Happy Anniversary Lucas & Christie!!

Hans & Amy Stokke

the wedding

Amy and Hans's wedding yesterday was wonderful! They both even said so themselves, and theirs was the most important opinion. Here's a few pictures I managed to take.

The rehearsal on Friday night. (That's me and Rachel, waiting for things to begin. Behind Rachel is Hans, and the classy lady behind me is Heidi, Hans's mom.) After the rehearsal (which did eventually happen), then everybody headed over to Ben and Darcy's for Lucille's BBQ for dinner. It was tasty.

The day started with the bridesmaids breakfast (Anna (Hans's fabulous sister), Julie, Amy, Heidi, Rachel)

After Amy had her hair done, it was up to the house for make up and getting dressed. Amy and I both had our make up done by Justina, who happened to be the Sephora employee who did Amy's trial make up run a couple months ago. Amy liked what she did so much, she hired her for the actual wedding day. And she did a fabulous job! If only she could come to my house EVERY morning ....

Mom helped Amy into her dress, which required lots of lacing down the back of her dress.

Meanwhile, outside, the tables were being set for dinner. The centerpieces were all different flavored cakes, and the table numbers were placed on top. Each numbered sign had pictures of Amy and Hans at that age, which was really fun (i.e. At table 5 there were pictures of Amy and Hans at age 5.)

Our brother Jon taking pictures before the ceremony. He got some fantastic shots.

Amy's bouquet. Isn't it beautiful!? My mom bought all the flowers and then she had two friends help her arrange all the bouquets and the flowers for the day. They did a beautiful job.

Jon with the bride and her entourage.

Jon and Dad taking pictures after the ceremony, before the reception. These were the first pictures of Amy and Hans together, as they didn't want to see each other before the ceremony.

Amy taking a break ... so classy.

Amy taking another break.

Hans fixing his tie before being announced at the reception.

Me and Hunkyness.

David and Rachel.

The wedding cake and topper. Peacocks were a theme for the day. Each bridesmaid had peacock feathers in their hair, and there were peacock feathers in the boutaneers and some of the arrangements around the reception area. Unique and beautiful.

Amy and Hans cutting their cake. They were very decent to each other and kept to eating the cake as opposed to smearing the cake.

The newlyweds: Hans and Amy Stokke. They're spending a couple nights local and then leave for South Carolina on Tuesday for a week. Congratulations!!

Happy Birthday Lauren!

(er ... Ellie)

a wedding to celebrate

Today is Hans and Amy's wedding. I'm so excited! Its so fun to be a part of a wedding of a most beloved sister, marrying the man most perfect for her. What a celebration today will be!! Hopefully I'll have pictures up soon.

Happy Birthday Aunt Jean!!

(Aunt Jean thinks of herself as the favorite aunt ... which she feels is only confirmed by the fact my sister chose HER birthday on which to get married.)

daily battles

Do you ever have one of those days when, as you stare at yourself in the mirror, you have to make a conscious decision to like what you see? I've been having a few of those days lately. I look at myself and sometimes I only see the bad skin, which I still fight at age 33. I see the hair that doesn't shine like those girls in the Pantene commercials, despite my use of the product. (Liars!) I lament at the 30 pounds I still wish I would buckle down and lose, but every day I vacillate between "I can lose 10 pounds!" and "life's too short to skip dessert." As a result I've lost the same 4 pounds countless times this year, failing to gain any ground at all. I wish I were a better dresser, that every time I walked out the door Stacey London would approve. Unfortunately, on these days I feel she would discard my entire wardrobe, wracked with horror that I would wear flip-flops to work and throw my hair in a pony tail. I feel so un-put-together sometimes.

I find myself comparing myself to those around me. I have four beautiful (and skinny) sisters. I have tons of beautiful cousins. (See bachelorette party pictures below.) I work with beautiful put-together people. I have friends who do all the right things with their hair and clothes, and manage to lose the baby weight after each kid.

I am sorely tempted to focus on these things, and to completely forget that I am fearfully and wonderfully made. On days like this I don't even know what that means, or how I'm supposed to own it to rise above society's impossible demands. I know that I am precious in the eyes of my husband, my family, my friends ... and especially my dog. (No one else greets me by jumping twice their height into the air when they see me.) No, today I'm having a hard time getting past the things about myself I wish were different, despite the countless reasons I should have for thinking otherwise. Most days I can talk myself out of low self-image moments, but there are days when the battle is overwhelming, and I don't have any weapons with which to fight.

