I know, I’m sorry….I’ve been a bad blogger.

I thought I would share what I just downloaded from my camera and maybe you all can piece together the last few months of my life.

Levi is 7, he has the largest two front teeth in the history of front teeth and he knows it.  When we make fun of his teeth he sticks them out and starts acting like a monster.  I’ve never seen a kid so proud of his giant front teeth.  He LOVES to play with my camera and the result is usually an hour of  filming everything in the house and about 85 pictures of himself making weird faces.  I spend a lot of time deleting his stuff, but making sure I don’t delete all of it because he’s pretty funny.

Then I have about 5 billion of these photos on my camera.  This is one of Clay’s jobs.  He snatches my camera from time to time and takes photos of his job sites.  I hate deleting them because sometimes they are of beautiful buildings and details that only an architect’s wife could appreciate.

After I cleared all the photos from Levi and Clay off of my camera I came to the few photos I snapped during Thanksgiving.  That very small woman sitting next to Clay is Carmen, my childhood friend.  She lives in the same town as my parents and her husband’s business intercedes with my mother’s business on a daily basis.  That means Carmen’s husband owns a FedEx route and he picks up the puppets my mom is shipping out to her customers.  Carmen’s husband adores my mom and my mom likes Carmen’s husband more than she likes me, so it was a winning situation to have them at my parent’s home for Thanksgiving.  Carmen and her girls taught us how to play a dice game called Farkle.  Guess who lost?

Yeah, that would be me. The loser of Farkle has to complete a task that is decided before the game begins.  I had to go to the same house that Carmen and her family had mistaken for my parent’s home just a few hours earlier. With all their Thanksgiving food in their hands thinking they were at my parent’s the older gentleman that answered the door thought that maybe my parents did live there, so Carmen and Charlie went in and quickly realized they knew absolutely nobody in that house.  The loser of the Farkle game had to take a pumpkin pie and basket to the door of that house and ask if my parents were home.  It was very embarrassing to say the least, but we got a years worth of laughter out of it.

Many of you have asked,”How’s Salt?”

Here she is helping to decorate the Christmas tree.

And here she is helping to decorate Ellen’s leg with a few puncture wounds.

Never has a kitten been loved so much by so many people as this little fluffy-wuffy-kitty-witty.  I swear we worry about her far more than we worry about our children.  And if that’s not enough to make you hurl a bit of stomach acid, then you should also know that we call her, “The Baby” and periodically use The Baby as an excuse not to help others, “I can’t fix dinner, I’m holding The Baby”  or “I can’t do my homework because The Baby is sleeping on me”  or “I’d love to help you do the laundry, but The Baby doesn’t want me to leave the room.”  You can understand how difficult life is when you have a baby in the house.

I made my yearly batch of beirocks or beirochs or beer rocks.  We ate them for four days.   I found out my oldest son was giving them away at school and then I asked him why he hates me so much.

This is Levi taking a snooze at our second home, aka the basketball gym.  My friends, I have a serious case of Bleacher Butt, it has caused my butt to be big, flat and also…ginormous.  I could use a good drug to cure me of this awful disease.  Here let me show you how I got it.

*All the DECENT basketball photos are courtesy of my sweet and talented friend Mrs. Mama.

I’m the mom that says (and by says I mean yells) things like, “DON’T TRAVEL!”  and “HEAD FAKE!!!”  and “DON’T FOUL!” and the more than occasional, “USE THE BACKBOARD!!!!”  and then my daughter’s favorite, “MAKE YOUR SHOTS!”  I know, it’s almost like I’m a coach with all my helpful input.  Honestly, I don’t understand how my kids can play the game without me there.

This is her senior year and I promised I wouldn’t miss a single game.

Nothing could keep me away from watching #24 do what she does on that court.

Or watch her coach the girls from the bench.  And in case you didn’t see him, that’s Clay up at the score table taking stats…..for every single game home and away for the girls and boys varsity teams.  He takes his job very seriously.  And yes, I love this picture of Ellen’s coach.

This is Big John, he’s one of our home court refs.  He looks really scary until he smiles, and then fahgetaboutit the whole room melts under his charm.  I love this photo of him.

Oh, how I am going to miss this next year.

Are some of you wondering why I’m all, “Ellen this and Ellen that…doesn’t April have a son that plays basketball too?”

Well, yes I do.  So, let me show you the great shots I got of him playing and the reason I posted my friends photos instead of mine.

I think I might put this one in his baby book.

I love this action shot of him.

This one is worthy of some sort of award.  I’m there people.  I’m am right there getting the best shots of my kids on the court.

I let my kids request what kind of cake they want.  I used to spend an entire day building and frosting complicated designs and then I had a 4th kid.   Isaac wanted a gold dragon on a two layer cake.  I frosted this in about 10 minutes and we ate it all gone.

We took Ellen to Build a Bear for Isaac’s birthday.

We told her it was Disneyland.

And now she can cross that trip off her bucket list.

Her enthusiasm was not to be dampened by her father or brothers who quickly grew weary of her.

I tried to take a fun Christmas photo of my family.  But……yeah.

My family doesn’t do “Nice Family Photo”.  Look at Levi’s feet.  Yes, his shoes are on the wrong feet.  I can only do so much people.

We love the show Parks and Recreation.  I gave this t-shirt to Seth for Christmas.  He thinks Ron Swanson is the perfect man and quotes him much too often, “I like dark haired women and breakfast food.”

Seth helped me turn this floral atrocity into….

This very vanilla landscape.

And uh, it still looks like that minus the broom in the shower.  I know, I know, I suck at finishing projects.  I promise I’ll get it done before I die.

And that my friends has been my life according to my camera for the last several months.   You’re welcome.