Sorry for the delay, we've been busy celebrating.........and cleaning.

Jesse turned 14 last week....it's true.  Normally, this would have provided me a perfect opportunity to blog (and take some pictures)--but as you can see, that didn't happen.

He did, however, have a pretty great birthday! We finally finished his new room (more on that later), went on a mini shopping spree to IKEA to furnish it, and when he came home a bunch of friends were waiting (very quietly I might add) to surprise him! Does he have AWESOME parents, or what?!  Hopefully his friends aren't too upset with me. I told them all to be here at 5:30, as I was planning on bringing Jesse home around 5:40. We kinda got stuck in traffic and finally made it home at 6:20. Ooops.

Jesse turning 14 has REALLY made me feel old. And short. Yep, he's finally passed me up. We took some pictures a few weeks ago, when it looked like we were the same height. (I'm not sure exactly when they were taken, but it looks like my hair had just been done--and judging from what my roots look like now, I'm going to say it was 5-6 weeks ago!)

Luckily for me, I have a secret weapon--ridiculously tall shoes!!!

Well, he is now (just a few short weeks later) a good 1/2 to 1 inch TALLER than me. I wonder how long all of my tall shoes are going to work? At the rate he's growing, probably not much longer...(anyone have any 5 inch heels I could borrow?)

The real reason that I have been so lazy at blogging is because we have been busy cleaning. Yeah, that's right, cleaning. Last year, during Thanksgiving break, we went on a cruise. This year, we moved everyone around to different rooms--which involved gutting the rooms entirely so we could paint and de-junk! So for the entire vacation, our house looked like a bomb had gone off! Now, if anything deserves some before and after photos--this is it! So as you can probably guess--I have none. The boys did complain a few times about working all through their vacation--but they are pretty darn happy with the results (as well they should be!). And, for the record, we only worked every other day--we took Thanksgiving off, and of course we had more important things to do on Saturday than clean (like going to see BYU beat Utah!).

In addition to a fabulous birthday and some good BYU celebrating--we also had a terrific Thanksgiving. We stuffed ourselves at Little America (yum!), but the highlight of the day was visiting with Jason's old basketball coach Dave Severns who is now coaching with the Chicago Bulls (they were in town playing the Jazz). The boys enjoyed meeting him, and I won't forget the look on Jason's (and Coach Sev's) face when they finally met up after all these years. 

It was a fun, busy week--we have A LOT to be THANKFUL for!