Life gets busy

Happy Holidays everyone! 

I have to say that sadly this blog gets neglected when life gets busy.  I was looking back at my previous posts and my last one was in May of 2016.  Since that time though my son has turned 6, my daughter has turned 4, both of them started school (My son is in kindergarten, my daughter is now in preschool), I started a new job as a quality assurance manager (this has taken up a ton of my time), we went to Disneyland with both sets of grandparents, and Jamaica with my amazing wife Censie!

It has been an amazing time but I often times find myself sitting down at night and starting to fall asleep around 9 or not having motivation.  It sucks because I have enjoyed my time blogging but sometimes lack that internal motivation to just write and share what is going on.  I am going to work on trying to get this up and running again, hopefully with my new love of computer coding I can share my interests with everyone.  

As I am sitting here writing this right now my son is sick and I am eyeball deep in his new found passion: Pokemon!  I had no knowledge of Pokemon until recently but he has found a love for it and a shared passion with his classmates.  As I type I am watching a small yellow creature named Pikachu shock Team Rocket from the sky.  I know that with Christmas coming up this next week that I am going to have to learn more and more about Pokemon.  

I have learned as a father that it is not up to me to determine their interests and passions but to embrace theirs and share mine with them. If we have the same interests that is AWESOME but if not I need to take the time to learn about theirs and not pigeon hole them into only learning one thing.  I have learned a lot about dance, gymnastics, and princess from my daughter, and now Pokemon from my son!  It is fun, but I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would be watching Pokemon!  It goes to show you that you will do anything for your children!

I hope that everyone has a great Holiday season and Merry Christmas!  I hope to be back here many times in the upcoming year!  If you have any suggestions for posts I would appreciate any thoughts!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!!

I hope that everyone had a great Holiday season and a great Christmas.  I have to be the first one to say that our family was extreme blessed this holiday season.  The main reason for that is being able to be together with each other.  To me this is the best gift that I could ever receive.

I am a sucker when it comes to traditions, and it has been interesting developing new traditions with my own family.  I will admit though I miss having my parents here to celebrate those traditions but thanks to technology we get to have time with them.  Our family is very lucky though that we do have my wife's parents just down the street from us and they have been a huge part of our lives and the kids lives.  

We started this Christmas off by going to church with our family.  The kids got all dressed up and were good kids during the service.  I am a sucker for Silent Night by candlelight in the church.  There is something special about this son and singing it on Christmas Eve. We sadly had to break away from our normal tradition of going to Texas Roadhouse for dinner, it was a two hour wait, but we went to dinner and had some good conversation.  We also had a great time tracking Santa, thank you NORAD, and finding where he was going next.  

After a great evening with family the kiddos left out cookies, carrots, and milk out for Santa.  They put on their Christmas Eve pajamas that the elves brought and headed to bed.  After a little while the little elves got around to helping Santa.  I spent three nights earlier in the week building all the gifts so that I didn't have to do it on Christmas Eve, thank goodness I had the time to do that otherwise I am pretty sure I wouldn't have slept, as it happens I got very little sleep as it is.  Jude was so excited he woke up almost ever two hours to ask if we could open presents.  The kids were very excited to see the gifts that were out for them. 

The kids made quick work of all their presents, they are expert unwrappers.  I don't know where they get this talent but they have perfected it.  We opened presents at home then went to grandma and grandpa's opened more presents then had Christmas lunch.  The kiddos did well despite being completely exhausted and over stimulated.  I was a proud dad!  We were able to talk to our family in Amsterdam and Grandma, Grandpa, and Great Grandma in Arizona.  Again thank goodness for technology and Skype!!

Jude challenged me to his Rock em' Sock em' Robots, and I have a ringer in the family.  He was an expert but we had a great time and have played a couple more times since last night already.  We even had a white Christmas!  People think that this happens every Christmas in Colorado but is is not!  

I hope that you had a great Christmas and got everything that you wanted and needed.  I look forward to sharing more and more with everyone in the upcoming year.  Here is to a happy and healthy 2016!!!

Heck Yeah I Can Bake!

I Did It I Made Cookies!

 

 

For those of you that don't know me very well I am a huge fan of the food network but rarely do I ever try and make anything.  It is one of my joys with food though.  It is funny I get so much enjoyment out of food but because of Ulcerative Colitis my body hates food.  Its a vicious cycle!  I wanted to try and do something fun this Christmas season with Jude.  I thought it would be fun to make cookies at home. 

 

Now I know that I could have gone and got the frozen dough or I could have bought the packaged mix and just made it, BUT NO I decided that I was going to make cookies from SCRATCH! 

 

Thankfully Censie decided that this sounded like a good idea and gave me a shot.  I found the recipe online and then we bought the ingredients and I made the cookie dough.  Now I know these are just basic sugar cookies but don't rain on my parade.  I was thankful that the dough at least looked like cookie dough.  I always used to eat the cookie dough more then the cookies but I have refrained myself and made the Adult choice that raw egg may not be good for my stomach.  I hate growing up!

 

We then rolled them out and Jude helped cut them out and we baked our cookies then.  He had a blast picking out the shapes and cutting out the cookies, now he did keep trying to eat the dough but we got a lot of cookies made.  He had a blast going through and decorating them with frosting and putting sprinkles on them.  Needless to say we went straight to the bath after this.  I think he had a great time, it take a while, but it was a great memory to share with Censie and him of making cookies.  I hope that I can start to cook and bake more I really enjoyed it!  Merry Christmas!