Happy Birthday Mom

Still in Holland

Well, Brian has returned to our house in Tallahassee, but I am still in Holland trying to see family as much as possible in the time that I have. We have been playing many games like Boggle (below) and Thurn & Taxis (second below).



Today we also made olliebollen, a traditional Dutch treat of fried dough with raisins. David and Mom did most of the actual frying, while Rachel and I took Josiah grocery shopping to keep him out of the way.



Overall, it has been a very nice visit. I have a few more days here before I am going south again to see Brian and the ferrets.

Merry Christmas to all

Happy Birthday Eli!

Today is Eli's birthday! We celebrated with a train cake made by his parents. He was quite calm through the cake time, as you can see below.


After cake, Eli opened his presents with the assistance of his older brother Josiah (and additional supervision to keep the assistance in check). Josiah is definitely more interested in present-opening than Eli, but both seemed to enjoy themselves.


Here is Josiah sitting in front of the cake. He has been asking about it for days, so he was really excited to eat some this afternoon.


This birthday celebration brought special guests to visit, including Peter and Anne (see below) and Grandpa and Grandma VanRegenmorter (Rachel's parents).

Christmas cookies

We decorated Christmas cookies yesterday. Josiah decorated many of them, helped by his mom, his dad, Brian, my mom, and me.

The Oath, part 2

Here are a few pictures of Brian taking his oath (mentioned in the previous post). In the first one, he is actually taking the oath. In the second one, he is shaking hands with Justice Wells after the oath. In the last picture, he is holding up his signed oath outside the court before turning it in.

The Oath

Today Brian took the oath to become an official lawyer! He was waiting on the review of his character that the FL bar was doing, which took a long time. He finally got the paperwork on Wednesday and set up the oath-taking for Friday (today).

One of the handy things about working in the court is that there are judges around. So Brian had his boss officiate the oath ceremony. His coworkers and I witnessed the oath. I took pictures of the event. It was a surprisingly long oath with lots of parts, so I had plenty of time to get many shots (photos). Since we are leaving in a few hours, I will not post any of those shots at this time.

Congrats Brian!

Artistic developments

Up until a few weeks ago, we had these three very nice pictures from the Dublin Irish Fest on our wall.


However. early in December we received some first edition artwork from an up and coming artist. We felt obligated to exhibit his work and promptly displayed his latest ultra-modern creations.


Many thanks to Josiah and his agents for these artistic originals.

As you might have guessed already, we got a nice package in the mail from David and Rachel for Sinterklaas. Rex duly inspected its contents for safety before we partook.



The box was also a hit and our Ferret Postal Authorities seized it. For our safety of course.


Thanks, guys!

Congrats Abby!!

One of my dear friends from high school got married this weekend. I was sad to miss it, but it was impossible for me to get away this weekend. She was in my wedding (directly to my left), and now she had her own wedding. I am very excited for her.

Happy December!

Wine Bottle Party Trick

Step 1: Remove cork and wine from bottle.


Step 2: Return cork to bottle and jam it in all the way.

Step 3: Remove cork from bottle (with a little help).

Happy Thanksgiving!

Salad Time

Instead of going to Ruby Tuesdays to enjoy their salad bar, I recently made dinner salads instead. Brian mocked me for taking pictures of the salads, but they took a long time because of the number of different ingredients that had to be chopped. If I remember correctly, these salads include lettuce, red onions, carrots, cucumbers, red peppers, hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, celery, and grated cheese. Even though they took a while to make, they were tasty to eat!

Disc Golfing

This afternoon was so beautiful that we went disc golfing with Kristina and Rick. Kristina works with Brian. Here they are showing some enthusiasm for their discs.


I always use the same disc, an orange one that I bought it Columbus years ago. Brian was already warming up at this point, so I took this picture myself.


Before his warm-up, I stopped Brian for a picture. That is kind of a silly expression. :) Brian usually carries two discs when he plays, one for the long shots and one to putt with.


After we played the course, we took a minute for a photo by one of the trees in Tom Brown Park.

Halloween Party

Last weekend, Brian and I went to a Halloween party of sorts (more like grown-ups sitting around talking, but whatever). Since it was a costume party, we both went dressed up. Brian is a pirate (as I'm sure you could guess), and I am an angel (we were meeting someone at the party who was bringing me wings).

to hold you over

Hello everyone,
It has been several days since we posted, and we have some pictures to get off the camera and post soon, but I wanted to put a couple pictures up to hold you over. The ferrets still love their fountain, and here you can see Rex and Chewbacca drinking from it. The bottom picture shows Brussels eating from one food dish while sitting in the other.

Keeping things interesting...

The ferrets are a lot of fun, but lately they have become obsessed with climbing the back of the computer (where all the cords plug in) to get onto Brian's desk. Eve even got up there and knocked a glass of water onto Brian's keyboard, which meant we were off to the store to get a new keyboard soon after. Now we try to remember that no place is safe from climbing ferrets.


Brian was feeling a little pips last week, so here he is snuggled under a blanket. The ferrets love to explore blankets, so they are coming up to see what he is doing. You can see it was a beautiful day, and we had the windows open.


Here Brussels and Rex are playing with the tube. Brussels has just leapt over the tube (center of picture), and Rex is zipping out of it (to the right).


Brian decided to clean out his closet this week, so here is the result (the closet is clean, but the clothes are on the futon). He did do some good sorting and pulled out a lot of items to go to Goodwill. The rest will (eventually) make it back into the closet. The ferrets enjoy climbing the pile of clothes and burrowing into it. I can see three of them in this picture. Can you?

Pumpkin Carving Party

Last Friday, we had some people over from the Supreme Court to carve pumpkins. Here are 4 of the resulting jack-o-lanterns.


Here I am, in the middle of carving out all the teeth on my skull. We cleared out a lot of the family room (easier because we don't have our couch yet) and put down newspaper. Then everyone sat on the floor to carve.


Here you can see Brian getting into the detail work on his second pumpkin.


Brian's coworker, Vincent, had never carved a pumpkin before. Here is his first jack-o-lantern ever. It was a little scary to watch him with the knife (I guess I didn't describe the proper technique very well) and I thought he might cut open his hand, but there was no blood spilt.

Pumpkin Patch

Before our pumpkin party, we had to get ourselves some pumpkins. There were some at the grocery store and Walmart, but I really wanted to get our pumpkins at a pumpkin patch (better atmosphere).


The pumpkin patch we found was to the north of town a little (on the way to Tim and Carla's, for those of you who know where that is). It was on the large lawn of a church, and the proceeds were going to their youth group (which is good, b/c they were a little expensive). They had the pumpkins grouped on the lawn and there were wagons you could use to gather your pumpkins in.


Once we chose our pumpkins, we took them up to the tent and they were compared to the priced pumpkins in front to determine their cost (by size). Overall, it was nice to get outside and select our pumpkins from a big field.