It's a New Year! Time for a family update:

Happy New Year!

Okay, so I know it's not the New Year anymore, but I figured late is still better than never for some family updates.

My good friend Jamie took our family pictures in December and I love them! The photos in this post and the following ones about each boy are her work. She is one talented lady!

Downtown Mall, Charlottesville

Our favorite family picture of the set.

We couldn't get all three boys to look at the camera at the same time, but I thought these two pictures were cute anyway:

Ha! Love it!

Okay, time for some updates:

Heather:

I started weight training again! George and I began training last spring for our Tough Mudder we ran in September and we have kept up our weight training program. I love it! Just because I'm proud of myself and I want to remember that I once was actually in shape, here are my numbers for a few of my lifts:

Squats: 175 lbs for reps (that's the weight of the bar on my shoulders)
Dead lifts: 185 lbs for reps (I'm not sure what my max is)
Bent-over Rows: 105 lbs for reps

I'm hoping to squat at least 200 lbs in the next few months and get my dead lifts much higher. I love what it has done for my body and am excited to start my 30's this year in the best shape of my life.

I'm a stay-at-home mom and am loving it. I get to be a teacher, an accountant, a chef, a waitress, a janitor, a nurse, a police officer, a chauffeur, a coach, a therapist and a technician. I get to see my family at their best and their worst, share happy times and sad, give them hugs and time-outs, shower them with praise and hand out reality checks. It can be "curled-up-in-a-ball-crying" hard but also brings more happiness than I thought possible. It is incredibly intimidating but completely wonderful. I wouldn't trade a single second of it for the world.

Young Womens keeps me busy! Basically, I get to teach sunday school to girls from age 14-18 each week and help plan mid-week activities. I've been doing it since last April and I loved it, although I feel like I'm in high school all over again--always worried if people will think I'm cool enough. 

I'm addicted to Pinterest. If ever it seems like I had a good idea, you can be pretty sure I got the idea from something I pinned.

Okay, okay. I know I'm pretty boring. I can't think of any other updates about me, so we'll move on to...

George!

George is now in the second half of his Intern Year of his Emergency Medicine Residency. Intern Year is supposed to be the hardest, so we're he's happy that he's closer to putting this year behind him. It's been busy and at his busiest he works 80-100 hours a week. If all the doctors at the hospital get as little sleep as George does during these rotations, it scares me.

George and his best friend Aric started weightlifting in the spring of 2012 and George discovered a real love for the sport. Here are a few of his numbers:

Squats: 285 lbs for reps
Dead lifts: 350 lbs--crazy!

I can't remember his other weights, but he's passionate about it and is diligent about making time to exercise. It is definitely a lifestyle we both enjoy.

 George is a great cook. As in, we often have better food at home than we get at nice restaurants. I'm constantly amazing at what he can whip up in 20 minutes when I think we have "nothing to eat". I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I will sometimes delay starting dinner until George gets home, just to see if he has any better ideas than the ones I came up with. He usually does. We make a great team: he does the cooking, I wash the dishes and clean up the mess. We're both happy!

Okay, I guess we're both boring. I even asked George what updates he wanted to include and he couldn't think of any.

Major highlights from this past year:

We welcomed our third baby boy into our family in February.

 

George graduated from Medical School at UVa and began working as a Doctor.

 

George and I ran our first (but not last!) Tough Mudder in September.

Now on to the people that really matter: the boys!

A Birthday visit from the Glass family

Jude turned 3 January 2nd! We had a party later in the month (post to follow), but the Glass family traveled down to Charlottesville the weekend of Jan 6th to celebrate with Jude in style.

First, they treated us to lunch at Mellow Mushroom, a very eclectic pizza restaurant on the Corner, right across from the hospital.

Walking from the parking lot. Cole kept pointing at things and saying "eh? Dis? Dis?" in his cute little voice.

Okay, this is a bad picture of just about everyone, but you get the idea. It was delicious  Mellow Mushroom never disappoints.

After lunch, we took the kids to Pen Park to play for a bit.

Cole discovered the slides and from that point on, we couldn't keep him on the ground.

