Beachy Days!

We went on a bit of a tour for Birthday Weekend. Lauren couldn't come to the beach with us so we stopped in Birmingham to visit with her. I don't know why but I have no photos of that so all of these will be THE BEACH!

Birthday weekend is when we celebrate four birthdays: P'd, Lauren, Lindsay, and Mike. (Also in that 2 week period? Liz...it's a busy time!). Mike asked if we could go to Florida because he just wanted a short vacation and, in a somewhat last minute manner, we got to do it.

When we were going through the photos, Mike groaned a lot at how wintery his skin is, hahaha. I didn't think it was as bad as all that, but he and his dad think he's about the same color as the sand. So, Mike, for your 35th birthday, I gift you with a photoshop tan:


Hahahaha, not bad for a 5 minute first try, huh?

Autumn loooooves the beach. She informed us that we needed to come back in two weeks. I told her it miiiiight be a little longer than that. Autumn also enjoyed having Tyler around because he is her "best friend and [she] loves him."


She also had a great time with the rest of the family. Here she is smushing Lindsay. She was pretty cute with Kyle, too. One night, Ryan, Mike, and P'd were watching Batman and Batman's face showed up really big on the tv screen. Autumn looked up, gathered her toys, and walked out without a word. I didn't really even put the two together until Lainey mentioned it. I just saw Autumn leave! I went around looking for her a little while later, even in our room in the dark, and I heard Kyle call, "she's in here!" And there she was, in Kyle and Lindsay's room coloring on the floor while Kyle read on his ipad. He said she just walked in, closed the door, and sat down!


This is one of the pictures that amazed my mom because it's weird to think that Autumn is getting so grown up. By the way, apparently winter is the time to look for seashells. I've never seen so many pretty ones on the shore. That's what the cup was for.


I thought these next few were cute. P'd "hid" from Autumn. They play hide and seek allll the time. Autumn was kind of oblivious at first.


Then...nope, still oblivious.


Oh, hey, it's P'd!



So sweet.



I think P'd is the one who shot this one. I really like it. He also took the photo of the three of us in the last post, I can't remember if I mentioned that.


:) He took this one, too. I look a mess but so much more healthy than our last beach trip!


I call this The Pied Piper.


And, I think this one is a good one to end on. How beautiful was this sunset?


More beach pics to come! Also, I've been fixing up the look of this blog and the pinwheel blog. Let me know if you have any trouble viewing anything or it looks too weird and I'll work on it some more.

Recovering from...

The beach!! We had a great trip to Florida and to Birmingham for birthday weekend. I'll post a regular update on Sunday. For now:

(click the photo for the full holy cow she's so grown up effect!)

Party Time!

Hey, everyone! If you didn't catch the announcement, hop over to Passing Pinwheels and read about our upcoming adoption! We got the next application in the process on Thursday so we're about to get that going.

I think this is the end of our holiday posts! We started out the year with our usual New Year's Brunch. I had such a good time because last year I was too morning sick to do any cooking so it was an all Costco event. This year went really well though. If you haven't and want to read more about the actual party, you can click here. :) And! All of the photos on this post are courtesy of my brother Donnie! Thanks--these are great! I never get enough photos at parties on my own.

Autumn usually takes a while to warm up to people so she spent about the first half hour looking like this:


My yearly Penny Pic!


When we moved to this neighborhood, I decided I didn't want it to be like our last neighborhood. We only knew a few people on our street...a couple we never even saw! These neighbors are definitely more social just anyway but last year, I went ahead and put an invitation on everyone's door. We had 2 sets of neighbors stop in (we were friends with two other houses but they couldn't come). This year, we had five houses worth of neighbors stop in! They all had super nice things to say about having us as neighbors and about the updates to the house. Even better, our new neighbors came by! They just moved into the cove and are originally from South Korea. They have an adorable 3 year old daughter and a son who wore traditional Korean clothing.


Oh, here's Autumn who warmed up to everyone. Probably mostly due to Aunt Penny. :D It was cute, she was sitting with Penny who was talking to my friend Christy. They told me that Autumn Very Seriously looked at Penny and pointed at Christy (who is home from Brazil!) and said, "I know her."


Remember Frank who doesn't look like Mike except he does? This is his daughter Olivia. She was chilling in Autumn's Tinkerbell chair, nomming on her pretzel rod.



Do you want to know what the popular toys of the day were? Dollhouses. For both genders. The littler girls liked the one downstairs. The boys liked the one upstairs. :) I know, we have two dollhouses but this is what happens when you have the only little girl on the Colley side of the family.


Autumn really warmed up to everyone. She tried to trap Donnie in her room. So he could play more? Take more photos of her? I dunno.


Do you want to know what is so funny about this picture? Mike just came in and asked, "why am I smiling?" Ha! Actually, this was near the end and I guess he was watching Mickey with Micah, Roxie, and Autumn?


And that's the end of our holiday! Thank you to everyone who made it so special. This was better than I ever thought a holiday season without Garrett would be and it's mostly because of you.

Christmas, Christmas: Part 2

When we last left you, Autumn was making this face.


In anticipation of her Big Santa Gift:


A Princess Dream Castle. Those are the Giant Eyes of Happiness. There were a lot of Giant Eyes of Happiness that night, including baby Hudson (Autumn assures me that it's Baby Hudson and not just Hudson) who I think enjoyed the paper more than anything. Although he also seemed to enjoy the balloon thingie we got him! This photo is more Adorable Tongue of Happiness but there were some Giant Eyes, too.


Ok, guys, how adorable is Boppa? We saw this hat on gap.com and just had to get it for him (I didn't do a single bit of shopping in a store!).


