The Leen

We had a great day yesterday! We stayed in San Francisco and our friend Kim (and her puppy Fipo) came down from Seattle for the holiday.
I’ll let the photos speak for themselves.

It’s been quite the year for us, full of events that were made up of really hard things intertwined with really good things.
My pregnancy with Elanor and her birth was the first hard/good thing to happen. She is amazing, and wonderful, and definitely one of the highlights of the year: the ultimate good thing. But [...]

We are home from our trip to Portland for Christmas. I’m so tired right now it’s not even funny.
It was a great trip in a lot of ways. Christmas itself was wonderful; we had a lovely time with our families and feel very spoiled and blessed and loved.
The drive down, however, was not so great, [...]

Sorry to update and leave you hanging for the past week. I haven’t had to go to work since last Friday, and it’s been lovely. I’ve barely even checked my email, I’ve been so lazy, so updating the blog kind of fell off my radar.
Anyway, I had another doctor’s appointment today. The exciting news (well, [...]

We spent last weekend with our families in Portland, supposedly celebrating the holiday — I guess these days, that means frenetically driving from house to house (three houses on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day), church service to church service (three church services on Christmas Eve), so that each family would be happy and placated. [...]

Got this from my in-laws…ha. (I mean, they gave me other stuff, too, but I thought this was kinda funny.) I think it’s chocolate-covered raisins or something.
Little Aud, looking crazed with all the wrapping paper and ribbon around.
Our little familiy, and all our presents, piled on our futon/bed (we’ve been sleeping downstairs because [...]

It’s Christmas Eve. We just ate my abso-freaking-lutely fantastic vegetarian tortilla soup, and now I’m in a period of limbo, making individual chocolate souffle cakes. I have to let the egg whites and yolks sit. So I am letting them sit. And I am sitting.
I have had 2 glasses of champagne and one beer [...]

Gah. I don’t know what was wrong with me yesterday. I was a mess. I felt like crap all day, until I got home. Brett was already home, and he came into the kitchen and gave me a hug. He asked me why I was sad, and I told him all of the things I [...]

It was one of my favorite books as a child. We read it in the fourth grade, I think, and I loved it. It’s about a boy named Milo who is bored with life, and one day he gets a mysterious package. It’s the Phantom Tollbooth, complete with a little car for Milo to use. [...]

We took the car to a mechanic this morning to see if we could find out what’s wrong with it. I found the mechanic yesterday on the Car Talk website, by looking at reviews that other people had written. This one all had good reviews, so we thought we might as well use them.
The [...]