Mimi the Sea Lion

I didn't think it would take me this long to get around to posting more pictures, but alas life happened.  When planning this weekend, even though the whole point of it was to swim with dolphins, I wanted to make it extra fabulous and fun, hoping that soon I'd be pregnant and not able to do any of these things.  I thought swimming with a sea lion would be pretty cool and different and I actually had to talk Chris into doing it! We ended up being the only two in the water with 168lb sea lion, Mimi.  She was very sweet and lots of fun.  It was quite different that swimming with a dolphin, a little more relaxed, and dare I say, almost more fun.  With the dolphins, you hang out treading water and wait for the trainer to tell the dolphin to come to you and do whatever behavior.  With the sea lion, we were standing and she was hanging out right next to us the whole time and interacted more with us.  We did the typical hugs and kisses, but a couple of the more fun things we did were swimming around the enclosure with her and "holding" her in the water.  She was cute while we were swimming, if she got too far ahead of us she would look back to make sure we were still there.  And my FAVORITE part of the time with her was at the end, we were still in the water and just kind of chatting with the trainer, she was hanging out next to me and randomly gave me a hug, it was so cute! There's not a picture of it, unfortunately, but it made my day.  So here are a bunch of pictures of us with her, I don't think many of them are very good of me, which I'm sad about, but there were a couple I liked.

This one is hilarious - Chris looks like he's stalking her!

Here's one of her "checking" on Chris, so cute!

This is me doing the command for "say cheese!"

Chris telling her to do her shark impression

"Holding" her

My favorite picture

She was just told to hug Chris, but she wouldn't stop kissing him!

Then the trainer told had her kiss him on the lips, he had to

wash his mouth before kissing me again!

This is her hug - basically just putting her flippers on us, but still cute.

I Heart Florida!

Many people don't know (and I did that on purpose) that we tried in vitro fertilization in March to get pregnant.  Unfortunately, it didn't work and we'll have to try again.  Not long after we started the process I started to worry how I would handle it if it didn't work, I pictured myself curled up in bed crying for months.  So I decided that if it didn't work I wanted to go on a trip, go somewhere and do something I wouldn't be able to do if I'd been pregnant.  I chose swimming with dolphins.  I've done it in Key Largo and in Jamaica and I thought it'd be great to go somewhere else in the Caribbean, but I couldn't find a place that sounded as nice as the place we'd been to in Key Largo.  And since this trip was all about me having fun, we went back to Key Largo.  We stayed in a different hotel and went to a different dolphin place and added a swim with a sea lion.  It was exactly the fun, relaxing therapy I needed. 

The first night at the hotel they had a fire on the beach with s'mores and live music - very fun

We got to hold all kinds of parrotts

This is the rarest macaw in the world!

Swimming in that beautiful water!!!!

A day trip to Key West is a must

We tried stone crabs claws - slightly bigger than blue crab claws!

I'm going to do seperate posts of the sea lion and dolphins so I can put as many pictures as possible up! We decided we really enjoy vacationing in the Florida Keys and might make it a habit, but we'd never be tempted to buy a house down there that we'd have to repair every time a hurricane hits.

100 Years Young

Next week my great grandmother will turn ONE HUNDRED! She's amazing, she lives in an assisted living center, but has her own apartment, a cat and a boyfriend.  She occasionally needs a walker, but can do just fine without it.  I'm so glad to have her genes, I hope I get to celebrate my 100th birthday! We had a party for her this past Saturday, several family members flew in from Arizona and California and it was really nice.  I really enjoyed being with my extended family who I don't get to see much and meeting a cousin for the first time.

My cooky brothers, I told at least ten trying to get a decent one and they would NOT cooperate. 

This one is cute, but not what I'd wanted.

My grandmother with her two daughters, I don't know why we didn't get a picture of her

 with all three of her kids, since they're hardly all in the same state.

Four generations!

We're only missing one girl cousin!

With the birthday girl!

Chris' 35th!

I had a lot of fun planning Chris' birthday.  I had some help getting ideas from some of the girls at work.  I started the day making his favorite breakfast muffins and giving him a new shirt and tie to wear to work.  Then I had set up a scavenger hunt to get him from work to dinner at Liberatore's.  It was only three clues and everything worked perfectly.  I also had cupcakes waiting at the restaurant.  It was a lot of fun!!!

My New Year Resolution

I don't really like making resolutions because I know I'll never keep them.  So I tend to not make them at all.  I didn't realize until today that I had kinda made one for this year.  The background - my house is filled with CRAP.  It's everywhere and sometimes I feel like it's going to swallow me or that I should be on one of those hoarder shows.  It's not that I don't try to keep things organized, but there is SO MUCH that I don't know what to do with, stuff that I should keep, but I don't know what to do with it.  It's mostly random stuff, but it drives me CRAZY.  I'm so embarassed, I feel like I can't have friends over, I feel embarassed when people randomly stop by, I hate taking pictures in the house.  Now, I know that you'll say I'm exaggerating how bad it looks, which I may be.  But the point is it bothers me.  It's such an overwhelming thing to try and organize the house, especially when my husband doesn't seem to notice or care.  So my resolution this year is to do one non-maintenance thing a day, even just a tiny one.  I classify a maintenance thing as laundry, dishes, dinner, all those things that HAVE to be done.  I only started it yesterday and my thing yesterday was gathering all the shower gels that people have given me that I never use and giving them to a friend who will use them.  It didn't take long and, cleared up some space in my bathroom and bedroom and it made my friend happy.  I haven't figured out what today's thing will be, I still have a couple more hours! I shared this goal with Chris in hopes of him joining me, but I won't hold my breath.
I decided to share it on my blog in hopes of keeping me motivated, so please feel free to check up on me and ask how I'm doing! Happy New Year!

Christmas Eve

Chris decided to try roasted chesnuts.  We didn't have an open fire, so that took some of the fun out of it.  And they weren't that great tasting, so that took the rest of the fun out of it.  But we tried something new and it felt like a good Christmas Eve thing to do.

Chris putting slits in the chesnuts so they won't explode in the oven.

The first bites! 

 You can see Cameron Diaz in the background, I was watching "The Holiday"

They were very dry, so we washed them down with coke.



That was our exciting Christmas Eve, mixed with some last minute wrapping and cleaning.  But it was really fun having the afternoon off of work and just hanging out at home.  Here's to sleeping in tomorrow, having a fun Christmas breakfast and spending the afternoon with my family!

Ghosts of Christmas Past

Two of my friends have done this cute post, so I thought I would follow.  I was lazy and didn't go back further than what I had easily accessible.

Christmas 2006

The first Christmas in our new house! We had just gotten the living room furniture from my grandparents and we got to have our joint custody dog spend Christmas with us.  He always chews bones very quickly, so we thought we'd get him a super huge one that would last awhile, but I guess it was too big, he didn't want anything to do with it.

Christmas 2007

This is the picture we put on our Christmas cards that year.

Christmas 2008

We took turns taking pictures of each other opening our presents.  This was the year we both "cheated" and bought each other an iPod touch.  I hadn't remembered being able to squish a tree in that small space!

Christmas 2009

This picture isn't at Christmas, we were in Utah at the beginning of December and played around trying to get a cute Christmas card picture.  We ended up not using this one, but I think it's cute and funny.  Can you tell we're freezing??

Christmas 2010

This is the "prom" picture taken at Chris' work party.

We usually don't take a lot of pictures at Christmas because it's just the two of us and there's not much to take pictures of.  Hopefully this will be the last Christmas without any kids and then we'll take millions of pictures every year!