Free Range Family

BIG things going on for me in 2015, big and exciting things! :D I had a wonderful weekend with some friends who were town, who are very well known choreographers in the dance world. And I had two super cool things happen to me at work as well. Yes! I am so happy and cannot wait for this year! After all the hard work and the rough year we had in 2013 and 2014, I know that wonderful things were bound to happen this year! I just hope that a new house for our family is ALSO in the cards this year. I will keep praying and keep spreading that good karma! So we will begin with the work news: I was offered to join the YMCA's annual campaign this year. Our annual campaign raises money to provide more memberships, scholarships and healthy lifestyle programs for our community. All of our annual campaign donations help with either our preschool or afterschool programs, our scholarships to families and senior members, our Livestrong program, our Get Started program, our aquatics...

So last year I did Christmas through the years, and I thought that this year I would do something different. Here is Sant over the years with my family! :D As you can see, Santa has never changed. We love our mall Santa! He has been "in the family" since Natalie and I were children! We love him! He has several different Santa outfits (so if you see him multiple times in the year, the kids don't think Santa has only one stinky Santa outfit lmao). I mean, each picture he has a new shirt on! He has also perfected his Santa voice, and is super kind to the children. Alan loves Santa, tells him that they are best friends every chance he gets! :) Even if there were other Santa's to visit in town, which there aren't in this small town, we wouldn't go! I love this Santa so much, he is such a wonderful guy! *2010* *2011* *2012* *2013* *2014* We love our Santa!  Here's to many more years of him keeping the Christmas magic alive for childre...

Merry Christmas!!! I hope that everyone's past two days were just wonderful! Ours definitely were special, even despite receiving bad news about a potential house the day before Christmas Eve. There were still so many things to be thankful for and so many reasons to feel blessed. We did not do too much for Christmas, we stayed in town and visited Lon's family as well as mine. Christmas Eve was spent with Lon's family and Uncle Aaron! It was so great to see him! Uncle Cameron was also supposed to come down, but something came up unfortunately. Regardless, it was still a blessing seeing the kids with Uncle Aaron. Uncle Aaron is currently stationed in New York with the Army, the last time he saw Alan and Anna was at the Montana Fair in 2012. Anna literally was only a month old then! Uncle Aaron was in complete awe with how much older she was. Christmas Day started with Grandma Melanie, Grandpa Kevin, Uncle Kalvin and Aunt April. We opened our presents from them and had or...

Happy Holidays!  I am so excited that I can finally say that! I love December and the holiday season! I have been waiting for this all year! We have been applying for houses like crazy too, in hopes that we will have a place by Christmas. Wouldn't that be perfect? Its honestly all that I want for Christmas this year.   Pray for us to get lucky! :) I hope that everyone is having a great Christmas season, I know that we are! We went to the Festival of Trees last night with Grandma Melanie and Grandpa Kevin. Aunt April was performing with her dance studio. She did so awesome, as usual! They even did their new dances, like their Spice Girl song choreographed by Ade! Oh my goodness, it was all so awesome! Great job April! I could go on and on about how wonderful their performance was! Seriously! She even inspired one of my own dance students who was their with family! :D Aunt April and her crew after their performance <via>   After Diversity was done with the...

This weekend was a weekend for my sisters lol. Saturday was the annual Griz and Cat game (an important Montana rivalry, if you haven't ever heard of it). Since both my sister and her hubby go to University of Montana, we are totally supportive of the Griz! So we had to wear our maroon AND totally harassed anyone that I saw in Navy Blue lol! I mean, I had to! Its a Montana tradition! And of course, the wonderful Grizzlies won!  That same night, was Aunt April's first formal dance of the year, Twirp. I remember when they called it Sadie Hawkins, but apparently they think that "Twirp" is a much more attractive name for a semi-formal where the girls ask the boys. In that case, we should rename Prom "Dork" in my opinion. But I digress… Aunt April had asked me to come take pictures for her, since Aunt Natalie (the only other person in our family with any photography skills) was still in Missoula. So Anna and I made a little trip to the Yellowstone Country ...

We have been so busy this week preparing for that boy's birthday party on Friday, that I have yet to even post about his first day of school! Wow! So we are in need of some MAJOR catching up!  This past weekend, Aunt Natalie and her family came into town to host their wedding reception in Billings. They stayed the whole weekend and we even went to one of Aunt April's first football games as a varsity cheerleader. We had a wonderful time! Benton even started walking while he was here! We all were able to see a major milestone for him! I was so happy! Auntie loves you so much BB! Gotta love my weird siblings and I. Trying so hard to take a family photo at Aunt Natalie and Uncle Jake's reception, it took probably five times to get a nice picture! And Uncle Jake's thumb is even in it! Lol, we are so crazy! We also celebrated Alan's birthday early because Aunt Natalie and Uncle Jake wouldn't be able to come back next weekend. They took us to Chu...

The Montana Fair was in town this past week; Lon and I went once to the Train concert, the kids and I went three times. Rather then post four separate posts, I figured that I would combine all four times into one massive fair post. It shall be full of photos too, you have been warned. :P We had quite a great run there this year, and apparently so did the rest of the county lol. Almost everyone was there! We ran into so many people we knew! Even some from out of town lol! Gotta love the state fair for that reason! Train was a pretty good concert, except it seemed like the lead singer, Mister Patrick Monahan, was drunk off his gourd. And that's me being nice. Everyone else I have mentioned this too disagrees with me, saying it was such an amazing concert. But I was quite upset when he messed up several sets of lyrics from several of my favorite songs. One was a Zeppelin song that I think even Alan knows the words to but if he didn't know all the lyrics to the song, he should ha...