Holiday Family Portraits

We had our formal family portraits taken the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and we're pretty happy with the results. It's frustrating to me though that I can usually get a nice smile out of Audrey when it's me behind the camera, but whenever we take her to Picture People it's hit or miss. We've got one with a big smile from her, and a sneer from Nolan, and one with a nice smile from Nolan and a dazed look on Drey. Oh well! They are done and they will be nice to have for the time that we will all be spending apart. The Christmas song "Merry Christmas Darling" by Karen Carpenter will definitely be playing over and over in my head this year!

November...not a big picture month

Here are a few pictures that we've taken this month. There aren't many, it's tough to compete with all of the fun of Halloween & Grandma's visit!

So here are a few random ones to document the month as best we can.

We've been waking up to jack-hammers and backhoes for most of the month since they are replacing the gas lines to each house along our neighborhood. Won't be missing that when they're finally done!

As Audrey's hair continues to get longer, we are experimenting with new hair styles and tricks-she's pretty receptive to it too!

Nolan realized that he didn't have a scarf, so we whipped one up quickly one night. A green one for him, and a burgundy shawl for Audrey. So glad I had some extra fleece kicking around.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner at John & Karisa McAllister's house-a big thank you to them for hosting. They are always so organized and prepared-everything was beautiful and the company was outstanding. My kids never want to come home after playing at Benson's house-can't blame them-it's one of the most welcoming homes you'll ever be in...oh yeah and they've got some fun toys too!

The day after Thanksgiving we decided to start the day by making Christmas cookies, and proceeded to use up what sprinkles we had left in the pantry-which were mostly full before beginning this endeavor.

Please ignore the binky in Drey's mouth. She found it in her baby toy box and was attached to it all morning-she hasn't taken a binky since she was 7 months so don't report me to the dentist!

So that about sums up the highlights of November. Now on to the craziness, fun and excitement of December and January!!

"Invitation to Interview"

Never before in my life have those words meant so much to myself or Kenny.

The month of November has been a blur. For several reasons. We've been busy with our day to day activities, the days are getting shorter and we had a Thanksgiving holiday to celebrate. But possibly the biggest reason: we've been trying to schedule Kenny's residency interviews as they come in and prepare for what the next two months will bring. This is craziness. To all of our friends who have already gone through the gauntlet of email checking obsession, interview scheduling and rescheduling, appropriate apparel shopping, travel arrangement making and program information gathering...YOU NEVER SAID IT WOULD BE LIKE THIS!! Don't get us wrong-these are some excellent problems to be having and we are grateful for every last one of them, but WOWEE. Today we said goodbye to Kenny as he headed off for the next 4 days with 5 interviews to do, hoping that he'll be home Friday night so we'll get a few hours together before the kids and I board a plane and fly to Utah for the rest of the month on Saturday. I'm so glad that he suggested months ago that we spend the time with our parents in December and January because heaven knows we're not going to be seeing a lot of him. Funny that they call these interview months "vacation months" in Med school-because I'm pretty sure they are going to be some of his most exhausting ones! On a side note, as I read through this I hope I don't come off as being boastful about our 'situation'. When you're in the thick of interview season it does feel kind of taboo to talk about how many interviews you are getting etc. But you know, we've worked and sacrificed for the past 3.5 years to get to this point and I guess in a way we just want to enjoy the chaos and hope that in the end we'll match with the best program and location that we have ranked. We definitely are hoping that for all of our friends here in the same situation! Here's to interview season...good luck to us all! May all of the $$$ that we are spending come back to us somehow in the end!

Halloween weekend

To make the Halloween holiday even better my Mom made a trip out to play with us for the Halloween weekend. YAY! Thank heavens for good deals on airfare, and her willingness to come spend the weekend going from activity to activity-it was definitely packed with fun!

To start it off, every year we have a Halloween dinner with some friends. It used to be a murder mystery dinner, and as more kids have been added to the picture it became pretty tricky to keep the mystery going while we had children interrupting every few minutes. So we have changed it to be a dress up dinner with spooky food and dessert. Some day we'll go back-but for now it's perfect.

