problems with my back and not looking so hot. lol

This is me and Granny as we were leaving to head home. This is her room at my aunt's house. She was able to come for our visit the 2nd day before she went back to rest.

Granny meeting Brennan for the 1st time. This is at her private home, it is run by a husband and wife and she is a RN. It is just the husband's mom and my granny there, so it is really nice.

Brennan is way too heavy for her to hold, but he kept leaning in for her to kiss him. It was very cute and he kept leaning in to her for about 5 minutes of more lovin'.

Bridgett was the perfect size for her. She is still so tiny and slept most of the time so she was still and Granny LOVED holding her. She would just hold her and stare at her. Granny is almost completely blind, but can see some color in the right lighting. You could tell when she finally made out what she looked like, because she kept saying how beautiful she was.

Me and my sis, Kat, as we get ready to make the crazy trip back

I love this picture of him. He is a master at army crawling and can get anywhere he wants. He is not on all 4s yet, but he is close.

I LOVE his eyes in the picture. How come the boys always get the longest lashes? When he is just sitting and relaxing, his eyelashes actually touch his eyebrows.

I am so thankful we made this trip, and I will treasure the memories we made in my heart. Hopefully, she will continue to do well as her 80th birthday is in May and I would love to make another trip with all the boys.

Reading the Bible in a Year

Our church is reading the Bible together in 1 year. We will be discussing the weekly readings on Wednesday night services. We are going to try to do this as a couple, and pray that we can grow closer to the Lord through it. Feel free to join us, I will try to weekly post the daily readings on the right-hand side of the blog.

Vegas Trip

Whew it has been a whirlwind Christmas vacation so far. I'll have to blog about the rest later. We went to Vegas Dec 20th to 23rd and we had a blast. We are pretty conservative so I was concerned about how we were going to like Vegas. It was a lot milder than I thought (except for the hooker cards...if you have been there you know what I am talking about) and we loved it. It was so nice to have a few days away as a couple. Hopefully, we can do better about it in the future and not wait so long in between.
Dustin took this picture from the plane. I loved that the mountains are in the background everywhere, something we miss here in Texas.

We stayed at the Monte Carlo. It has a great location and is right on the strip. It was a very nice hotel for the price, and I wouldn't mind staying there again. It was right next door to New York New York, which has a really cool ESPN Zone with over a 100 HD TVs, our little booth even had it's own tv.

We went to Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden and they had dolphins, including a 7 month old baby. They also had lions, tigers, and black panthers. Funny story: they are only enclosed by fencing, no glass. They warn you that lions mark their territory by spraying, and they can spray up to 20 ft. So if you see a lion turn, you should run. Well, while we were watching the lions he got mad at a man standing there and growled, and ran up to him. He immediately turned his back and I have never run so fast in my life. I just knew we were about to get sprayed.

We had a great time just walking the strip and taking in the sites. We watched a 4D M&M movie at the huge M&M World store. We also saw the Polar Express on 4D at one the hotels. It was super neat, and I wish our kids could have been there for that.

This is in front of the Bellagio while we were waiting for the water show to start. I was shocked that the song they were playing for the dancing fountains was Hallelujah Chorus. The weather was pretty nice while we were there. It had snowed a few days before we got there, and in the shade there was still snow even though it was in the lower 40s.

While we were walking through the mall on the strip we walked past a store and saw Pete Rose. You could only talk to him and get his autograph if you bought one of his items from the store, starting at $75 for a baseball. Didn't want to talk to him that much. lol

By far the highlight of the trip was playing slots. It was a lot of fun. This was our biggest win, triple 7s across and we won 1620...too bad it was nickels. It was still over $81 on $.15, not too bad. Overall, we netted $215 over what we spent on slots. We were to cheap to do quarter or dollar slots, because it is amazing how fast you can pull that lever. lol We went to the top of the Stratosphere, and it was pretty neat to look over all of Vegas at night with all the pretty lights. We saw 2 different shows., and really enjoyed them. We wouldn't mind going back in the future, there was lots of things we didn't get a chance to see.

When we got to the airport to come home, we were suppose to leave Vegas at 7:25 pm (9:25 central) and land in Houston at 12:30 am central time. My sweet sis was suppose to pick us up at the airport and we were going to crash at her house (she lives about 20 min from the airport). The hotel told us to leave 2 hours before the flight to get there and get through security. Well we must have timed it perfectly because we were at the airport and through security within 30 minutes of leaving the hotel. So we were already going to be waiting over 1 1/2 hours for our flight. Evidently, there was a snow storm in Chicago and it was causing havic at all of the airports. Our flight was delayed for almost 2 hours, and I was just so happy we had planned to come home on the 23rd and not the 24th. We finally landed in Houston and got to my sister's around 3:30 in the morning. We were exhausted, but so thankful for my sis that woke up to come pick us up in the middle of the night.