New Years's Resolutions....

...everybody has them. I tried to make mine reasonable and attainable. No more of that whole..I wanna lose 45 lbs by the summer crap. NOPE, not for me. This year is all about 2 things, taking batter care of myself and getting to the temple...being a better person and a better Mormon.

Here are mine...what are yours?

1. Exercise at least 45 minutes 5 days a week.

2. Stop cursing.

3. Do not go to bed with laundry still in machines.

4. Do not go to bed with dishes still in sink.

5. Blog at least once a week, even if nothing really blog worthy happened.

6. Go to church every Sunday, unless bedridden.

7. Pay tithing every month.

8. Take at least one dog on a walk a day, unless weather prohibits.

9. Put at least $200 in savings a month.

10. Get back into scrapbooking, try to get at least a page done a week.

11. Pray everynight.

I know that some may think that my goals are dumb, but this is how I feel I can become better in almost every aspect of my life.

I also did this with my Corel Paintshop. I thought some of you might enjoy it.

HOME SWEET HOME

Aaron and I were so glad to get away from LA for a while, but I had no idea how much I was going to miss home. Not so much as Louisiana goes, but just having our own bed and you know...the comforts of home. Getting home was not as nice as being home though.
First Siera decided to throw up on the seat and Aarons' bag (which did not make him happy). Then Jack decided to throw up in the kennel only a couple of miles later. Then I got sick to the stomach. We had to stop several times for me to use the bathroom, not actually able to go but in so much pain I had to actually force myself to sleep. I woke up a while later demanding a bathroom. I caused us to push back our ETA by about 2 hours.
And what made it even worse....going to TN we had fog...going to NC we had rain...going back to TN we had some good weather...but driving back to LA...first was harsh winds so hard it was hard to keep the car on the road....then there was rain so hard that my windshield wipers on high did nothing....people were going 30 mph UNDER the speedlimit. Funny thing is that I prayed while Aaron was driving during the rain and I took over shortly after....it actually let up so much that I drove easily home. In fact, it stopped raining a little ways after I took over.
Overall, the holidays were nice. Seeing the family was great. But nothing beats being home.

Family Time

We also all went down to Riverside and took some family photos.

Fun Fun Fun

Can't leave out the little fun things I got to do this Christmas time.

Like starting to give myself my weekly shots at home.

Christmas is the time for getting stuck at the airport

Well, Grandma Bowman was supposed to come in the evening of Tuesday, December 23. But, as you may have guessed by the above title, she got stuck at the airport. We were told that it looked like she wouldn't be able to fly into TN til Christmas Day, but we got lucky and she came in on Christmas Eve.

It was nice getting to meet and know her. Christmas itself was just interesting and fun. While we opened presents I had a slideshow going of many pictures of all of the family that I have collected while Christmas music I downloaded played in the background (this was made possible thanks to Aaron and his AV/iPod connection he gave me as an early Christmas present). We all had fun opening some wonderful presents. Well, except for Aaron. Sadly he opened a present from Mom and Dad and it was a CrockPot, which I have been saying that I wanted for a while now. Well.......

This is the nice CrockPot Mom and Dad gave us that Aaron opened.

This is me opening Aarons' gift to me.

This is me not able to keep a straight face seeing I got 2 CrockPots for Christmas.

This is Spencer opening his gift from Aaron that I (and Aaron) packaged and decorated.

I came up with the idea of making his gift look like an old fashioned TV set. More work went into it than you may think.

We liked it so much he tried to save the wrapping...lol.

Inside was a bag of Tootsie Rolls and a Slim Jim container.

A pair of backetball shorts was in the Tootsie Roll bag and the Tootsie Rolls and some Toblerones were in the Slim Jim container...lol...also something I came up with on the spur of the moment...lol.

Here is Aaron opening the Iron Gym Total Upper Body Work-Out Bar that I bought him. And to go with it.......

a 5 lb bag of Gummi Bears....lol.

Aaron did, however, do a GREAT job on picking out presents for me....

I got LOTS of great new scrapbooking stuff.

This is me "surprised" Aaron caught all of the hints I had been dropping....lol.

