Love Month

Life lately for us...including all of the strange weather Oregon likes to throw at us.

Valentine's Day came early for us and James totally surprised me with a trip to the coast, where we stayed at a beautiful bed & breakfast and did some fun shopping and enjoyed the beach - the only sunny place in Oregon...sometimes :)

Then, a few days later, we had a CRAZY snow storm and school/work was cancelled for days! The snow was followed by an ice storm and there was tree carnage all over the place. The University of Oregon sent out email alerts warning people not to walk under trees (kinda tricky in Oregon...) because branches and whole trees were falling down all over the place!

Despite the craziness, we kept celebrating Valentine's Day pretty much the entire month. Yes, those are pink heart-shaped pancakes. So festive.

Then a couple weeks later, the weather was so warm that we got out for an impromptu bike ride along the river. More sunshine - yay!

Ok, I took waaaay more pictures of my bike than I did of us. But look how cute it is!!! Can you blame me?

I thought this was so funny - this sign was half covered in water. I feel like it is a sign...I mean like a sign-from-the-universe-kind-of-sign...telling us to throw caution to the wind. Or drown it in the water. Something like that. 

Redwoods and New Year's

More catch-up from winter vacation...I promise this is the last one though.

This one features our day trip to Big Basin in the Redwoods and our New Year's Eve/Day celebration. Lots of fun. Lots of pictures. Enjoy :)

This was our New Year's Eve celebration, complete with extreme games and prizes, Chinese food, and the annual Dr. Pepper (and other soda) belching contest at midnight.

Poor Dad got this fortune at about 10:00 p.m. on the last day of the year. He did have "much happiness" for those last two hours of the year. 

Baby Michael really wanted to participate in the soda drinking. 

Precious.

James and Jess picked out the prizes for our extreme games...James was super excited for his Spiderman hand sanitizer. He picked it out, especially for...him.

The prize bag...featuring lots of snap bracelets and fake locks of hair.

Dad rocking  a new pink lock of hair.

Bananagrams...my new favorite game.

How clever is this? Someone spelled "winner" and I think they won. Wasn't me, that's for sure. 

Things got a little loopier as the night went on.

Mom threatened to fall asleep. She didn't stay like this for long.

Dad's game face.

Mr. Tumnus's game face.

After the midnight celebrations and our belching contest (which Jess won, of course, though her performance last year was far superior), we headed out to Chubby's to prepare the pork for Lisa's wedding reception the next day. Mind you, this was about 2:00 in the morning and we were dealing with half a dozen pork butts...the jokes ran wild. I'll let your imagination take it from here. But seriously, who needs alcohol when you have my very overtired family+half a dozen pork butts+2 AM. Hilarity. Nothing could beat that.

 The next day...I just couldn't get enough of this baby. He is such a goof!

 And right before we left Utah, we had a lovely visit with one of my very favorite people, Karuna. I love this girl so much and wish we lived in the same country or state or city or something. Australia is WAY too far away.