Friday Catch Up

Lots of random stuff not worthy of a separate post, so here we go.  Sean is continuing with no soda which he stopped drinking in Djibouti because he got 14 hours of sleep each night and no longer needed the caffeine.  However, back home he is not getting that much sleep so he agreed to try my green tea and seems to like it.  So before he has a shift I make sure there is a pitcher to get him through it.  I am almost out so I just ordered more and I love a website that asks if I want to use my "store credit" towards my purchase.  Umm, yes?  It must be from ordering so much because I certainly haven't returned anything.  This is kind of like my hair place where they finally asked me if I wanted to redeem some of my points.  Points?  I had saved up quite a few apparently since I had never used them before.  Love these secret reward programs, unless I never find out about them.  And then I hate those places.  If only I knew what places those were...

Now for the photo part of the day:

 Best in-laws ever brought us our favorite cider (have I mentioned this?) for our birthdays.  I'm so glad they like to drive out here...

 Delivery man enjoying a break with his favorite Buddy's glass from Friday Night Lights.  Oh we miss that show but I'm kind of excited to watch that Nashville one with the wife on it.  Also excited to head to Nashville in a few weeks to visit Krauts and Stouts!

 Finally burned all the sticks in the fire pit.  If there is a fire ban going on right now, then this is a photo from last year.

 Nana and Emily, doing her thinking pose.

 Everyone was cleaned up for family photos with Beth as we won a big portrait at an auction before Sean deployed.  It was rained out a couple weeks ago so we rescheduled and as luck would have it, we were able to squeeze Nana and Pops in for some shots.  These are obviously the shots I took while we were waiting for Beth to arrive.

 Always fun trying to get four kids to cooperate at once.  I hope Beth had better luck than I did!

 We also tried to get good individual shots of Megan and Emily to go with the big ones we got of Patrick and Anna back before Sean left.

 Patrick was mad that Beth wasn't taking individual shots of him too so I had to appease him and get some myself.  You can see his level of cooperation here.

 Sean brought us out a Bold Rock to split when things were getting tense with the kids.

 They are such double trouble, but look so innocent here.

 And here.

 This is more like Patrick.

 And this crazy pose...

 Poor guy, you can see his little scar from stitches still, above the eye on the right.  I didn't even touch up this photo, he has rosy cheeks from racing around.

 I am really hoping we got some good shots of Megan because I feel this is the last time she will look like a child, starting to really grow now and she'll be a teen before we know it.  Tiffany pointed out that this is the age when you want to get that family portrait to have up forever, not when your oldest goes off to college and already looks like an adult.  Oh the pressure to get a good family shot now...

And this is how we got Patrick through the photo shoot... by increasing the number of Hersey bars we would give him.  I think he ended up with five of those little ones which he then broke up and piled up and then ate.  Sean wanted to put him to bed sleeping on a towel because he was pretty sure there would be barf in the night.  But there wasn't, what a trooper!