December comes but once a year

Finally, it was time to leave this crap hole and head up north for some much needed time with family. First was the 12 hour drive to TN with two dogs who kept us up ALL NIGHT AND MORNING before the drive. NOT FUN!! But we got there safe and sound and with under $30 in gas :D

We got to relax Friday and recover some from the drive. Only to take off Saturday evening headed to NC. I had to make time for Papa and Grandma, and it was SO WORTH IT!! At least we got to leave the pups in TN, so it limited our need for breaks.

We went to church with Papa and Grandma as well as spent some time with them before heading over to Aarons' sister, Andreas', home for the night. It was great to see Andrea and the family after so long. The girls are just TOO ADORABLE!!! We enjoyed a good nights sleep on a bed and then said goodbye. We went back to Papa and Grandmas house to say our final goodbyes and take some much wanted pictures.

Then it was off once again to TN.

SO FAR BEHIND IT'S NOT FUNNY

Well, I guess the lazy bug bit me, seeing as I have not posted anything in over a month. So it is now time to play catch-up. Hmmm....where to start.

I guess I should explain what we did for Thanksgiving. Aaron and I went to church for dinner with our usual friends. The bishop was putting it on so that no matter what the circumstance ( deployed spouse, no kids, or just plain hardships) everyone would have a nice Thanksgiving. I brought my usual cake as well as some fruit/whipped cream/marshmallow/jello salad. We sat with our only friends and the missionaries and enjoyed each others company. After dinner we played cards. Then we all came to our home and played some more cards. Overall, it was alot of fun.

After Thanksgiving we had Mike over and I cooked him a home cooked meal. He kept raving about it, which made me wonder if he was just saying it...lol. He was making the mistakes of calling his wife a few times and throwing in the remarks about why she doesn't play video games with him like I do with Aaron and other remarks that would get him in trouble when he got home. But it was fun cooking for someone other than just Aaron and myself. Then Aaron and Mike went in the field for like 2 weeks and when they got out...Mike decided that he wanted to come over to make us dinner. It wasn't all that bad...just a bit salty...but it was nice to have the men waiting on me :D

After that it was all a matter of waiting for block leave so that we could leave for TN.

Guest OC

Well, I guess I should mention how I came to know this family first. As some of you know, before Aaron came home from his LONG deployment to Iraq, I was a member of the AFRG (Anti-Family Readiness Group). It was due to the fact that I didn't really get along with most of the wives and had nothing in common with most of them either. A few of us would get together every so often to have some fun without the "stuck-up" ones and ones that would only go to Chuck-E-Cheeses because they had kids. Well, right before the guys came home one of our girls had a friend fly in. Her name is Lani and she was way cool. I was very dissapointed to find out that she was just visiting because I could see me totally getting along with her even more so than the other girls living there.

Fast forward to now...her husband is here as a guest OC (Aarons job). Here are some pics of him coming to bowling night with us.




This is Mike...Lanis hubby.

This is Aaron being a dork.

Anna and Charlie came with us as well...due to the time and how much I have already posted...I think that this is enough for now. Maybe I will post some this weekend since Mike is coming over for dinner on Friday.

An Update And A Half

Lets start with how adorable our pups are. Siera has realized that she is very much smalled than Jack and can make it so that he can't find her.....

The best dogs in the world are also getting very good at their tricks/commands.....

And they are also...very impatient...here they are waiting for Daddy who just stepped out the door to put the trash out...

But what can I say...they obviously love him....

Speaking of showing some love...I got a very nice gesture from my mother and sister (in-laws)




Well, that is it for this one...next is bowling with a friends hubby while he down here.

Bowling With The Missionaries

We have been going with the missionaries to the bowling alley for the past couple of weeks on their P-Day. I just thought that I would post some of our wacky pictures and videos. We did random bowling, which is when every frame is a different form. We did low crawl bowl, blind bowl and backwards bowling to name a few.

We call this elder "ELDER SMASH" when we are bowling. So...in this video you can hear him actually say "Elder Smash" before he releases the ball. We call him that because of how he bowls...so we took the saying off of The Hulk and tweaked it :D

Anna is just too funny in this one, so...yeah...more embarassing clips of her !!!!!

Here are some of our low crawl bowls.

Aaron sucks at the whole camera thing, so my pictures and vids turned out badly!!! But I will put this one up.