Finally.... an actual update!

Well, so far this year has been extremely BUSY!!! January just flew by.

We went down to have "Giving Day" with my family! Giving Day is a tradition that I hope we have started with my family this year that will carry on every year hereafter! It's basically Christmas in January. But since Mom and Kathi both work in the retail world, it wasn't/isn't realistic that they could both get the days before and after Christmas off to celebrate with us, so we set up a day in January to celebrate. That was a lot of fun! It was just a day of relaxation, enjoying each other's company and exchanging gifts!

Shortly after that, and the reason I haven't been able to get online long enough to do an actaul update before now, the laptop's hard drives started to go out. Yes that is plural. Out of the two hard drives that we had on the computer, they both decided to go out on us at the SAME time. Grrrr. Luckily they didn't just up and die on us, they did give us a little warning first. We could be on the computer for about 10 minutes before it would freeze up and shut down on us. Thankfully, that gave Peter enough time to back up all our files and pictures that we had on them! It was a slow process, but Peter was able to save everything before they died completely.... thank goodness. I was seeing a repeat of the time where we lost about 6 months of pictures from when Natalie was just a little over 1. I didn't want to lose those same months from Alexis too! Anyway, Peter found an awesome deal on some new hard drives to replace the others and ever since then, he's been working on setting everything back up again to the way we had it! Crazyness!

Like I said in the last entry, Natalie turned 5 years old on Jan. 22. It's crazy to think that it was that long ago when we brought Natalie into this world! So much has changed since then! Anyway, she had a wonderful birthday and we were lucky enough to go down to Seaside to visit Mom, Tom and Vanessa again that weekend! We were supposed to go down that first weekend we went down to visit them, but because of all the rain that caused all the flooding, they had many roads closed that we couldn't get there. So it was rescheduled for Natalie's birthday weekend. Unfortunately, Kathi wasn't able to join us because she had to work :(. We missed having her there with us. But we had a lot of fun playing on the beach and playing games and just hanging out and relaxing! There are now pictures above in the slide show, just in case you didn't notice they were new!

That and the fact that I've been subbing like crazy lately, has made 2009 just fly by so far!