Baby Blessing, Birthday Party, and Fall Leaves

I've been meaning to post pictures of my new niece for a month now... But I kept losing them through some technical difficulty or another. My niece was blessed yesterday by her dad, my brother. We are so excited to have this beautiful little girl in our family!

Other than the fact that they're quite tired (as new parents often are), my brother his wife are, of course, thrilled by her, too.

One of the nicest part of the blessings, for me, was the opportunity to spend some quality time with my brother and with my nephew. The new big brother had a pretty full week between his birthday parties and Halloween and then all of the excitement of his sister's blessing. He wasn't really in the mood for sacrament meeting.

As soon as church was and he could get outside, he grabbed my hand and headed for home. He was so happy to be heading home that, even though it was raining, he ran and laughed the whole way.

Of course, that wasn't the only event of the day. My oldest nephew turned 8 yesterday. So after the blessing, we went to my Grandpa's house for Sunday dinner and a birthday party. He got lots of Pokemon (his favorite thing). Plus, Grandpa had raked all of the leaves in his yard into a big pile and the cousins climbed in and had a great time burying themselves and having "leafball fights". They were also good enough to pose for a few pictures. These two are really great friends. You'd think they were brother and sister, they are so close.

This wasn't my niece's first time in the leaves this week, either. A few days before she'd come to my house for the afternoon. She helped me with some gardening. (She loves Veggietales, and thus was more than happy to pick all of the "Bob's" (tomatoes) in my garden to make room for a leafpile. Here's my favorite picture from that day's fun.

If you know me, you know that all of this constitutes a GREAT weekend for me. I love kids! Getting to spend some quality kid time with my nieces and nephews is always a treat!

I'm so lucky to be an aunt! I can't even imagine my life without kids. My nieces and nephews keep me young

Technical difficulties on chickenandhowie.com

Last night I found a pretty big little bug on the chickenandhowie.com website. It's come to my attention that several weeks ago, while I was making some little cosmetic tweak, I accidentally saved over the "Emily According to Brian" page with one of my work pages that I used when I was designing the site.

Because of this, instead of the beautiful little description of me that Brian had written, you have several paragraphs of "Lorem Ipsum". Lorem Ipsum is a tool that graphic designers use so they can work on design before they have the actual text in hand. At a glance, the random Latin words look like English. And somehow I managed to save my Lorem Ipsum version of the page over all the final draft copies I have.

Anyway... I'm working on finding the text that Brian wrote so I can get it back up on the site. If that fails, he's promised to write a new introduction. Until I can get it fixed, though, here's an excerpt from our birthparent letter that Brian wrote about me:

Let me tell you a little bit about Emily. Emily has a spunky personality. She loves having fun and is willing to try anything at least once. Emily is so very loving and caring. If she knows that she can help someone enjoy life a little bit better, she will do all she can to provide that help. Being the second child in a large family, Emily loves having kids around and knows exactly what to do to keep a child happy. She seems to attract kids. When we are in church, we often will have a kid come to visit us.

Emily loves to learn. Because of this, she speaks Spanish and Italian fluently and knows bits and pieces of many other languages. Because she speaks Spanish, she is often asked to translate. A few times a year she will go and help a kindergarten teacher in our ward translate parent teacher conferences. This is something that she really enjoys.

Emily loves music. She is always singing. She will often sing me songs that she makes up, just for fun. It amazes me that she can come up with words that rhyme so quickly. For the past year Emily has been teaching piano to two neighborhood kids. It is fun watching her get ready to teach. One of the children she teaches is mildly autistic. Emily has a lot of fun teaching the basics and sharing her love of music.

Hockey Opening Night

The hockey season is finally back! The Grizzlies played their home opener last Friday night. And we were able to kick off the season with a party for our whole family.

A couple of months ago, Howie told me he'd entered a contest to win a suite for opening night. He was sure his odds were good, and... well, they must have been... Because he won the suite.
We rounded up some of our family members to join us in the suite and celebrate. Some are seasoned hockey fans. Others were there for their first time and just learning the rules.

Howie did his best to get a picture that fit all of us into the frame. By the 10th take, we weren't smiling quite as nicely.

Our niece Bella has great hockey fan potential. When the game started she just knew that our team was trying to beat the "Alaskans". By the end, she'd paid enough attention to my explanations of what was happening that she could follow the game pretty well.

The Grizzlies didn't disappoint in this home game. Even though Alaska is a pretty tough team, the final score was 7-2 Grizzlies. 12 different Grizzlies scored during the game. They even got a bit fiesty by the end and we saw a couple of fights. It was a well played game and a very exciting way to start the season.


And, of course, with his black eye, Howie fully looked the part of a hockey fan. And, in true gameday fashion, he screamed so loud he lost his voice and got to teach Elder's Quorum two days later with half a voice.

Church Ball

You've heard before that church basketball is a dangerous sport, right?

Howie came home last Thursday night with this nice shiner. Course, it was less visible the first couple of days when this picture was taken... But still not bad for just an elbow, eh?

Course, usually he's the big guy other people are bouncing off of. They say it was an accident, but could it really have been revenge for broken toes or other church ball injuries?

Hoping to fill a dining room table

I hae a confession to make. Last weekend, Brian and I bought an enormous oak dining room table. Without the leaf, it seats 6-8 people. With the leaf... well, it's just big.

This may not seem like a typical purchase for a family of two. We don't exactly take up a lot of room. It seems even more impractical if you add in the cost of having to now get all new tablecloths because few of mine fit a table this large. But we just do things like this sometimes.

We are hoping and praying for the day when our family grows. Maybe even enough to fill our dining room table. And, even though it doesn't make much practical sense, we just can't help working to get ourselves ready for that day. Therefore, not only do we have a big dining room table. We've got a drawer full of cute little baby clothes. We've got a room set aside as a nursery. We collect children's books and toys and little fuzzy ducky slippers. I've picked out a crib. (Though I haven't bought it yet) and am working on figuring out what else a nursery needs. And, even though I often feel like I'm breaking some unspoken rule by being there, I just can't help wandering through the baby department when I've got a few extra minutes in a store.

In the meantime, we are lucky to have friends and family who help to play with our toys and eat at our table. One of our favorite traditions is inviting a family over for dinner and games. We love to share our home with our friends. So I guess that's a good reason to have a big table, too.