I love my family...

Not only did I get to see Craig when we went home to Washington, but we got to see almost all of my mom's side of the family, and some of Jaron's family. We don't have too many pictures, but I was so happy seeing all my cousins and aunts and uncles again. And we had a lot of family friends come for the weekend as well. It was so much fun! I don't have any pictures from Sunday when everyone was there, but these are from Saturday night.

Craig and Papa.

Craig, Papa, Shirley, Aunt Steph, Uncle Fred, Me

Rick, Lisa, Jaron, and Abel & Marsha Garcia.

All the teenagers.

Hopefully I'll have more pictures to post from Sunday.

Return With Honor

My little brother is finally home! Craig has been serving a 2 year mission, for our church, in Paraguay. We are so excited to have him home again. It was fun seeing how much he's grown up and matured while he's been gone, and we loved listening to his stories.

Here is Craig at the MTC two years ago.

I have so many pictures of us waiting at the airport for Craig...but I thought this one was funny. I don't think we were making these weird faces on purpose either. For some reason it took FOREVER for Craig's plane to land. Jaron and Dad finally started walking around and ended up finding Craig first, mom was not happy to miss the first hug! Jenn and I had to go to the bathroom, but we were afraid we'd miss Craig...finally we RAN to find one.

Yes, we were in a hurry...but we took the time to stop and take a picture.

Mom finally gets her hug, and it lasted about 20 min. We had to pry her off so we could welcome him home too!

My turn!

I thought this we a funny picture too...Craig was asking about cell phones and we all took ours out to show him.

As soon as we got home from the airport and had some food, we went home and had 2nd Christmas! We left the tree up and saved all our presents for Craig, so he got to have Christmas with the family....sort of. He also had lots of fun stuff for us as well.

Here I am trying the Matte' (no idea how to spell that) that all the missionaries come home talking about from South America. No offense, but I was not a fan. It was a fun trip, and I was so glad to see my brother. We love you Craig!

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

While in NYC with Landon and Kendra, we went to see Mary Poppins on Broadway. It was awesome! Jaron and I have seen quite a few shows and this one, by far, had the best stage and props. At the end of the show Mary Poppins flys over the entire crowd, seriously, we could've reached up and grabbed her foot at one point. They were walking upside down on the ceiling, flying, and the backgrounds were great. I would definitely recommend this show to anyone.

Here are Landon and Kendra in front of the 17 Cherry Tree Lane sign.

Jaron and I outside, FREEZING!

This is a picture of the Theatre...isn't it beautiful?

Masonic Temple & State Penitentiary

We took a tour of the Masonic Temple in Philadelphia. The building is amazing and when it was completed in 1873 was intended to be the centerpiece of the Philadelphia skyline. About the time it was completed the city started construction on City Hall, which wouldn't be completed until 1901 but would dwarf the Masonic Temple in size and hold the record as the tallest building in the world from 1901 to 1908. Still the temple was gorgeous and is a very big structure in it's own right. If you're interested in checking it out they have an online tour you can take at http://www.pagrandlodge.org/tour/mtemple.html

This is another view from inside the Masonic Temple. We saw several beautiful staircases like this one. There seemed to be about 20 meeting rooms like the first picture there, all with a different theme to the room like Egyptian, Greek, etc, and all used for meetings. It was a very interesting tour.Here we are outside of Eastern State Penitentiary. It was completed in 1829 and is considered the world's first true penitentiary. Whatever that means. The architecture focused on solitary confinement, the hope of its designers was that people would turn to God and reform if forced into isolation. Each cell was designed so that a guard could give them food without being seen, and for a brief period each day the prisoners were allowed outside into the small courtyard (about 10' x 10') adjacent to each cell. All this was done without them seeing even the guard. They had human interaction once every two weeks when they were hosed down for their shower.

We saw Al Capone's cell, he was one of the more famous inmates. It was no longer solitary at that point. They determined that the solitary system was causing mental insanity among inmates. By 1913 it was also too crowded to continue the solitary practice as well so they started putting two inmates to a cell. The prison operated almost like a mini city. The odd thing is the prison is really in the middle of a residential area in the city. As the building deteriorated it was eventually closed permanently in 1971.

Now they do tours, movies, and during October it hosts supposedly one of the scariest haunted houses in the country. Amy hasn't wanted to find out though!

