Merry Christmas from the Whitmans (and others)!

Two words: Jib Jab.

Don't send a lame Holiday eCard. Try JibJab Sendables!

For those of you Portland-sports challenged, that's Brandon Roy. He's a Blazer. We're tight.

Don't send a lame Holiday eCard. Try JibJab Sendables!

And to all a Good Night!

If you're wondering why you haven't got a Christmas card from us yet, this would be why:






















































Is anybody having fun yet? Honestly, I just want to know why everybody's pictures don't like as nice as ours?

Happy Birfday Toooooooooo U!

On Cooper's birthday, I'm afraid I have to write a cheesy, mushy post. So that I don't just ramble on and on, I'll make a list. Here are 10 reasons why I love my husband:
1) He is the best daddy a girl could ask for. He changes diapers and everything! He has even learned to discipline despite the fact that the girls bat their little eyes at him, and pretend to be angels. I'm sorry girls, he cannot be bought.
2) He lets me take naps on the weekends!!! Despite the fact that he needs them too, he takes the girls and lets me cuddle up in our warm, down comforter. Can't ask for more.
3) And speaking of weekends, he wakes up Saturday morning and asks me what I want to get done that day. And although he would rather do big manly chores like clean the garage, he'll sweep and mop if that's what I want done.
4) Last Saturday he spent an hour in JoAnn's. By himself. We sent him there with a list of stuff to get while we (my mom, grandma, and I) worked on a service project. And he went. He even returned with the list. Really, I could just stop there, but I'll keep going.
5) He has always treated me SO well. After decades of being just friends, I finally realized that I tended to end relationships because other guys never treated me as well as Coop did. Not sure what took me so long to figure out what to do about it.
6) He looks really nice in a suit. I like it.
7) He wears the pants. Even though he would rather just go with the flow and let me decide because I usually care more, he knows I like him to take charge. So that kinda sounds like he wears the pants because I tell him to, but you know ... I like the end result regardless.
8) He likes chocolate even more than I do, so I never have to eat it alone.
9) He's always up for my crazy ideas like, hey, it's 20 degrees - let's go to Zoolights!
10) He would rather stay home and hang out with me than play basketball or even go golfing. That says a lot, and I sure love how much he likes spending time with me.
11) He puts up with me. Enough said.
12) We never fight, and he's probably at least 99% of the reason why. I can't express how grateful I am for that.

Oops, that's 12, but I couldn't stop. Happy Birthday Coop. I love you. So much. Forever.

Just Keep Swimming ... and Tagged.

Cooper let me out of the house (wahoo) and so I went really wild and snuck over to my parents' house to use their internet and blog to my heart's content. Meri is really sick and Jenelle has fever envy so let's just say today was a little bit nuts. I called Coop at one point just so he could hear the lovely harmonizing our girls were doing as they cried. Jenelle stopped when I put the phone close to her, but I poked her and she started up again. Oh oh, and my favorite quote of the day happened while we were still on the phone. Jenelle pointed at Meredith and yelled, "No! Top crying! Is my turn [to cry]!" That was funny. A few hours later, not so much, but I did get to watch Finding Nemo, which was exciting. Of course they were both insisting on being held at the same time, which would work fine (my lap is plenty large), if Meri didn't keep stealing Jell's binky and pulling her hair. I'm gonna give her the benefit of the doubt and say she was doing it out of curiosity. Yeah, I am that naive, by choice.

Anyway, like a week ago now, I was tagged. Don't totally know what that means, nor does the person who tagged me, but we figure I should answer all the questions she did (although I've seen some people list 7 interesting things about themselves when they were tagged, I don't think I have that many so I'll answer the questions instead). Here goes:


1) Where did you meet your husband?

The better question is when. Let's just say, we looked like this:

2)What was the first thing you said?
Ha, um, probably something like "don't cut in line," or "I'm in love with your friend, Laura Blake." We do have a letter I wrote him in 3rd grade, but if you're thinking it was mushy, you should know, it was a class assignment.

3)Where was your first date?
That would totally depend on your definition of a date. Was it in any of the hundreds of times we hung out in high school? Any of the double dates we went on in high school - oh wait, we were never each other's date. Pre-mission when he wanted to date and I didn't want to deal with sending off another missionary so we just hung out awkwardly wanting to be more than friends? Or three days after I got home from my mission when he held my hand while we watched Pirates of the Caribbean? Three days! Totally freaked me out! Oh, and if he comes out with some story of me giving him all the signs that I wanted him to, don't believe a word of it. I didn't know what signs were . I was just trying to speak English and sleep in a room by myself.

4)Where was your first kiss?
In front of my apartment door a couple of weeks later. After he kissed me, he laughed out loud and said, "I can't believe I finally did that!"