Lance liked showing him new ways to go down, although Cole was more interested in trying to climb up the slides than go down. Good thing Pop Pop was there to give him a boost!

The boys had a great time!

I'm so glad Mom and Dad came down with Allen and Der. It's always great to see them.

Lance made a new friend while we were there:

He and this girl ran around the woods collecting sticks to build a fort.

They found a hollowed-out area that was the perfect fort. With a home-made roof, you couldn't ask for anything better!

After the park and a nap for Cole, we all had dinner at Bonefish Grill, Jude's choice. Of course Jude was so worn out by the day he fell asleep waiting for his food and slept for most of dinner. Poor guy!


Thanks, Mom and Dad, for making the trip down here to spend time with us, treat us to some great food, and to make Jude feel special for his Birthday. We sure love you!

And before you go, here are some pictures of the boys doing "Just Dance" one night after George came home from work:

They were having a ball!

New Years

New Years Eve was pretty low-key for us, which was perfect. George was working that night in Charlottesville and the boys and I were still up in Northern Virginia. 

We spent most of the afternoon playing with Callie and Bryce at their house. They got a trampoline for Christmas that my boys LOVED! We had a great time!

That evening, we drove over to George's parents' house to have dinner with the family. Mom made a great meal of spare ribs and tacos. 

And of course, after dinner, we played Nate's game Cards Against Humanity. I won. I'm still not sure if I'm proud of my win or ashamed. Mostly proud.

Around 10 p.m., I loaded up the very tired boys and we drove back to my mom's house to finish our celebration. The boys crashed once their heads hit the pillow, so it was just the adults that rang in the New Year.

We welcomed it with style: we watched Father of the Bride II and when the clocks rolled around to 12:00, we wished each other Happy New Year and then finished the movie. Boy, we are party animals!

Lance's Christmas

Lance got to spend the week of Christmas in sunny California this year with his dad and his Dahlquist family. He has tons of cousins out there (Uncle Pete's family with their two little boys and Aunt Denises's family with their four kids) and Grandpa Bob, Grandma Kari and Aunt Shianne. Here are a few pictures I savenged from the Dahlquist blogs:

Christmas Eve they got to go to Lego Land in San Diego with all the Dahlquist cousins, Grandpa Bob and Grandma Kari.

Playing with the musical fountain.

The whole group!

Lance LOVES Tressel, Aunt Denise and Uncle Dave's Rhodesian ridgeback.


Christmas morning waiting to go see what Santa brought!

Poor Lance was sick for a lot of the trip and even Christmas morning didn't feel that great. What a bummer. :(

Christmas day, they got to Skype with Uncle Dan who is serving a mission for our Church right now.

 They obviously had a great time talking to him!

If I get any more pictures from Christmas I'll be sure and post them!

Santa split his gifts between California and Virginia, so when Lance came home he got a second Christmas! (Lance has to be the luckiest kid around.)

Whoppie cushions from Jude. He knows what his big brother likes!

Lance was super excited about his Angry Bird hat.

Battleship! Thanks, Aunt Amy!

I must have been trying to wrangle the other two little boys because I didn't get many other pictures of Lance opening his other gifts. His big Santa gift was a Terrain Twister--a remote control vehicle that is supposed to be all-terrain (it even goes in water!). He was so excited to drive it. 

While we waited the 4.5 hours it took to charge the battery for the Terrain Twister, we played Battleship.

This game is neat because you have to build it before you can play, something that is totally up Lance's alley.

Jude was trying to get down from the bar stool and got stuck... :)

It was a fun game! It has slightly different rules than regular battleship, but definitely fun. Even Jude wanted to play.

Lance made off like a bandit this Christmas, as usual.

And it wouldn't be Christmas without our annual halo pictures.

Cole couldn't quite figure what to do with the halo. As a side note, I think he is officially as drooly as Jude was, something I assumed was unique to Jude.

Jude wanted to play, so this was the best we could do with him, too. Speaking of drool...

And Lance. 

Lance was excited to see his Uncle Jason.

And Uncle Stephen!

And Jude's latest obsession? Any kind of phone or tablet that lets him play games or watch movies. It's like he has a sixth sense and can find the nearest phone in the room. Am I scared? Yes, yes I am.