Some random new pics

For those of you who know Manda, she is engaged now!! She and Cody are planning to get married in January 2009! Yay! We love him and are so happy that they've found each other.

Christmas 2007

Hannah opening her first Christmas present! Santa filled Madeline's wishes and brought her a baby doll. Now she has requested that we get a "blue sucker to suck out the baby's nose" (you can guess what we've been doing a lot of at our house lately!) Chrissy bought Chris 3 packages of freeze dried astronaut ice cream.


We had a wonderful Christmas, in spite of rampant illness in the family. The plan was that Chrissy, my dad and my dad's friend Nancy would come to our home the night before Christmas Eve. We made arrangements for Santa to come one day early so we could open presents on Christmas Eve morning. Well, Dad ended up with a stomach virus and had to stay home. Chrissy got the same virus the same night at our house and both were sick all night. At the same time in Arkansas, 1 1/2 hours away, Chris' sister Becca, his sister Manda's fiance Cody and our nephew all came down with the same virus! Never the less, Santa came to our home and we had a nice morning. We had a small Christmas Eve meal, delivered cookies to several of our neighbors and took the girls for a late night drive to look at Christmas lights. On Christmas morning, we drove to my mother in law's home and everyone was relatively healthy by that point. We opened gifts with them and had a wonderful meal. I discovered that I've got an addiction to Rock Band - I can't put the guitar down once I get started!! Here are some pics of our events. I'm so sad to say that we didn't catch pics of our time at our mother in law's house. We were so busy participating in the fun that we didn't think to pick up the camera...

International Children's Library

Hey all, I posted a list of links to some of our favorite websites (see Left). Madeline likes to get on the computer with us to play games and listen to online stories. Recently, I found a website with tons of children's books online "International Childen's Digital Library". You can search for books by age, type of character, etc. We like to visit this site when we're tired of the books we've read at home and aren't able to get to the library. Enjoy!! Jen

Hannah has been sitting up for a few weeks now, it's so great! I haven't posted pics in a while but here's a cute video.

Chris feeding Hannah a Lime


Love me a Lime from jen giles on Vimeo.

Ice Storm

We had an ice storm in Oklahoma on Sunday (in case you hadn't heard!) We woke up at aroud 5am Monday morning to the sound of huge limbs breaking and crashing onto our house - mostly against Madeline's bedroom wall. We brought her to bed with us and spent the rest of the morning listening and waiting for something to crash through the house. We invited our friends over when they lost power and one family chose to come stay with us. Just as I was finishing cooking the last pancake, we lost our power. The guys weren't able to find firewood anywhere and the temp steadily dropped all day. We've heard that one million homes in Oklahoma are without power, 1/2 a million in Tulsa area, and some will be waiting as long as 8 days before power may be restored. Michelle and I took the kids to Irene's house to sleep in a warm home and Chris and Eric slept at Chris' office. Chris said that the town was eerie that night - driving through neighborhoods devoid of light and past darkened buildings. On Tuesday, Chris had to get gas. There was only one QT around with a generator and he said there were easily 80 cars in the parking lot. We never realized how very reliant we are on electricity. Thankfully, our power was restored by the next day. But there are still thousands of people without electricity. Here are some pics of the damage to our trees. Needless to say, the landscape of Tulsa will be changed dramatically with the loss of so many old trees.

Family Pics

Avacados

Cute video of Madeline feeding Hannah avacados for the first time.


Avacados from jen giles on Vimeo.