Happy New Year!

Well, so begins 2009! We had a chance to go up into the mountains for the day and do a little snowshoing. This was Blake first real experience with snow (other than the little bit that we've had at our house this year). It was a little windy which made it a little tricky because it makes it feel pretty cold, so even though we had Blake bundled up in his little snow suit he didn't like it much. We had Kona (our dog) with us and Daisy (our friend's dog), so we had our hands full :-) We hiked at St. Mary's Glacier and hiked for about 45 minutes up and then headed back so that Blake wouldn't get too cold.

That was the excitement of our New Years this year. Otherwise we just relaxed at home and got to bed early for a couple nights which was nice since Blake has been waking up in the middle of the night thinking it is time to play lately. And then we had a wind storm last week like one I have never experienced before. We had 70-80 MPG gusts during the night...so that pretty much kept us awake most all night. It also blew down part of our fences (about 8 posts worth) and made for a 'fun' New Years fix-it project :-) Oh well, guess that's how it is sometimes...wouldn't have been too bad if it hadn't been 23 degrees on the day i was trying to wrap that project up. All i can say is brrrrr.

Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/jasen.bankson/20090101

Blake's First Christmas

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Christmas Pictures

It's that time of the year...time for Christmas pictures. We went to a studio in Louisville and got a bunch taken. It was pretty cool...we did the photo shoot for about 30 minutes, reviewed the pictures and they printed all of them for us right then and sent them home with us along with a CD of them...nice! Gotta love digital photography...maybe all the studios do it this way, but we haven't been in to have pictures taken for us in a long time...it was pretty sweet.

Here are a couple teaser photos to check out. The rest with be 'released' after Christmas...we won't say why, but you might expect to see a few around then :-)

More Christmas pics, but not all of them :-)...we'll just say Blake takes pretty good pictures...wait until you see the rest..
http://picasaweb.google.com/jasen.bankson/ChristmasPictures

It's Beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Well, we made it home from our trip and are enjoying being back at home for a while. We have had a few small snow storms and some REALLY cold weather in the last week or so. We had an 'arctic blast' which is exactly what it sounds like...freezing. It was about 5 degrees for the high for a couple days. Brrrr. At night it was -34 with wind chill. Fortunately this is really unusual weather for here and we're mostly back to the more normal 40 degree December weather.

We went out and got our Christmas tree and Blake had a nice time helping us pick it out. It was funny because we went through the normal 'get really picky about finding the perfect tree' routine at the nursery and looked at probably 100 different ones trying to find the one we wanted. We finally 'settled' on one that we thought was acceptable and would do the job and brought it home. Ironically I think it may be the best Christmas tree we have had...that worked out nice. Blake did a good job choosing. What do you think? Kona really likes it too :-)

We put the Christmas lights up and are ready for Christmas...with it not being too far off now we are excited.

CA Trip - Salt Lake City, UT

After all the traveling we did for the 3 weeks on the road we pulled into Salt Lake City, UT to finish up our trip with Abby's extended family and to enjoy Thanksgiving with everyone. It was a good way to finish the trip off with the weather feeling much more like the fall/winter weather that we are used to in Colorado. The food on Thanksgiving was great and we had a full house of people. It was a relaxing and full time.


Friday the girls went and did some shopping while the boys went and hiked some in the canyon. This was the first snow that we had seen this season. There had been a storm a few days earlier and there was still some snow on the ground while we went hiking. Kind of a good way to ease back into the snowy season as we headed home.

Thus ended our trip around the western half of the country over the past few weeks. It was time to head home...

Pics from our trip: http://picasaweb.google.com/jasen.bankson/CATrip

CA Trip - Santa Rosa, CA

Off we went from there to Santa Rosa to visit Abby's family. We had a really nice time visiting with all of them and had our third and final open house of the trip. A bunch of Abby's high school friends were able to make it and it was fun to catch up with them. A lot of them had kids too...


We had a nice time celebrating Sean's birthday with the family at Checkers and Jasen and Sean went and did some float tube fishing at the lake....didn't catch much that day, but that's why it's called fishing and not...well you know...



It was good to spend time with all of them and Brandi was a proud aunt for Blake.

We enjoyed getting see Abby grandparents, uncles and great grandma while we were there. We also made it by the Banksons in Santa Rosa to say hi. It sure was nice to see everyone...it had been a while.

Off to Thanksgiving in Salt Lake...