Love them. I just do. These two are the sweetest, friendliest couple. Seriously. Besides my two redheaded nephews, cutest redheaded baby. Period. Oh, and this girl can cook and sew like nobody’s business. She’s like the second coming of Ree. You know, The Pioneer Woman. These three are truly a go-with-the-flow kinda family, and you can tell in everyone of their photos. Don’t they just ooze cuteness?

These were, of course, taken before xmas for holiday cards. Even for what seemed like a split second shoot the moments captured that morning are some of my all time favs.

This is where Baby C decided she was just about done with taking photos, and was letting it be known.

3/12/10 :: day 127

My tail bone is constantly sore…no matter what type of chair I sit in.  I’m about this close (holding up my hand with my thumb and pointer finger a 1/2 inch apart) to bringing a chair doughnut to sit on at work.  Not to mention when I do my kegal exercises it agitates my tail bone even more.  I guess those muscles are connected.

3/16/10 :: day 131

I am thankful for my loving and amazing husband, my two precious pup pups, and my family…both new and old.

Did everyone have a wonderful 4th?  I sure did.  This was my 1st married 4th of July, and the 1st Independence Day spent with my inlaws.

We spent a good portion of the day at my in-law’s pool.  My mother in-law and I caught some rays while Derek and Davis goofed around in the pool.  My father in-law smoked some delicious and extremely messy ribs.  We watched a couple of movies, played a few innings of wiffle ball GIRLS VS. BOYS, and indulged in some brownies a-la-mode…with homemade almond ice cream.

It was a perfect day with one exception…my parents, brother, and sister were not there with us.  My parents drove down to New Orleans with my nephew to visit my grandparents and uncles for the long weekend.

I wanted Derek to have one last relaxing, school free weekend before he began graduate school. I decided we should both take Friday off work, and head to Pickwick to spend the day on the lake with my parents. See to get my husband to take a full day off work for any reason other than death (by death I mean…he would have to be dead for him to take a sick day) is nearly impossible.

To my surprise when I made the suggestion to take Friday off he agreed right away.  I think he knew that he wasn’t going to have much free time until school ends.  Unfortunately, due to Murphy’s Law the boat was broken on Friday, and had to be worked on.  Luckily, he was able to fix the boat, and we headed to the lake on Saturday instead.

Side Note :: My dad has been trying to decide on a name for the boat for almost a year now, and finally came up with Phish Food.  This is of course, named after his favorite Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, Phish Food.

We had a nice laid-back day on the lake.  We cooked some brauts, read some books, paddled around in a tiny blow-up boat, and simply enjoyed a mini vacation at the “Redneck Yacht Club.”

Yep, I said redneck.  Just look at this Burger Boat…

Although only something a southerner would have the nerves to do…it’s not a bad idea.  Think about it, you get to chill on the lake all day and make a little money.  This floating Tiki hut serves hamburgers, hotdogs, and other various snacks; so you don’t have to go back to your car and eat the now hot PB&J sandwiches you had to take out of your cooler so that you could fit that 18th beer in there. Smart thinking there buddy! The burger boat also delivered, in a sense, they had a guy driving around in a 2 man boat that would drive the food right up to your boat.  Yes sir, this is how the lazy get lazier.  You can always tell when summer officially begins, down here in the mid-south, by the hoards of people shoved into the small offset coves on the lake.

Recently I have been getting into researching my family tree.  My husband introduced me to a website called Geni that is part family tree,  part social network.  Geni is free!  My dad, grandfather, cousins, etc. are all using it.

Users can build their family tree through the simple colorful interface. Relatives who are added to the tree can join Geni and add other relatives. Everyone in the tree has a profile which shows more about them and enables other family members to stay in touch with them.  Families can work together to build profiles for common ancestors.  Family members can also share photos, videos, events, discussions, and more.  A family timeline shows the history of everyone in the family.  What’s kind of cool is that Geni was founded by former executives and employees of PayPal, eGroups, eBay, and Tribe…so these people really know how to manage large amounts of data & keep it safe.

Just last week my grandpa emailed me (yes…my grandpa emails) to tell me that he mailed me a copy of the direct decedents of the DAEMS family which is his great grandmother’s branch.

My Grandpa

My grandpa said that two of his cousins, in the Netherlands, researched this some years back.  The information he sent me goes all the way back to the 1670′s.  I was astounded at how far back they were able to go.  I really lucked out with this, because my father and grandparents immigrated to the US back in 1950 from the Netherlands (Holland).  The furthest back I would have been able to find, with US records, would be the immigration of my grandparents & father in 1950.  So to have relatives in Europe to do some of the digging for me was wonderful…I would not have had a clue where to start looking over there.

Since I have been hunting down info about my ancestors I decided to also do some research on Ancestry.com.  This site is great for researching vital records, as long as you don’t mind shelling out a few clams.  I decided to sign-up for just one month and to see what I can find, and to my surprise I located the manifest to the ship my father and grandparents came over from Holland on.  How awesome it that!?!  They even had a picture of the ship and a brief history of it.  Check it out…

S.S. Volendam

S.S. Volendam Manifest

If you have ever thought about looking into your ancestry, give Geni or Ancestry.com a try.  Invite some family members to join your tree, and watch it grow!

I offered to watch my nephew, JD, Saturday night so my brother & Derek could go to the Memphis basketball game.  Knowing that most boys love video games, no matter what age, I thought that we could find some kid friendly games on Derek’s x-box.  When JD said here I want to play this game and handed me the Call of Duty :: World at War box I paused and pictured in my mind the massive amounts of nightmares this bloody & violent game would bring on for this 5 year old.  So I said “ummmm…..how about we find an even cooler game on the x-box?”  (this meaning kid friendly)

We played the movie inspired game Cars, a bit of pac-man, and finally my nephews new favorite game…..Cloning Clyde.  The premise of this game is that someone was cloning sheep & wanted to move onto people & Clyde was that person.  The experiment went wrong and so Clyde has decided to escape in his, opened in the back, hospital gown.

Yes, that is his butt you see.

Here are some pictures of us during our game night…

He took this picture and the one below.

The last two pictures are of him telling Wrigley that he is disappointed in her, because she was being too crazy.  At one point he even had his hands on his hips….how cute!