Me and My Three

Just like I did here, here, and here, I made a little video for my brood for 2012 now that the year is over and I was able to take time to compile some of the thousands of photos I have from the past year. Seriously, I have thousands, so you can imagine how tough it was to select only a few to go into a four minute video. Anyhoo, blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, yadda, you know the drill if you've been reading my blog long enough. And if you're new 'round these parts I have full confidence that you'll figure things out. Enjoy!

Boom!

I love coming across random, fun videos and photos. This is a video of the kids this past summer (2012) when we still lived in Destin. We do odd, random stuff, so on this particular day the brood was walking on the back of the length of the sectional without falling off. Even Jersey participated. Enjoy.

Home

As most of you know I was a stay-at-home-mommy for almost eight years. Then life happened, and not only did I no longer get to spend every moment with my kidlets, I moved cross country, causing me to miss scraped knees and kisses goodnight. Yeah, talk about shock of a lifetime. After sloooooowly adjusting to "a new normal" (as I call it) I realized life was going to be forever different. And I realized that with this new normal comes new traditions. And so I began making my crew a video near the year's end with a glimpse of things we had done throughout the previous year. Along with the video came the tradition of making a family yearbook. They watch it before bed when we're apart, and even request to watch it sporadically even when we are together. Good times.

I've yet to make this year's video but I'm a few months overdue for a different sort of video - one highlighting our recent move. As I mentioned in my last post, the kiddos and I have moved a gajillion times it feels like. And my goodness, my kids are little troopers. They went from living with me in Pensacola in 2010, to their Dad's in NM in 2011, back to me in 2012, then three months after moving back in with me we moved to a roomier house 45 minutes away from our Destin apartment. That's four moves in two years for them! So needless to say there were some mixed feelings about our most recent, voluntary move to our current place. Owen gave me the most resistance, said he loved our place in Destin. And so did I, of all the places I've ever lived it was the smallest and most expensive but it was the one that felt most like ours, most like home. So I promised Owen and the older two that I would make this new place feel just as cozy as our last. And I reminded him that while it sucked moving so many times, it wasn't the house that made it a home, it was the people in it as well as the memories made there. So here's a video containing a few pictures from the last few months, from a few days before moving day in August to present day. Enjoy.



Psst - if you want to see the videos from 2010 and 2011 just click the video page under the blog header and scroll to 'family videos.'

Testing, Testing...

1, 2, 3...

Excuse us while we have technical difficulties with our first edition of Momma & Ana. We recorded it with a camera that I rarely use, and we are in the process of packing our house for our move next week, therefore things are chaotic, and I love every bit of it, but in the midst of the unpredictability that is better known as life in the Rumbarger house, I have misplaced the cord to that camera that I mention gets hardly any use. So until that's found, we will have no video.

If it makes you feel any better though, it was a lot of fun to make. So hopefully it will be just as much fun for ya'll to watch (once I find that darn cord). I will let you know that the video has to do with food. Oh, and there's dancing, lots and lots of dancing, but that's how we get down in our house - we dance for reasons most wouldn't even raise an eyebrow for. We dance if Owen picks out his own pajamas, we dance when I get home from work, or if I one of us has to potty we can often be found singing, "I gotta...go...pee...I'll be. right. back!" All while dancing down the hall to the bathroom.

So yeah, you have that to look forward to.

Until then....

*Cue Kesha's laugh* ...Dance.

Lor

She's a Glowin'

As planned, we put up our tree last night. We decided to put it in the dining area (keyword 'area' not 'room'). Waaaahhhh! That was supposed to be me crying at our lack of an actual dining room. But, whatevs.

Here's the super small space beforehand:

And here's what we've got goin' on after SHOVING the tree into the corner:

It's a slightly different angle. My bad.

Anyway, we put the tree in the corner because, uh, we gotta eat! Therefore, we had to leave room for the table (which, if you've been keeping up with us, you may notice in the video that we have welcomed a bench to the ensemble, but more on that another day).

If you know anything about us you know that we all love shooting photos (with the exception of Seth) so it seemed only natural that we videotaped the setup of our tree. Plus, I have this whole sappy thing of documenting life even more than usual (if that's even possible) ever since we're all not with each other 365 days out of the year.

While we set up the tree we were rockin' out to the Family Christmas station on Pandora, hence the boogie woogie-ing throughout the video.  And you may have noticed that I got half way thru putting up the lights and then discovered that not all of them worked, so I had to start allllllllll the way over again. Grrrr! It's a fairly long video (12 minutes) but when you realize how long it took us to put up the tree (about 1 hour 45 minutes because of all the dilemmas we ran into, such as lights not working), 12 minutes seems completely magical.

I'm 100% sure I've got the coolest family ever. Everyone is so different but somehow it all totally worked out and we got the tree up and it's purdy darn good-lookin'. For starters (in case you didn't watch the whole video), Ethan needed a 'break' within five minutes of starting, he did come back around the 5:35 mark and help to attempt to pull the lights separate from some garland so that we could use those lights in place of our nonworking lights. At 6:10 our efforts failed and I took allllllll the lights off the tree to start over. At 7 minutes and 45 seconds into the video the light situation caused me to need a drank and turned to my trusty wine 'globe.' Around 8:15 Owey finally shows up to help hang up an ornament or two although I'm convinced he only did so because he got to stand on the chair. 8:25 Ari does a little jig on the chair, which Owen imitates. 9:45 Ari swallows me whole with her hand (watch it, you'll see what I mean). At 9:10 Ari does yet another entertaining dance, then at 9:40 she's under the tree messing with the cat. At 9:20 I 'bowed down' to Owen because Ari and I found a beautiful ornament he made and wanted him to grace us with his presence while hanging said ornament. Around 9:56 we do a celebratory jump because we are sooooo close to being done. At 10:10 Ethan can't resist the candy canes and comes to help put them up. At 10:35 Ari and Jersey do a little jig. At 11:45 we all damn near had a heart attack when the star gave us a scare by not lighting up initially. And finally, at 12:20, Ari and I sign off by throwing up the deuces to you fine folks. Bam! Tree officially up! Can I get a 'heeeeey'?!

Maybe this time next year we'll be in North Carolina with actual space for a tree. Only time will tell...

Aren't our kidlets the cutest damn things ever? Geez, I fall more and more in love with those three each day. Is that even possible? So do ya'll "force fun" like I do and make everyone participate in the setup of your Christmas tree? Seth's part seems to be dragging out the box, attempting to put up the star and wrestling with the kids every now and again. While Owen tends to focus more on being entertaining and hanging a single ornament.

Happy,

Lor