Aubrie is Seven!

During my vacation from blogging, Aubrie turned 7!

It is so hard to believe that she is old enough to go to school and grow new front teeth.

If I could keep any of them little forever, it would be her, though Brooklyn is running a close second!

She asked for cheesecake for her actual birthday

and a cake with a deer on it for her party...




I couldn't figure out how to make a deer,

so I compromised with a rendition of India, our dog.

Aubrie has been so generous with the American Girl she got for her last birthday letting her little sister, Brooklyn, play with her to the point of permanent "bad hair day"!
So, we decided to pass Josephina on for good and let Aubrie have a new one.
For her party she wanted to make crowns
and sock puppets.


Cady & her horse

Aubrie & her pig

Silas Broberg

& his creature

This is Megan.

She was Aubrie's BEST present this year. Aubrie hasn't usually had girls her age in the different places that we have lived. Since birth Cassidy & Gabby, her cousins, have been her only close friends. While they are STILL her BESTEST friends (she misses you guys!) she now has Megan. Megan's family has moved to our city to work... not just for language school. That means we may have her around for more than 2 years (all of this does NOT mean that she has forgotten the boy who was her age and only here for language school... she misses you, too, Micah!).

Wouldn't you know...

I don't know whether you would attribute it toMurphy's Lawor the desire to prove someone wrongor just crazy coincidence...
But just as soon as I pushed "post" on my last installment, my camera and computer came to some kind of agreement and I got all my pictures back!
So, I will share them as they come to me, but don't expect things to be chronological.That would be asking WAY too much!



Imagine this coming at you at 60mph!

Okay, not quite "u-shaped" but DEFINITELY un-Useable!

Cady was in the very back seat, but after the initial shock, we found only a tiny little scratch on her leg.

Brace Yourself...

I know you have been waiting...

I have been waiting, too!

Waiting for my photography/computer saavy husband to put some pictures on my computer so that you all don't just have to read all that is floating through my head these days.

But, alas, all the "saavy-ness" in the world cannot undo what a Russian semi did back in August as we drove the 17 hours from the Moscow Airport to our home in Krasnodar.

We had just come down a hill 8 hours into our trip when we were forced to come to a dead stop because of "prohp-kah". (Russian word for "traffic" literally translated "cork")

After sitting for a few minutes, Steve, the ever-cautious driver, looked in his rearview mirror and seeing nothing, went to change the song on the MP3 player when...

--- BAM ---

the semi rear-ended us and pushed us off the road.

Now, before you get excited... we were in a Toyota SUV with a tire on the back and all of our kids were restrained properly (which is really something considering it is not the law here and our kids were REALLY tired of being restrained!). No one got hurt, just real shook up.

The worst part is what we discovered after we got out to survey the damage...

When the driver (who offered no explanation as to why he rammed us when traffic was clearly at a standstill and he had plenty of time to stop and even admits that he did not try to slow down) hit us he broke out our back window and consequently crushed our roof (we had quite a few boxes stacked on top as we had just come from America).

That is still not the worst part...

While walking around the semi to look for skidmarks, Steve discovered his laptop bag behind the semi... Yes, it had fallen out of our back window and the semi ran over it, not once, but twice!!! I had the greatest picture of our "u" shaped computer, but since it also demolished our flash card and card reader, I cannot show it to you no matter what my photography/computer saavy husband tries.

And here we are again... you're stuck reading my ramblings.

So, to whoever is still listening... I will try to give you updates during the holidays and try to steal pictures from others and if you just hang in there, it should all be remedied by February... or maybe March...