Family photo archives

Lots to say about the holidays this year, but it will wait for another post!  ;-0


One of the most fun things was that my sister scanned in a whole bunch (seriously, like 190+) old family photos.  So I just have to share a few... more in other posts, I'm sure!

My maternal grandparents, Ian and Helen Knott

Ian Knott with Penny, Libby, Jeremy & Robin Knott

Libby Knott

Richard Coombs and Libby Knott, 1969

My paternal grandparents, Robert & Barbara Coombs

Richard Coombs and Barry Coombs

Ian Knott and the MG (my dad still has this car!)

 

Libby Knott -- beautiful!

Irish Dance/Festival of Trees

Miss D started Irish Dancing this fall.  Her school performed at the Festival of Trees on December 4th, and she was invited to join them.  This was her very first performance.  She was on stage all of about 30 seconds (and I missed most of it fiddling with GPa Larry's camera, trying to get a picture.  This was the best of the bunch...

Miss D is the one in the center of the pic.  The girls in the fancy dresses behind her (those are our school dresses) are more advanced dancers.

This is Miss D with her two teachers.

And here she is with the flowers her Gpa Larry brought for her!

Thanksgiving 2010 (Part 2)

After attending the Community Thanksgiving, we got home and the weather was just spectacular.  We had had some great early-season snow (courtesy of the Blizzard of 2010), and we decided to get out all the skis and open the Casa Llamedos Ski Resort!

We skied down our driveway, down to the neighbors' driveway, then wrote the Pilot lift up to our other neighbors' property, skied down the hill a few times, then back up the driveway two more times to ski down to yet another neighbor's driveway.  All in all, we took about 6 or 7 runs and had a grand old time skiing our driveway and the hills and roads of the subdivision!

This is everyone getting ready...

This is Miss D, skiing down from one neighbor's driveway to  the other neighbor's driveway.

This is Daddy J, skiing from a neighbor's driveway down the hill and up the hill again!

And here is M-Moo skiing down the driveway.

Somehow I didn't get any of K-Wiggles skiing, but she was out there too!

And this is a photo of the Pilot Lift!

Thanksgiving 2010

We had a really nice, quiet Thanksgiving this year.  We had planned to go to San Diego, but a little thing known as the Blizzard of 2010 got in the way.  We probably would have been fine driving down to San Diego on Wednesday afternoon, just ahead of the storm.  But thank goodness we didn't go, because the drive home on Sunday would have been hellacious.  People were stuck on I-15 in a total parking lot for hours!


Instead, we decided to attend the Park City Community Thanksgiving.  (We did something similar in Moab last year, and it was lovely).

It was a lot of fun, really festive.  It was amazing how many local people we saw there.  Everyone was so happy and in the spirit of togetherness and thankfulness.

The girls really enjoyed writing and drawing what they were thankful for on this large wall mural.

And of course, M-Moo made friends with the pianist and got to play some lovely piano tunes!


I don't know what we'll do for Thanksgiving next year, but the Community Thanksgiving will definitely be an option to consider.


(Oh, and the food was great too!).

Fun weekend goings on.

On Saturday the girls and I were planning on doing nothing. They got up early (even though Miss D had a lateover at a friend's house and came home at 1:00 am). We were watching tv in my bed (daddy j was in LA) when we got an email from some friends. They were staying at a local hotel, about to go swimming, and did we want to join them? Needless.to say, we hunted down some swimsuits and had a grand old time.

After all that fun, the girls and I got home, had breakfast for dinner, and played Wii until well past bedtime. So fun!

Today, we woke up to 10" of snow! While I slept in, the girls put on all their snow gear and played outside for at least an hour, maybe longer!

Daddy got home about midday, with g'pa Larry, and we made lamb meatballs and strawberry shortcake for the littles' birthday dinner. The wind kicked up and it turned into a major crazy blizzard outside!

Not an exciting weekend by any stretch, just a totally ordinary couple of days in this ordinary family. I love it more than I could ever have imagined.

