Part 2, Cosmo, and a special leaf

This is crazy...I'm sitting here and I can hear my kiddos playing the wii. There wouldn't be anything wrong at all with their joyous, playful sounds except....except that it's 11:30 at night and they should really be in bed. The problem is that neither my husband nor myself are bedtime sticklers. When some of our best friends, The Jones', stayed with us in November I was so impressed because Rob (the dad) said that it was time to get the kids to bed (and it was pretty early). I mentioned that I was impressed and Kristen (the mom) said well, he's a stickler on bed times. Chad and I laughed and announced that that was our problem...neither of us are sticklers. I get busy working in the study late at night and he gets busy doing whatever he's doing and before we know it it's way past bed time! They do get to bed at a somewhat decent time on school nights but there's definite room for improvement. So check back with me later in 2009 and see if I've been able to stick to my resolve to become a better bed time stickler.

The pictures on this post are more from December sessions that I didn't have time to do sneak peeks of. And also a couple of our new baby Cosmo. Then there's one of the beautiful red heart leaf hanging in our backyard. It has a little bit of a story. We added a pave stone patio last June and pulled out a palm tree from the corner. I wanted to add another type of tree but it needed to be a small tree. I already knew what I wanted, a Redbud tree. We went to a local nursery in search of one but all of the ones they had weren't very pretty. We found out that they grew more in a back area and they offered to show us. A worker took us in a golf cart to the back and as soon as we drove up I saw "the one". We snagged it, took it home, and planted it. A couple of months later Hurricane Ike came to town. I watched in horror as my new little hand-picked Redbud tree swayed back and forth in the strong hurricane winds. I didn't know if it would survive. It did survive but wasn't left with many leaves after it was all over with. About a month ago I noticed it had 3 leaves left on it. Two of them were brown and about to fall off, but this one, I noticed was perfect. A deep red that is shaped like a perfect little heart. I keep expecting to see it gone, but it's been the lone leaf for about 3 weeks now and just keeps hanging on to the tiny little tree.