Month: November 2007

Julie has a sister, Bonnie, who lives up in Grand Junction, CO. She sang at our wedding and has always had an incredible voice and incredible talent for arranging and presenting music.

This past summer, she played and sang a Christmas song for us up at her parents that she had written herself. Aaron must have been there at some point as well, because he mentioned the other night during dinner (thanks again for the sushi!) that he wanted to hear it again. Well, she has officially released her first CD, and it’s awesome. You can listen to most of it over at her page on CDBaby.com. If you choose the “play all songs (Broadband)” option, you can hear them in CD quality sound (the dial-up version doesn’t do it justice). The song I’m talking about is #3 on the album.

http://cdbaby.com/cd/bwixom

If you have iTunes, it’ll open it up and play it all for you. Works great.

Enjoy! And thanks for publishing this, Bonnie. We listen to our CD all the time and love it. Allie sounds great as well. For the Elcock clan, Allie is Bonnie’s daughter. She sings on track 2 with her momma.

Happy Thanksgiving all. We had a really good day today. Luckily we were able to sleep in a bit, due to our late afternoon spread at my Mom’s house. Julie had to brave the store this morning because we were too tired to go last night. She got everything she needed, but was forced to navigate the (mostly) unwashed masses.

I know that I’ve spent lots of time recently talking about Lucy, but she provides so much material that it’s hard to not include her in my ramblings. I have two examples tonight:

1. Lucy got her haircut a few months or so ago up in Utah. She turned out pretty sassy, but expressed many times how her hair was all gone and that her mother wasn’t allowed to cut it anymore. Today, while Julie was doing her hair, she blurted out (as only Lucy can): “Momma, I look like a punk! Don’t make me look like a punk!” I have no idea where that came from, but it was pretty funny.

2. As mentioned in the last post, the girls spent some time in the pool last weekend, which resulted in quite the ear infection for Lucy. She woke up screaming a few nights ago, so Julie whipped up her homeopathic/witchcraft solution (oil and garlic or something similar) and put it in her ear. She calmed down almost immediately. Today after dinner, Lucy was chatting with Michael and mentioned that “Mommy put juice in my ear.” Classic.

As you can tell, I have truly much to be grateful for. Wonderful family, wonderful wife, health, strength, and (almost) prosperity:)

I know how much you love the life-size blow-up snowmans. Here are a few shots of our neighbor’s house, which was done up on November 2.

We’ve had an interesting time of it since we’ve been back. Trying to get back into some sort of routine. You can see that I’ve failed (blogging at 3pm on a Tuesday). The girls have done quite well getting back into school and a music/dance class that they really enjoy. Gwenyth just gets naughtier and naughtier.

Here are some of the things we’ve got going on around the house:

Conveniently, Dan needed to come down to Phoenix for the day, so we promptly put him to work on one of Julie’s projects that would have taken me 4 weeks to do. And I think the quality is a little better with Dan’s bit of experience.

Even Lily made it down for the fun and mess.

And, believe it or not, the kids were swimming all day Saturday. I’m not sure if they’ve thawed just yet. Luckily for them the hot tub was hot and available as well. Unluckily for me, the hot tub was hot and available for them. The water is a little, er, discolored?

I’ll try and post updates as I get more and more shots of great big blow up stuff in the yard. Just for you, Ali.

I’m sure my other girls have done this as well, but it seems particularly interesting with Lucy. Here is the sequence she usually follows (and don’t tell me that you’re so powerfully spiritual that you don’t do something similar):

1. She runs down the list of things that she did today
2. She runs down the list of things that she wanted to do today, but didn’t get to. And if I’m the reason she didn’t get to, she’ll stop and look at me until I look at her
3. She runs down the list of things that she wants. This is the “stuff” list
4. She stops, looks around the room, and rattles off all of the things that she sees that she’s thankful for. Hopefully she’ll remember me and the rest of the family. But it usually centers around dolls and food.

It’s even more interesting when I’m praying. She’ll continually nudge me and/or whisper things to me that I need to say. And if I don’t say them, she gets continually louder. As the prayer goes on, if she’s satisfied with things, she’ll just decide to either lay on my lap or get up and start dancing.

Gotta love Lucy. She’s wired differently than I am, but I’m glad she is.

We went and had the family dinner last night. I think there must have been 87 people there. My mom is getting even more efficient at feeding the masses.