The daily onslaught of Pantene commercials, celebrity magazines, diet fads, Hollywood awards shows and the regular fashion show life is supposed to be ... it makes me tired. I want to rise above it, I really do. And most days I can. Those who know me well know I usually have self-esteem to spare. But today, all I feel like doing is curling up on the couch in my sweats and t-shirt with a gallon of mint-n-chip ice cream and drowning my issues in episode after episode of Law and Order: SVU. Which, of course, doesn't help anything at all. I suppose I'll have to content myself with the M&M's in the office and my somewhat comfy office chair ... at least until I've gathered the strength to fight again.

You have days like this, too ... right?

are you a follower?

So, Blogger has added a new gadget to their site that tracks who follows your blog. And, because I'm somewhat obsessed with being popular, I wonder if you might be willing to add your name? The link is on the left, just under the picture of me and Caleb. I'm not too sure what's involved, but if you're willing to add yourself as a follower of my blog, just click on the "follow this blog" link ... I'd be much obliged! Thanks for playing!

the bacheloretty party

On Saturday night the girls came together and celebrated Amy's upcoming nuptials with a bachelorette party! We started with dinner at my place, then we did that oh-so-common bachelorette activity ... bowling! And then we came back to my place for dessert, some champagne and a few presents. It was a lovely evening and more than anything I hope Amy felt honored and celebrated. We can now say the wedding is THIS WEEK! So exciting. Here's a few pics from the evening.

The bride-to-be.

Joy, Amy, Molly and Amber, enjoying a nice dinner on the patio.

Rachel, Lauren, Darcy and Amy, enjoying a nice dinner inside.

Rachel, enjoying a nice dinner on the stairs (our place is a little short on seating sometimes).

Amy, Rachel, Amy and Heidi ... in the car on our way to the bowling alley.

Darcy, Lauren, Rachel, Becka, Amy, Amy, Amber, Molly and Joy ... getting ready for a rousing round of bowling!

Rachel and baby Sophie, fine bowlers.

Rachel and Amy (not to be confused with the other Rachel and the other Amy).

Darcy and Lauren.

This deserves an explanation. For every strike or spare bowled by someone other than Amy, an item of clothing was pulled from a bag that Amy then had to put on ... and wear the rest of the evening (at the bowling alley anyway). It was amazing how motivated people were to bowl strikes! This is Amy after only about 2 frames into the game.

Amy putting the last item of clothing on Amy ... the bag all the other clothes came in.

And here she is! Our illustrious bride, finally wearing everything in the bag ... by the 5th frame! Who knew we'd have such motivated bowlers!

The bride and her matron of honor. I feel underdressed.

Back at the house Amy got to open a few presents. The goal was to bring a favorite beauty product that you think Amy might also enjoy. Here she is with Burt's Bees colored chapstick-type stuff.

She seems pretty excited about this one. Apparently its so nice my Uncle Bob even uses it to shave.

Six days until the wedding!!

ahoy matee

Today is, in case you didn't know, International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Don't believe me? You weasely rascal, check out this site: http://www.talklikeapirate.com/. It'll tell you everything you ever needed to know about how to celebrate, and how to talk, like a pirate. Avast, me hearties ... yo ho!

2-year-olds

Happy Birthday Burke and Conrad!!

(These boys are our twin nephews, and they turn 2 today! Here are a few pictures from the celebration on Sunday.)

You gotta love it when the birthday presents are twice as big as you are. This is Burke, a true Angels fan, waiting to open his first present.

Here's Conrad pulling out a giant stuffed monkey. In Burke's big bag was a giant stuffed penguin. Both given by Uncle Andrew.

Conrad and Burke. Behind them is the favorite toy of the day ... the 80th anniversary edition of Mr. Potato Head.

Burke is just sure that's where the glasses go.

And so Conrad takes his brother's advice and shares in the wearing of the glasses as a chin strap.

Of course, its not true fun if Uncle Caleb doesn't get involved ....

Christie made a Winnie the Pooh cake for each of them.

Conrad loved the candle on his cake, a big number 2. He kept trying to touch it, so it eventually got blown out for him.

Burke enjoys dessert the way the rest of us wish it was proper to enjoy dessert.

He's actually getting better ... this time the frosting didn't end up in his hair.