5)Did you have a long or short courtship/engagement?
How do you mean that? I know that when we started talking about getting married and I was freaking out about how quickly it was all happening, Coop, Mr. Smooth Talker, pointed out that our "relationship" was 20 years in the making. Now he likes to tell people we dated for 2 weeks, just to embarrass me with his lies. The truth would be somewhere in the middle.

6)Where did you get engaged?
Up a mountain hike in Utah, past the rattlesnake, a few feet from the edge of a huge rock cliff. (I've been trying to upload a picture, with no success. If you want to look though, his friends were hiding nearby, snapping shots, which are in an old album that you can connect to through the link at the right.) I knew it was coming because, bless his heart, he can't lie worth a darn - whatever that means.

7)Where did you get married?
Portland, Oregon temple

8)How did the reception go?
Thanks to lots of hard work from my mom, it was fantastic. Really beautiful. Although, I have no clue why I spent so much time stressing over things like making sure the silverware looked good with the plates - as if I saw any of it or got to eat anything anyway! We tried to ditch the line idea (since we were standing directly in the sun and my dress had been laced up WAY too tight), but they just followed us. Oh, and the bellhop at our hotel stole the food we'd snagged from the reception, but you know, who really cares about any of that on their wedding day???

9)The honeymoon?
We spent it in a little Oregon coast town - Manzanita, in the vacation home owned by my in-law's boss. Coop's parents went to the beach too and brought us out to dinner one night, which was a little weird to me, but other than that it rained the whole week, and we didn't care.

10)Whose turn is it next?
Lyndsey, have you been tagged yet?

Cut the Hair, Not the Ears

So Friday was a normal work day, nothing particularly special. Just sitting at my desk either dialing or typing away trying to do my job. Then I got a fantastic an unexpected e-mail from my wife containing these pictures!

That's right, Jenelle got her first professional haircut! We've cut her bangs a tiny bit before, but with all the squirming and screaming we were lucky to have not cut anything else. Alisha decided to go a different route. Jenelle called me on the phone later quite excitedly to tell me about her haircut that she got whilst sitting atop a horsie. She does love horsies.

Of course not to be outdone, Meri was looking her cutest even though she doesn't have enough hair to cut. (Be sure to click on that one to get the full cuteness effect.) Good times.

Of the Mischief there is no End

So Meredith is our stealthy little criminal. She is so quiet that we often don't notice what is going on until she's climbed all the way up my parents' stairs. And when we find her, she honestly claps for herself.

Here are a few pictures of the mischief she, and her big sister, have been up to this week.We were pretty impressed when she learned to climb onto the rocking chair here, although in this particular instance it was so she could get in position to pull out Jell's piggy tails.





But then I turned away and found her doing this, in order to look out the window at the massive rain storm we've been surviving. She has since tried to stand on the back of the chair. Good luck with that one sweetie.








Thanks to Meri, "my Christmas!" as Jenelle calls our tree, has to be imprisoned. It's for it's own good really. Yet somehow, mysteriously, I still find piles of ornaments that have been removed by some bit of magic. (Jenelle has learned to get inside, where she likes to sit and taunt her sister. Oh and on a different note - when we were trying to decorate the tree, Jenelle would bring an ornament over, hand it to the tree, watch it fall to the ground, say "oops" and go back for more. She continued until there was quite a pile of oopses.)




And here, Meri got her diaper off. Just pulled that strap right off and left the diaper behind. I've heard lots of stories of kids doing this but Jell never did so this was hillarious to us. That and Jenelle tattling as she yells to us, while pointing at her sister, "nakie bum, nakie bum!"




Just thought she'd sit down for a rest at Nana and Bopa's house. She loves this corner. By the time she's done, there is not a sheet of paper left in the basket. She may be little, but she's amazingly capable of tearing apart a room in seconds. When she wants you to read her a book, she quietly goes over to the bookshelf and proceeds to pull out every book she can reach. But we still think she's cute! She has started saying "Mama" and "Dada" and using them correctly, which gets her out of any trouble she might have been in. Although don't get too close, she has her first two teeth now! and she knows how to use them, and does, quite frequently. Believe me, I would know.


And although this post is full of Meredith, don't think for a second that Jenelle isn't deserving of making the list. This is her at a restaurant with Grammy, enjoying the spinach and artichoke dip. Putting it on the bread was just taking too long. Why not go at it directly? Clever girl really, it's what her daddy has always wanted to do.






And I know this has nothing to do with the girls' mischief making, but we are loving decorating for Christmas! This is our first year in a house. We have room for a tree and that's about all we have so I've been trying to make some decorations. I finished painting these yesterday and am excited because I think they look cute! Later we're going to see how Jenelle is at gluing glitter to a bunch of snowflakes we cut out. Somehow I see a lot of vaccuuming in my future.