Here's Mike's dad being surprised by his CARNIVAL POPCORN MAKER. :D


It kind of looks like Ryan being overwhelmed with joy at his gifts wrapped in Justin Bieber paper.


Boppa Update: Still cute.


A couple days after Christmas, we trekked to Texas de Brazil. For some reason, Autumn was really into the tongs.


Apparently we had Giant Eyes week. Funny enough, Autumn did some serious chowing down on steak. Medium rare steak.


I've never really thought Mike and Frank looked super alike. I can kind of see where they are similar in body type and maybe, I don't know, hair? But once someone thought they were twins. For real! Apparently the same type of person who'd actually ask me if I am really Autumn's mom, haha. But, I will say this: we watched Autumn stand by Frank for several minutes thinking he was Mike. I caught the moment that she realized that he was not, in fact, her papa.


Boppa Update: Still cute.
They asked me to take a photo of them so I took a few. None of them are edited but this one is my favorite.


Oh! One more funny thing we did over the holidays...twenty years ago, Mike's parents and their friends the Denneys sat down and did predictions about what the kids would be when they grew up. They decided that they would, when all the kids had chosen careers, open the envelopes and put $50 for each kid in the pot. If someone guessed correctly, they got the $200. If they missed, the kid kept the $200. I had a good time watching them and listening to all the guesses. Someone needs to ask Lainey what she guessed for Michael David because, guys, hil-arious.


They actually got 3 of the kids right! Megan is in communications (her mom guessed that right) and Lindsay is a kindergarten teacher (P'd guessed that right). But the oddly specific correct guess of the night goes to Michael David's dad. He guessed that Michael David--who was a BABY--would be a landscape architect. How crazy is that? As far as how Mike came out...he got his $200 mainly because his job didn't exist in 1991!


Of course, that made us think about what crazy jobs our kids will have someday that don't exist right now! Mind-boggling!

Hey, visit the other blog to see my fitness before and after pics!

And, next week! Mike! Being social!

Christmas, Christmas: Part 1

Well, I totally meant to do a mid-week post and then totally didn't. I'm going to try to get caught up this week, though. We're mostly recovered from the holidays and it only took me a week! Ha! I still need to clean up the garland and glitter debris and help Mike carry the boxes upstairs but things are taken apart. It's kind of sad to not have all the decorations up but I left a few fun red things out to leave until Valentine's Day so it's not too bad. If you want to see our decorations, you can click here to see my other blog. I also posted some of my reflections on the past year.

The holidays were quite a bit more fun than I expected. Thanksgiving was, oddly enough, harder than Christmas but I think some of that might have to do with just how excited Autumn was about the whole thing. She even got a good photo with Santa! Here we all are after visiting with Santa. Penny got to come,


so did Lainey,


and, of course, I was there. :) This holiday was the holiday of no one believing I am Autumn's mom. First, the Santa people didn't for reasons I can't figure out. And then New Year's Day, Mike, Autumn and I went to the local Chinese buffet and the waitress didn't think Autumn was my daughter because "she doesn't look Asian enough." Now, don't get me wrong, I know I look not entirely "white" but, really, I don't look that Asian. Anyway, here we are, apparently looking nothing alike, haha.


Mike didn't do Santa but later that day, he and Autumn played I Spy together with her I Spy wand. I thought it was pretty cute when I came upon them behind the table.


A couple days later and it was Christmas Eve! This is the first year Autumn's really gotten the whole Christmas/Santa thing. We read from her storybook Bible every night leading up to Christmas and talked some about how we're fitting Santa into the season. I discovered that while I don't have a problem with Santa, I don't care for the whole "be good or Santa won't bring presents" thing. She and I talked about how I want her to be good, not to get stuff, but because she loves us and wants to behave. :) Anyway, here she is putting out cookies for Santa for the first time.


Santa left her a note and ate the cookies! She was pretty happy except she didn't like that Santa left half a cookie on the plate because Autumn very specifically wanted him to have 5 oreos.


We only got her one gift (a dress up center for her dress up clothes) and Santa just put gifts in her stocking. We figured that between all her family, she'd be getting plenty of gifts. She didn't seem to notice or care that there weren't a million gifts in the living room (the tree is in Mike's office, lol).


One fun thing we did this year that we definitely want to do again...my mom spent the night with us Christmas Eve! We ate popcorn and watched Tangled and my mom got to see Autumn put out cookies and get up all excited. And, believe me, it was a good thing Mike and I showed restraint with the gift buying because my mom went way, way above and beyond!


Oh, my big gift this year? Mike got me a new lens. This is the first photo I took with it!


My family had Christmas dinner at our house. We were excited to have everyone over, especially Donnie and Liz who were here from Las Vegas. Here is Liz having a little milk with her dessert.


Roxie was hysterical Christmas night. She went and got a chair from Autumn's little dollhouse in the living room, brought it to the dining room, said "chair?" and tried to sit in it. Here is Donnie laughing so hard he turned purple.


:) And that was Christmas at our house. If you can believe it, our night wasn't over! We still had to head over to Mike's parents house to open gifts with them...here's a preview of that:


That would be a face of anticipation, excitement, and insanity brought on by it being 3 hours past her bedtime!

Happy New Year!

This is what we did today!


Christmas and New Year photos will be coming soon! Until then...I hope your 2012 got off to a fantastic start! Autumn's certainly did...with chocolate, strawberries, a juicebox, and BACON.


:)

Merry Christmas Eve!

art by Matt Thomas

This baby would be like that bright star shining in the sky that night. A Light to light up the whole world. Chasing away darkness. Helping people to see. And the darker the night got, the brighter the star would shine.
~The Jesus Storybook Bible

 visit our other blog to see our Christmas card!