Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!! I know that we did. We travelled to Tennesse to my in-laws house and we've currently consumed two seperate Thanksgiving dinners and enough food to keep a third world country fed for at least a week! We watched Kentucky play their hearts out in four overtimes against Tennessee and lose by two points when they weren't able to complete a two point conversion. What a heartbreaker!! Maura even had a great time "watching" the game, and would always give us the touchdown sign when prompted. She has had the biggest weekend! She has played, visited and eaten enough for three children! This morning, her Nan and Poppa took her to McDonald's while we slept in. They said she ate a whole egg, a pancake, a fruit and yogurt parfait, and a large glass of milk. Eating has never been an issue for this child! We'll be heading back to Kentucky in the morning. Back to the grindstone!

I'm having major technology difficulties, so you may not hear from me again anytime soon. Our computer has crashed due to a virus and now my digital camera is on the fritz. Who knows when we'll be able to replace/repair all those items and get back into the swing of things! Hope everyone is doing well! Lots of love from the Allens.

Florida Trip Part I

Well, it's almost a month later and I'm finally getting around to blogging our Florida trip. We went to Sarasota on fall break in October. It was SO much fun! We stayed in a house that belongs to a friend of Brent's family. I don't know about you, but my own family doesn't have any friends who own multimillion dollar houses on the beach. I'm just lucky to have married into this well connected family!! This house is these people's winter home. We LOVED it! There was more than enough room for us, Brent's parents and Matt and Brenda to all have our own suites. We weren't exactly tripping over each other in this place. Above, you see a picture of the front of it. Don't we look tiny?

The back of the house complete with pool, spa and fountains. This place was amazing. We visited once before during Thanksgiving of the first year we were married, but it was a completely new experience to come when we could actually use the pool, beach and other amenities.

We really had a lot of fun. We went mini golfing one night and took Maura with us. She had great fun running after all the balls and picking them up. It was perhaps the quickest 18 holes of mini golf I've ever played. We had to keep moving to keep her happy that night. She did like feeding the live gators they had at the course, though.


Matt and Brenda. This trip was kind of like their honeymoon, since they didn't really take one after their wedding. What a cute couple!

Living life in the lap of luxury. We really just hung out around the pool and beach all day for the whole week. You really don't need to go anywhere or do anything else when you're surrounded by total luxury.

Maura and Brent enjoying the spa--don't worry, it wasn't hot. Maura loved the bubbles, though, and kept throwing her toys to watch them disappear in the jets.

Maura with Poppa. She loved the lions and spent a good portion of her time outside perched on the back of one of these statues. They had four lions total. It was so funny. Every day this big tourist party boat would come by and they'd be talking about how big the house was and everything. Kind of made you feel a little weird to be seen outside while all the tourists stared at you.

Chuck and Matt having a kayak race. I'm not sure, but I think Matt's plan here was to capsize Chuck and then take the lead. Regardless, it was a very physical race.

Matt and Sherran having a much more sedate kayak ride. We really enjoyed the kayaks and also the dock. Every morning about eight manatee would gather around the dock to hang out and eat. They were so fun to watch. There were even two babies with the group. They'd usually be there for an hour or so, then move on. We also saw dolphins from our dock. Three dolphins came swimming by one day and played out in the water about 30 feet from our dock. They were jumping out of the water and everything. It felt like Sea World!


Maura at the beach. Her new favorite beach activity is picking up ever rock, shell and cigarette butt she could find and tossing it into the surf. Big fun!

Here's a group sand castle effort. It really did take this many people to build, because Maura knocked it down just about as fast as you built it. With three people, you could kind of stay ahead of her!

What a cute little beach bum. She really enjoys the beach and we went there just about every morning of our trip before it got too hot.

Brent threw her up in the air until he was completely exhausted! She still couldn't get enough of it. She kept saying, "AGAIN!"

Feeding the gulls. Yes, we broke the cardinal rule of beach etiquette and fed the gulls, but as you might notice from the beach behind us, it was nearly deserted out there. Maura loved the sea gulls and would run at them just to see them fly. Feeding them was just an excuse to get them close enough for a real chase.