This year we had Mummy meatloaf, bruised potatoes, and slimy green beans. I think I may have used too much purple for the potatoes-that's a pretty vibrant bruise.

Todd, Jessica, Malia, and Halie Pitts

Karisa, Benson & Cole McAllister-John was MIA at the hospital

My bewitching Mom and the ugly witch of the Midwest-I think I got too carried away with the green makeup & eyebrow powder!! Yikes.

Next up was the Branch party with the cupcake walk, pin the spider on the web and black-out trick-or-treating downstairs complete with glow sticks and bumping into each other. It was great.

The Branch Halloween Party-they made their own trick-or-treat bags-very cute. Nolan did his "all bine mine self".

The family portrait...probably won't be on the Christmas cards this year.

The weekend was quite a whirlwind of activities and it was great to have my Mom here to enjoy the time together. We did have some down time where we just stayed home and played. We all loved having the extra attention-funny how Mom's can do that.

Nolan and Grama Whittaker invented a new game called Trick-or-treat-hide-n-seek which he was eager to play at any moment. One hides the candy, the other finds it. Thank goodness we had such a huge supply of candy by the end of the weekend so this game could go on for extended amounts of time!

MCW Trick-or-Treat

Every year Kenny's med school hosts a Trick-or-Treat for the student and resident families. It is not to be missed. From 3pm-5pm the offices shut down for normal business operations, and each department decorates and dresses up and offers some seriously good candy, crackers, crafts, or stickers. There was even a couple of baskets of fresh apples and whole packages of M&Ms etc. It's nice and warm and well organized. We will truly miss this part of our Milwaukee fall celebrations if we end up not staying here for residency.

Then & Now

On October 13th 2009 around 2:20PM I took the kids to the "blue park" otherwise known as the Wisconsin Ave park and snapped these pictures.



Exactly one year later on October 13th, 2010 @ 1:40pm we unknowingly made the exact same trip and took the following pictures.



So that is what my kids and the gorgeous Autumn scenery look like exactly one year later. Pretty cool huh?

Jim's Pumpkin Farm

October 2nd- Our trip to Jim's Pumpkin farm in Germantown.

Love this place-it's free, has a great wagon ride with a spooky forest, any pumpkin is $5, and they have a great variety of kid things to do like a corn maze, and hay romp. Plus-it's our 3rd year visiting so it's tradition. It's cheesy and homemade, we always have a great time and get some fun pictures.

Our first camping trip in Wisconsin!

Which is really quite sad when we think about it. We've been meaning to go camping at least twice each season...and it's never happened until Kenny pretty much forced us to on Friday, October 9th. He'd been suggesting it all week and I just had too many other things that had to be taken care of before I could even commit to getting us packed up and ready to go camping. So I guess he just got tired of all of my excuses because the night before he announced that he would have us all ready to go by the 2:00 PM Friday, and to my disbelief he did! We were headed out the door to pick Nolan up from preschool, hit the kids well child checkups and then onto Camp Maude in the Kettle Moraine National Forest.

I'm so glad he did to, because it was beautiful. Nice warm weather, beautiful camp site, yummy brats and s'mores roasted on the fire, and it was Audrey's first experience with an actual campfire! I don't have much to say that was nice about the night's sleeping events, migraine on my part, plus multiple vaccinations on the kids part equaled all of us very thankful for the one little bottle of infant motrin that I had remembered to pack in my makeup case. But it was nice being snuggled up in a giant pile of blankets and sleeping bags, and I did watch a lot of stars moving by all night.

We didn't take many pictures of the actual camping site-just too busy trying to set up camp, get our dinner made and us all tucked in to bed I guess. I do wish that I would have taken a photo of the yummy breakfast spread that Kenny provided: 1lb bacon, fried eggs, pancakes and some fancy O.J.-definitely not a breakfast that we normally indulge in-but quite tasty when you're camping!

The next day was gorgeous too. We played at the playground, took a walk along the lake and then later took a nature hike that ended up providing myself and the kids with a nice little sunburn on our faces.

If nothing else, the little overnight camp trip provided some much needed Daddy time for the kids and if a night of little sleep and some some firewood bark left over in the car is what we've got to do to enjoy it...we'll take it!