Ten Year Anniversary - Europe Trip

Finally, I've found the time to update my blog with details of our trip to Europe! About a week after we returned from our trip, my grandmother passed away so I headed to Arkansas for several days. Since returning from there, it's been super-busy at work and now I'm finally caught up....almost.

First, I want to say a little about my grandmother, Gwendolyn Ruby Lyons Ponder Pankey. Oh, how I wish I could have just one more little girl and name her Ruby after my granny! How cute would that be? I'm serious about the name, but not about having another kid. No way, Jose! Granny was my dad's mother and she was the sweetest lady to walk the face of the Earth. She raised three very handsome sons and was famous in Nashville for her chocolate pies. The funniest memory I have of her was when Grant and I were kids and she drove us to Dallas to visit my Uncle George and Aunt Monta. We were driving down the interstate and she turned and reached in the backseat for a bag of candy that I was eating and the next thing we knew, we had crossed the grass median and were on the other side of the interstate facing oncoming cars! It scared us half to death, but she just kept on trucking back across that grass into the correct lane just like she meant to do that. She was a very special lady who always made me feel very special. She always called me before a holiday to let me know that she would be making my favorite dessert, Cherry Cream Crunch. At the funeral, my dad's cousin, Cathy, told me how very special I was to my granny and how she always referred to me as her "Brookey" and it felt good to hear that nickname again. At times I feel a little disconnected from my roots, and as sad as the circumstances were, it was really good to be among family and to be in Nashville where all those memories were. It was a special time.

Now, enough of the Debbie Downer subjects, onto brighter things. Our trip to EU was wonderful! I wish I'd written this while the trip was still fresh on my mind. We loved Rome and all the historical sights like the Roman Collosseum and all the ruins. It blows my mind that it is still standing, since 80 AD and that they built all of it before there were cranes and dump trucks! The Vatican and Sistine Chapel were so beautiful. It's so hard to wrap my head around how much work went into creating those beautiful works of art. Florence was great and I loved the location of our hotel. It was right in the middle of lots of shops and restaurants, although I only window-shopped. We saw Michaelangelo's David there in Florence. We traveled by train to Lucerne, Switzerland through the Swiss Alps. It was a breathtaking train ride. We probably would have enjoyed it more had we not been so nervous about making sure we were on the right trains and making all the right stops. The trains were a bit stressful! Lucernce was really beautiful and peaceful. The best meal we had was in Lucerne, where we dined on cheese fondue and local Swiss cuisine. The shops and department stores in Lucerne had the most unique and elaborate window displays. It was Easter so everything was decorated beautifully for Springtime. We spent our final days in Paris and luckily our hotel was very close to the Eiffel Tower. It was very windy, rainy and cold so we opted to not go up in the Eiffel Tower. I was most looking forward to going to the Louvre but I found that there was very little art/artists in the Louvre that I was familiar with, other than the Mona Lisa. I preferred another gallery that we went to that housed works by Degas, Monet, Manet, Gauguin, etc. The food in Paris was terrible, we thought! We ended up eating at Italian restaurants in Paris because we could no longer stand eating french fries with everything. It was a great trip but it made me realize how much we take for granted here in the U.S. We have excellent food with large portions, big houses, large yards, nice cars, friendly people and we all speak the same language. We are a bit spoiled!

Happiness is....

Even though my kids are so much a part of my happiness, I'm not going to talk about my kids here. Oops, too late I guess!

Happiness = the little rituals that I do every night before bed

like, my hair in a knot on top of my head

my bright pink fat pants

I'll spare you the horror of looking at the whole picture of me like this because me without make-up is just not a good look. Just ask Ian. He calls this my "Fraggle Rock" look. Something about the hair on top of my head reminds him of the Fraggles, which was a Jim Henson puppet tv show in the 80's.

Happiness = ten years of marriage with Ian

Next week we are heading to Rome, Florence, Lucerne Switzerland and Paris for twelve days for our big anniversary trip. Can't believe it's been ten years. If he only knew when we posed for this engagement picture in 1999 that I would dress up like a Fraggle every night...and that he would be perfectly fine with that. So glad I have him!

Lucy Taylor Swift Perry

Lucy performing some of her favorite songs!

Notice how the songs all run together? It's a montage! We had Lucy all to ourselves last night because Maggie was away at a sleep-over. Boy did Lucy love being the center of attention!

Maggie Doing Her Thing

Here is Miss Maggie in action. She is in the light blue jersey, number 8 with long ponytail.

"YOU ALWAYS THROW MY ART IN THE TRASH"

"You always throw my art in the trash" was the statement that Lucy made with tears streaming down her little face when I cleaned out my car and dumped all her school papers in the trash can. I felt like the world's worst mom. BUT, in my defense, you can only keep so many papers from school since she is sent home with about four each night! I'd love to keep every single one of her masterpieces that consist of scribble marks, which she claims to be a giraffe or a tree or a clown. So, after digging them out of the trash and some apologies from Mom, here she is proudly displaying some of her works of art.

