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hi again. sorry, didn't mean to be so boisterous in that last post. this beer stuff makes me feel a bit funny. and really, i don't mind the pink. someone once told me that don johnson was super cool. back in the eighties. whatever that means...

Happy New Year Everyone!

Hey Y'all! Happy New Year! This Beer Stuff is GREAT! How can I get more? Also, who put me in this ridiculous pink outfit? I mean, come on, who's going to respect the big man dressed like a strawberry.

Ohh those eyes

Closeups of Baby Blue Eyes, and my little Brown Eyed Girl.

Cardinals Christmas Tailgating

The last NFL home game of the year for the Arizona Cardinals happened on Christmas day evening. Jaime and I had tickets, and were trying to figure out the best way of going to the game, tailgating beforehand, and arranging for babycare for Ella & Sam. Our friends Mark & Jessica also had game tickets, but between the four of us we only had one parking pass. Our friend Anna had graciously offered to watch the kids for us, but a 10 hour babysitting stint is too much to ask of anyone (except grandparents :-). A couple days before the game the perfect plan popped into my head. Why not buy a second parking pass and bring Anna & Sam & Ella to the tailgate, and then they would drive home at sunset while the rest of us went into the stadium to watch the game. Since it was Christmas we tried to stick to Christmas traditions, Jewish style: Chinese Food for our tailgate. We ordered a bunch of chinese takeout the night before and brought the grill to reheat it on. We also brought Mark's "volcano" burner and a pot of oil so we could freshly deep fry some food. In there, we threw partial contents of our freezer (lumpia & pierogies), as well as a fresh batch of ricotta fritters (mmm, donuts). That was an awesome appetizer and dessert to sandwich our chinese meal between. Here's a picture of our tailgating setup, though the grill and volcano were outside our shade tent, and not in the picture:

The kids were in our laps, or playing happily in their pack-and-play in the shade:

A great time was had by all. Perhaps a bit too great for some...
We are going to have to keep an eye on this little imp as she grows up and figures out how to reach for the liquor shelf!

Chuckle Fest

I picked the kids up from daycare a little bit early last night, but then they both fell asleep on the drive home and got a good nap in.  That's normal for Sam, but special for Ella, and resulted in them both being in a great mood for the evening.  We spent some time playing with their new blocks, and they thought it was the funniest thing ever to knock the towers of blocks over.  Click on the image to get to the video. Enjoy!

School Pictures

OOPS.   I just realized that I already posted this pictures back in September.  See, I'm not as far behind in my picture posting as I thought.  Sorry about this, you will have to suffer through the cutelings anyway as I'm not deleting the repost.  Scroll down to early October's posts if you want to see slightly bigger versions of these pictures without having to click on them.

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Back in mid-september, before the cacti even contemplated changing the colors of their spines and dropping them into little spiny piles for little phoenicians to jump into with wails of glee, the photo lady came to town (and to school/daycare) and introduced our tots to the annual ritual of school photos.  I think my mom still has our class group pictures from when we were young hanging in a hallway somewhere.  Anyway, we got our kids dressed up in their cutest overalls and trucked them to school for professional picture taking.  Here are the results:

We were impressed by how well the photographer took our adorable kids and made them look, well, somewhat vacant and pudgy?  A bit two dimensional?  I'm not sure what the problem here is (and Ella's pics came out better than Sam's).  We didn't buy very many of them.  But I'm sure we'll look back on them year after year and giggle nonetheless.  The process did make me realize I had tailed off a bit in my own picture taking and remind me that I should be shooting more pictures, more often, and even occasionally posting some of them to the blog.  So I'll start with these to make my next posts seem that much better :-)

winter strikes phoenix

It's been a while since we posted anything. I guess we have been pretty busy with life, and raising our two adorable little munchkins. Lots of growth has been happening in the past two months. They are both bigger, Ella is crawling and pulling up on everything, Sam is clapping and giving out high fives when the mood strikes his fancy. We have been going for daily morning walks, but it's gotten cold recently, quite cold the past couple of mornings, so their walks are on hold. Instead it's dig through the closets for appropriate clothing gifts which showed up back when it was 115F outside and we hardly imagined it possible that they would ever get worn, but now they are perfect (and perfectly cute!). So, for today's clothing, thanks to the Margheim troupe for their La Serena purchased South American garb.  Warm, stylish, and, amazingly, perfectly sized for our over-achieving little miracle-gro munchkins.

Oh, and I know many of you are wondering what "quite cold" really means in the context of phoenix. It means a couple things: 1) I actually both swapped my shorts for trousers and wore a sweatshirt this morning and 2) Our overnight low was ~30F which constitutes a hard freeze in our garden. I guess it's a good thing we don't have any basil growing because if we did, it would now all be wilted and gone.