New Year, New Challenge

It's hard to believe we have put another year behind us! Our family leaves 2010 and looks on to 2011 with mixed emotions. There were many fond memories made in moments with our children, and good times spent with friends and family, but the year is largely overshadowed with the devastating loss of Greg's dad in August. The kids continue to work through the loss in their own ways, as do Greg and I. We've made it through the first Thanksgiving and Christmas, and know that 2011 will hold it's own difficult milestones, but I look forward to the blessings that 2011 will hold as well!

I did an exquisitely poor job at blogging in 2010, managing a whopping 14 posts the entire year! That's really pitiful, and I do hope that I will be able to do far better in 2011. The state of my year's pictures is almost as pitiful, most still sitting in their raw format just waiting to be converted to jpegs and shared. I've had an intense desire to get things in order over the past couple months, and am looking forward to being a more organized me this year. Today, I have been working through last year's pictures and organizing them into their monthly folders. I'm feeling good about the progress I'm making! In fact, I've already downloaded the pictures I took this morning, converted them, and placed them into the new 2011 folder, hooray me!

This is all in preparation for something I've decided to take on this year after being inspired by a dear high school friend (thanks Amanda!) who is doing the same. The challenge I've chosen to face is the 365 project, where you document a year of your life by taking a photo a day. Now, I cannot promise that you will see a picture every day here on this blog, but I do promise that I am going to do my darndest to TAKE at least one picture every day. I also cannot promise that there won't be more than one picture a day, because it just so happens that I'm pretty crappy at making decisions and will likely not be able to choose just one! Anyways, on with it!

Today was crazy. We woke up to a shredded poopy Cooper diaper courtesy of the dog. We then discovered that poor Ian was suffering from conjunctivitis and croup. Then, just to keep us on our toes, he threw up this afternoon on the freshly groomed dog who he was cuddling with, and into the torn living room chair (yes, into, meaning the guts of the chair....it was not salvageable). However, between bathing the dog, again; steam cleaning floors and ditching living room furniture, I was able to steal a moment away to build blocks with Cooper this morning. We hadn't had the blocks down in a while and I was amazed at how well he can stack!

At one point he steadily stacked six blocks with his pudgy little hand.



And he was so proud of himself!



Of course we couldn't get through the moment without a little sibling rivalry...



Because Ana wanted to show her skills too!



There you go, 1 day down, 364 left to go!