Eight Years With Maggie

Eight

Seven

Six

Five

Four

Three

Two

One

With Maggie turning eight on February 15, I started looking through old photos to post here and got teary eyed. Not only was I emotional about her growing up way too soon, but also because several of these birthday parties were meaningful to me for one reason or another. Her one year birthday was held at my home in Nashville where I grew up (my mom no longer lives there) and it holds so many childhood memories and celebrating many birthday parties of my own in that same dining room. We had Maggie's second birthday at Ian's parents house, which they recently moved out of, and it also holds many wonderful memories for both of my kids and Ethan too. Her third, fourth and fifth birthdays were in Benton. Benton will always hold a special place in our hearts for SO many reasons, but especially because that's where we started our family of four! It's hard to believe, but her sixth, seventh, and eighth birthdays were all spent here in Colorado. I remember for her sixth birthday we had only been living here a little over a month and Maggie was still making friends and I was torn over having a party for her. I couldn't bring myself to ask these parents whom we didn't even know to buy a gift for my child, who they had probably never even heard of! We convinced Maggie to have a family birthday party and I think it was one of the most special times that we've had. She also learned to ice-skate that day!

Maggie, at eight years, is the most confident, independent, smart, outgoing, funny, athletic kid that I know. She embodies every quality that I could ever hope for or want in my children and everything that I was not. My mom thinks that Ian and I were sent home with the wrong baby because Maggie and I are so opposite. Thank goodness that kids inherit genes from their father also!

Holidays!

New Year's with two of his favorite ladies
Back to school

Santa brought new house shoes

Christmas Morn

Last fall ballgame

Me with my mom and brother, Grant

Papa Doug with all the grandkids

Papa Doug and Marmee with all the grandkids

At a Holiday Tea Fundraiser for Pediatric Cancer patients

This year we stayed in Colorado for both Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. We missed seeing our families of course but it was also a nice change to stay home and relax. I cooked a turkey for Thanksgiving for the very first time and it was so easy and so good! We had tons of leftovers because I cooked enough food for ten people but it was only my little family of four. Needless to say, I ate sweet potatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. My girls are not picky eaters, but for whatever reason they do not like mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, or dressing. Ian is worse than them because he's a meat and potato guy and won't even try any of the side dishes, which drives me nutty because I am completely opposite - I'll eat pretty much anything!

Since there was an excess of leftovers from Thanksgiving, Ian requested steak and potatoes for our Christmas meal (imagine that). I think it was around 12 degrees outside on Christmas day. Try firing up your grill in that temperature! The girls enjoyed opening their gifts from Santa. Maggie commented that Santa "sure did know us well" because he got a lot of what we needed and wanted. Santa only brought them a few toys this year and the rest was stuff they needed like new shoes, clothes, etc. My kids have never played much with toys or dolls - or at all really. They play pretend and dress up with each other and they like books and computers but there are never any toys involved. I played Barbies until I was in the 9th grade so I'm not sure where this comes from! My neighbors come over and ask "where are all the toys" and I have to reply that we do have some, they are just put away in closets or in the basement. My girls are welcome to get them out any time but they don't! Weird, I know.

In early December we traveled to Dallas for Ian's Diageo Holiday party and stayed at the Four Season's in Las Calinas. My mom, step-dad, Grant and sister-in-law Jill and their kids came too and met us there. We had a lot of free time before the holiday party so we got to spend some time with them and it was great since we knew we were not going to be seeing any family at Christmas time. All the cousins got to play together and run wild in the hotel lobby. The Diageo party was held at the Dallas Cowboys Stadium in one of the private party rooms and they offered a tour of the stadium, which I did not do for some reason. I wish that I had.

Also, in December the girls and I attended a Holiday Tea Fundraiser for Teen With a Dream, which is an organization that raises money for pediatric cancer patients. A friend of ours sits on the board of Teen With a Dream so he had told us about the event. I thought it would be a fun thing to take the girls to so they could get dressed up at Christmas time. It was SO fancy and there were china tea cups and tea pots and the finger foods were really beautifully made. These tables were like a work of art! Maggie and Lucy don't quite know etiquette or even table manners. They were clanking cups into plates and taking the lids off of teapots and spitting food onto their plates and Lucy nearly pulled the tablecloth out from underneath it all. They were like two wild bulls in a china shop - isn't that the phrase they use? Oh my gosh - I was a nervous wreck by the time we left. Who knew girls could be so rowdy?

Maggie has wrapped up one basketball season and just started another. She made 12 baskets in her final game of last season! She's really tall and really aggressive so that always helps. Her new team is all of her friends from school so it could be really good or really bad since she likes to socialize a little too much anyway. We've never known any of the other girls on any of her previous teams so it's a big change to have friends on her team for once. Lucy will be starting back to gymnastics soon. She is anxious to get back into it because we took a break over the holidays. We're thinking of getting her into mini-mite soccer.

We went to Breckenridge for the day a couple of weeks ago so that Maggie could take some snowboarding lessons. She was not so sure if she liked it. I didn't get any pictures of it because they take them up on the mountain for the lesson so we weren't anywhere near her. We didn't even get to see whether we were getting our money's worth from the lesson, equipment rentals, etc....it's so expensive!

The Perry's are coming to visit next weekend and bringing our nephew Ethan with them. The girls could not be any more excited to see all of them. Hopefully we will have some snow so Ethan can do some sledding while he's here. Maggie and Lucy will be turning 8 and 4 in February and April so look for me to write about birthdays in the next few months!