Conrad is a bit more composed, content to finger all the icing off his cupcake ...

... and lick his fingers.

Happy Birthday Boys!

Happy Birthday Aunt Joyce and John!!

(For those unfamiliar with my family, John is my aunt's son-in-law, and they share a birthday.)

the big read

I was just reading a friend's blog and she was talking about The Big Read. Its an NEA program (that I only just learned about 4 minutes ago). The NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) funds programs around the country that encourage people to read and communities to come together to talk about what they're reading. Of their top 100 books (a list designed more to get people to read than of your traditional top 100 pieces of literature), they estimate the average American adult has read only six. Six! I'm a reader, I love to read, and so I don't understand when people don't read. I felt compelled to see how many I've read. So, the following is their top 100 list, the ones bolded are the ones I have read, italicized means its on my list of books to read. How many have you read?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Almost a third, I've read almost a third. 31 to be exact. Of course, they have a few series in here which include several books for one entry ... and I've read almost all of those (that would bump my score up to about 45). How many have you read?

In case you're a reader and you haven't heard of Good Reads yet, you MUST check it out. Its a great place to organize all the books you've read, the ones you want to read, the ones you tried to read and couldn't. You can write your own reviews and read others' reviews of books you're interested in. Its a fantastic site! http://www.goodreads.com/

new pics

Click here for more pics of my most beautiful new niece. There's also a link to Jon and Julie's blog in the list at the right, so you can check it out whenever you want. She's so precious!

i'm sick

It started on Sunday afternoon. I was happily knitting while watching TV (probably Law & Order or some other crime drama), and slowly but surely my throat started to get scratchy. You know how that can start so subtly ... you swallow and there's that tinge of feeling like your glands are swollen. I brushed it off, hoping it was nothing. But by the time Hunkyness woke up from his nap I was full-blown sick. Just like that, in two hours, I went from the tinge of "oh I hope I'm not getting sick" to "I think I'm going die." The congestion has left my head feeling like its caught in a vice and my nose is raw from the Kleenex. I slept awfully on Sunday night, my throat just getting worse and worse. In my half-asleep state in the middle of the night I started worrying I might even have something more serious like Strep. Fortunately the sore throat got better by the time I got to work yesterday morning (yes, I went to work). But the congestion has only gotten worse, and I have that all-over achy feeling of someone whose body is at war with a foreign invader. I went home yesterday at noon. I love getting off from work early, there are so many things I could get done! But I just went straight home, sat on the couch watching an NCIS marathon and knitting off and on until about 3:00, when I simply had to lay down for a nap. I woke up when Hunkyness got home. Another perk of being sick ... he took such good care of me! He made dinner AND cleaned up the kitchen.

I'm back at work today, still feeling pretty under the weather. But I slept well last night, thanks to Tylenol PM. I hate taking the stuff because it leaves me so groggy in the mornings, but sometimes you just need a good night's sleep. I don't think I changed position all night long. I don't know if I'll make it through a full day of work today. And my coworkers have made it clear they'd rather I weren't here spreading the germs. So, another afternoon nap may be calling my name. And hey, isn't it better to nip something like this in the bud than let it linger because you couldn't slow down long enough to heal? Yes, I purport, it is.

(Oh, at least its an excuse to eat as many Ricola Honey Lemon flavored cough drops as I want. I LOVE these things.)

dad takes the most wonderful pictures

Maddie Hammer. Two days old. At home for the first time.

the first gift sweater

For Amy's birthday this year I really wanted to knit her something. But it was becoming a huge challenge to choose something I thought she might like, and then since it was the first time knitting for someone else I was nervous about it coming out the right size and proportion and all that. When you prepare to spend 40-50 hours hand-making a garment, you want to be pretty certain the finished piece will be well received. Well, whether she remembers it or not, several weeks ago this was a pattern she said she liked ... so I got her measurements and dove in. Last night she was over and I decided to have her take a look and try it on, even though it hasn't been washed yet and has no buttons. And low and behold, it fits! And its actually perfect! And she loves it! Sorry for all the exclamation marks, but the finished product actually exceeded even my own expectations. Maybe I'm getting better after all ...

She's as excited as me that it fits!

This picture shows the sleeves a little better. They're super cute, if I do say so myself.

This is the detail of the hexagon pattern.

Another shot ... imagine buttons and you'll imagine the finished sweater!

Lucy likes it too!