Anyway, as you can see, we had any awesome time. I'll post the Disney pictures soon. Maura was in heaven there!

Welcome to the world, Little one!

Meet Ava Holt. She's my brand new niece, born at 3:05 on November 1 in Las Vegas, NV. We're so excited to welcome her to the family. Ava belongs to Amy and Matt, Brent's sister and her husband. Isn't she sweet!! She's a sleepy girl--so far! Holt is the name of the adoption agency that Brent's parents used when they adopted Amy.

Ava was anxious to come into the world--she arrived just 90 minutes after they got the to hospital, and before Amy was able to get an epidural. My poor sister-in-law. She had considered scheduling an elective Cesarean Section, but opted for a vaginal delivery. I know that she never meant to do it without drugs!! It's getting to be a theme among my friends and relatives!


Ava and her very proud momma. Ava weighed 7'11'' and was 20 inches long. Matt and Amy are so excited to have her home. We can't wait to meet her at Christmastime!

BOO and a boo-boo!

This year, we decided to celebrate Halloween with a bang. Literally! On the evening before Halloween we were at Wal-mart picking up a few things when Maura decided to be very affectionate. She was being so sweet, giving me lots of hugs and kisses while sitting in the cart. The last time she went to hug me, she did it with gusto, missed and slammed her head down on the bar of the cart. She must have hit it just right, because she managed to cut open the side of her eye. You could hear the screams all over the store, because Brent was on the other side of the store and he came running to find out what happened. It was a very sad scene. We finally got her calmed down, cleaned the cut, and I put a little steri-strip on it.


BUT the next day she woke up with a black eye! If you look closely at her right eye, you can see the bruising above the eye. You can tell that it was really bothering her a lot, right? Mommy was super funny on Halloween. We figured that Halloween was probably the best day of the year to sport a black eye, because it kind of looks like part of the costume!

I just had to include this super cute picture of her on the Sunday before Halloween. I love this dress so much. It has removable collars for Halloween, Thanksgiving and birthdays.

Happy Halloween everyone! I know that you're supposed to carve your pumpkins several days before Halloween so that you have a chance to light and enjoy them for a few days, but this year we were a little behind. Because I was so busy studying for my test the few weeks before Halloween, I forgot to even BUY pumpkins!! I bought these the morning of Halloween on super clearance.(I wonder why???) What a cute little punkin! Do you know how difficult it was to get her to sit still long enough for this shot??

Maura cleaning out the goop. I really thought she'd be a lot more interested in this whole process, but really she gave it a few halfhearted attempts and abandoned the pumpkins to the lure of the slide. Mommy was stuck cleaning out the pumpkins and Brent and I carved them in about five minutes right before the trick-or-treaters showed up.

My whole family came over to eat chili and help hand out candy to the millions of trick-or-treaters that we get. We got Maura all dressed up and she helped to hand out candy. In case you can't tell, she's a skunk. I loved this costume because I call her my little stinker! She can be one sometimes! As you can tell, she's all ready to hand out candy, Pixy Stix in hand.


Maura and Daddy on Halloween. She's waiting for the kids to show up. When we had a lull in the action, she'd start yelling, "Kids, 'cmon!" She loved all the costumes and all the activity, and especially all the candy!

Our friends Dawn, Jeremiah and Lily stopped by. Lily is dressed as a vampire because she has the most hilarious "Dark Lily" look. It's very convincing.

Maura with some ill gotten goods. I didn't want to take her trick-or-treating because I figured that she didn't really need all the candy, so I did let her pilfer through the hand out candy from time to time. She took it to extremes, though, and felt like she needed a new piece every few minutes. We finally tried to cut her off, but not before the damage was done. She was wired!

Handing out candy. Like I said, she loved this part and would have given two handfuls of candy to each kid if I would have let her. She did get a little scared of some of the kids wearing scary masks, and she'd just kind of sink in to my lap and hide her face.

End of Halloween. What a tired little stinker!! She had just enough energy to give Aunt Katie, Aunt Lorie, Grammy and myself a good version of her naked dance, which occurs every night after her bath. I'd love to show it sometime on this blog, but I'd get arrested!! Needless to say, it's a hilarious sight!