Christmas Puzzle 2006 Now Uploaded

Our Annual Christmas Puzzle is now available. The theme is "Close but No Rhyme".

If you are stumped, you can check out the answer key.

We won First Place for our Halloween Costumes!

As part of our annual Halloween tradition, we come up with a "family theme" for our costumes. This year we went as The Holidays. We entered in to two local Halloween costume contests and in both we won first place trophies and prizes for our group theme.

Once again, Felicia deserves all the credit for her hours (weeks) of meticulous sewing of all our costumes. And each costume was varied in terms of fabrics, patterns, sizes, etc. A few of the costumes had no patterns (April Fool, Leprechaun) but that didn't deter Felicia. I am so proud of what she created this year. Take a look at our costumes for this year and years past

Blaine and Felicia off to Cancun

While the kids are with grandparents, we've decided to take a quick trip to Cancun. Obviously we'll see Chichen Itza and other sites, do some snorkeling, take a jungle adventure, perhaps some parasailing (if I can get up the nerve), etc.

As usual we'll take our camera and camcorder and see if we can't post some images after we return on August 15th. Check back for that...

Edit: We are back safely. Only minor delays with the increased security at the airports. We had to transfer all our liquids to a single bag that was then put in checked luggage. We skipped the parasailing and jungle tour but went to Tulum, Ek Balam and Isla Mujeras instead.

Spectacular Family Camping Trip to Crater Lake

A few years back we had planned a camping trip to Crater Lake National Park but were turned back at the entrance because a large fire had closed the park. That year we headed to Lava Beds National Monument instead.

Never deterred, we decided that Crater Lake was not to be missed so we chose to make that our family camping destination this year. The great hiking, camping and spectacular views were well worth it.

Enjoy our video of Camping at Crater Lake

Finally! Pictures from our trip to the Big Island of Hawaii!

Click here for the album
For those of you that have been waiting, here are the photos of our trip to the Big Island. While we were there, our main camera got wet and we almost thought we had lost the bulk of our photos, but both the card and the camera survived (after a couple weeks of drying out). Fortunately we had a backup camera (and our two video cameras) so we were able to capture all our memories. Enjoy the pictures!

We're back from Hawaii

We spent the weekend unpacking, reorganizing, etc. I've downloaded our 1200+ photos and we started previewing our 6+ hours of video tape, but that's as far as we got. Maybe we'll get back to the photos this weekend so we'll at least have something to show next week... stay tuned!

We're on the Big Island of Hawaii

We'll have many more posts, pictures, details, etc. once we return. We've spent the last few days in Volcano and Hilo looking at Kilaeua Crater, lava fields, waterfalls, botanical gardens, etc. Today we are in Kona in our luxury condo. The kids are in the swimming pool and I'm researching things we can do including snorkeling, a submarine ride, a luau, etc. More details to follow!

Our Trip to Egypt - Amazing Race style!

Well, I had planned to finish editing all our Egypt video (all 5 hours) into a nice movie to show off. It's not done, but here is the introduction done in the style of the Amazing Race. The movie is 45 seconds long.
Amazing Race Intro - Egypt

Snow Tubing at Kingvale

We took the kids snow tubing a couple weeks back. The last time we went to the snow, Jason was a baby while this was the first time for Amara. I put together a short Family Snow Tubing video for your enjoyment. It's about 4½ minutes long, but it flies by.