This dog killed the cat of the Governor's wife. She wanted revenge so they sentenced him to life in prison. He had a pretty good life living at Eastern, he was adopted as the prison dog and got lots of attention from everyone.

This was another cool place to visit in Philadelphia!

A view down the hall of one of the prison corridors.

Gettysburg and the search for HDTV!

Tom came up from Baltimore to check out Gettysburg with us when Landon and Kendra were in town.

Here were are at Ruby Tuesday's, certainly not our first choice for watching the BCS championship game but...

At the hotel room in Gettysburg I (Jaron) pulled out the phone book and started calling local sports bars to see who would have the NCAA football championship game in, in HD. It seemed like a simple enough request, I love college football, and I prefer to watch it in HD. (Doesn't everybody?)

Thankfully, the first two places I called both claimed to have HD tvs with the game on, and one even had a special on wings! We went there first, about 30 minutes before kickoff just to be safe. Good thing we did. I think the TVs in this place were actually around during the Civil War, which is cool from a historical perspective, but not when you're about to watch a big game. Supposedly they had a couple HD TVs in the back room so we went to look at those screens and I will give them partial credit, they had two flat screen TVs, they were about 20 inch screens though and judging from the interference lines running through the screen there was definitely no HD signal coming in. So we rolled.

We tried a place across the street but they had already closed...seriously? So we went to the second place I had called, who claimed to have HD. We got there and it was seriously a trailer. A trailer. With lots of motorcycles parked outside. Tom and Landon ran in to scope it out and after determining that the only thing hi-def about this joint was the concentration of tobacco smoke inside we were skunked again.

We determined that Gettysburg is still living in the past. I mean, we figured it was so I don't know why this came as a surprise, but just one place with a good TV was all we wanted.

Off in the horizon we noticed a glowing hue. We determined that glow could only represent civilization and quite possibly the modern necessities we have come to call 1080p HD. After much debate we settled on Ruby Tuesday's. They had two big flat screen TVs we could watch, and had a really grainy picture, another was only semi-grainy, so we stayed. Desperate times call for desperate measures and kickoff was in 3 minutes.

The food was only slightly more disappointing than the picture, but we made a night of it and had fun just the same. Besides, we'd hit the biker bar on the way home for dessert...

Times Square

We thought it was about time we spent New Year's Eve in NYC! Glad we did it, don't ever want to do it again!!! We started to evening chasing a horse drawn carriage trying to take pictures of the proposal and FREEZING to death. After we lost the horse and any sight of Andrew and Hilarie, we stopped in Central Park and took some pictures.
Then we made our way back to Ray's Pizza, which is our favorite NYC pizza place. On the way we stopped in at Trump Tower and took some pictures by the waterfall, we made a few other stops, but didn't take any pictures.
Then was my favorite activity for the night...Comic Strip Live...Jaron and I try to take in a comedy show whenever we're in New York and this is our favorite place to go, mostly because we get free tickets and just have to pay for drinks. It was a lot more crude then we are used to, probably because of the night and the crowd, but it was still a lot of fun and our cheeks and stomachs were all super sore from laughing so much. And it was WARM!!!

This last picture is what I felt like the rest of the night. It was freezing cold, there were more people in Times Square then you can possibly imagine, and they cage you up in sections once you get there. Seriously, looking back I'm glad I did it, but if anyone else comes to visit and wants to do that...Jaron and I will wait for you back at the hotel in the warm, comfortable, spacious room. I really can't remember much, other then Landon and Kendra somehow jumping over the gates and then my legs not being about to move from lack of circulation, then we lost everyone and it was just craziness. Jaron looked at my at one point and said, "Amy, I'm probably going to fight these guys...just thought I'd warn you." To which I reminded him that his backup just hoped the fence and left him and begged him the just ignore the idiots in front of us. I was sooooo happy to get to the hotel that night! I think the night would've been a lot more fun if I was back in high school, maybe college...but I think I've outgrown that whole scene now. Thank Heavens!

Happy 2009!

Congratulations Hilarie and Andrew!

Andrew flew Hilarie to NYC for New Year's Eve so we got to spend it with them! The surprise was...HE WAS PROPOSING! The plan was for us to walk next to them...hidden...and take pictures of the event, sadly their carriage driver thought he was racing in the Indy 500 and was passing all the other carriages on the road. We had some hilarious video coverage of us sprinting after this bugy trying to keep up. We failed miserably! But Hilarie said yes.

Congratulations Hilarie and Andrew! We love you and are so excited for you.