Oh, and daddy j plays in his hockey league finals tonight... wish him luck.

And tomorrow M-moo and K-wiggles turn 5. How did that happen? 5 years of extraordinarily ordinary days, one at a time.

Random thoughts from dance class.

I got a fancy new phone a while back. It is sort of Verizon's version of an iPhone. It has a touch screen and runs Android's operating system. My old phone had a slideout keyboard and used Windows operating system. I can do so much more with this phone, it is a wonder to me how I ever lived without it.

Now I don't spend as much time on the desktop computer or even my network because I can do almost everything on he phone. I can order groceries and pizza. I can surf the 'net. I can take pictures and video and share them on fb. I can get navigation help to almost anywhere. I can find who has the cheapest gas. I can run my banking stuff from the phone, right down to depositing a check! I can even get my boarding pass for the airport directly on my phone! There is so much more it is just mind-boggling.

Until today I hadn't thought to update my blog from the phone. Because I'm not on the computer as much, my blog updates have fallen off a bit. Today M&K and I are waiting while Miss D does her Irish dance class, so I thought I would try a blog update.

Happy blogging!

M&K's Karate birthday party

So, M-Moo and K-Wiggles are turning five on November 22 (they're twins, you see).  For their previous four birthdays, this has meant a party the weekend before Thanksgiving, at our house, with whoever was still in town, mostly our friends who happen to have kids, but not necessarily M&K's friends.

Of course, they're almost 5 and they don't really have any friends of their own.  Miss D's friends have younger siblings, but they don't go to the same school as M&K and, well, M&K have each other, so I've been lazy about helping them make friends.

So this year, we decided to have a "real" birthday party for them.  They settled on a karate birthday party, and we settled on Saturday the 13th because there was a better chance that people would still be in town.

Today was the magical day!  The girls had so much fun.  Ten of them at Bobby Lawrence Karate Training Center with our head of school, Mr. Klekas.  They had a terrific time... pizza, karate, cake, presents, goody bags.

Here are some photos (the lighting is notoriously terrible at the karate studio, so the pictures aren't the best, but they capture the spirit!).

New pictures from our wonder-sitter, Jamy!

Halloween pumpkins!

While we were away, the girls had fun carving pumpkins for Halloween!

Visitors

Look who's been visiting us lately...

Sunday evening...

And Tuesday morning...

Oh yeah, the weather changed a bit... this was what we woke up to Monday morning...

And as I post this, it is Tuesday night and it's still coming down hard. Looks like February out there!

Moab 2010

For UEA weekend (that's Utah Education Association weekend -- the weekend that all the school kids and teachers get Thursday and Friday off to go play!), we decided to take our spanky new trailer to Moab for a camping trip. For reasons known only to someone other than me, we also took our three dogs, our three children, and more bikes than any family has a right to own!

What follows is a semi-random assortment of photos from G'pa Larry's camera and Jim's cell phone that we took while we were there.

The weather was absolutely gorgeous, fantastic, in fact (which I write as I sit looking at the copious amounts of snow coming down outside my window) and we had a great time. For our next trip, I am hoping for more consistent sleep (with neither kids nor dogs waking up on a regular basis each night) and everything else about the same! The trailer is now winterized and awaiting the first signs of spring so we can head back down south to warmer weather while the mud at home disappears!

This is all three girls sleeping in their triple-bunk!

All the kids waiting for their banana boats from the fire.

This was Scott's glow-in-the-UV light t-shirt!

This is one of the scorpions they found on the scorpion hunt (I did NOT go, and did NOT appreciate finding out that there are tons of these things crawling around the sand in the dark!).

This is the new trailer (new to us anyway) parked in our courtyard before the trip.

This is Jim and Scott liberating some rocks from the side of the road so we could construct our fire ring.

This was the whole gang (except g'pa Larry) as we enjoyed our post-lunch-in-town ice creams!

This is Miss D, enjoying some pudding in G'pa Larry's RV.