As usual...

...it's been forever! I won't even promise to be better this time, as that doesn't seem to happen. With facebook, it seems my pictures and updates end up there, and this falls by the wayside. Oh well, I'll do the best I can, and hopefully will keep this more up-to-date!

The family is doing great. Brendan is in first grade and is doing very well. His teacher is impressed by his math skills and reading and he is really enjoying school. That being said, he's getting eager for summer - the weather here has been gorgeous this spring and all of us have a pretty bad case of spring (summer!) fever! He turned 7 (7!) on April 8th and we spent his birthday eating his chosen birthday dinner, homemade pizza, with Erica and Josh and our family. We are hoping to get him into a summer program in Bemidji, at least part time, as well as swimming lessons. We'll see how the summer shapes up.

Halle turned 5 on March 24th, and is girl to the core. She loves all things pink and princess and Barbi. Halle is in a local preschool program, which, sadly is coming to an end May 3rd for the year...she loves going! Halle will spend the summer going to gymnastics and swimming lessons in Bemidji, as well as spending some days each week at Kay's house - our longtime daycare provider. I recently took Halle in for her 5 year well-child and the girl is tall and skinny! 75-90th percentile for height and 50th percentile for weight. If only we could all be so lucky, eh?

Chance - ahhhh, Chance is our little charmer. He's an entertainer through and through and has the funniest vocabulary and logic. We celebrated 2 years cancer free this past March and he's doing AWESOME. The kid seriously keeps us laughing day in and day out with his hilarious personality. He turned 2 on November 7th, 2 going on 12, for sure!

Cary and I - we are doing great. Jobs are going fine, we are keeping very busy at and outside of work, and we even manage to spend a little time sans kids here and there. I recently received a promotion and will be moving out of mortgages and into the bottom floor of the commercial lending world. I will be serving as the bank's credit analyst, which I am very excited about. It's a great way to get your foot in the door of commercial lending, and it will be exciting to do something new and different. Not to mention, it will be an awesome learning opportunity for me!

Yes, I AM still alive!!!

Hello! What happened to summer?? I cannot believe it's already August - aside from the frigid temps, the time has gone by so quickly that it doesn't seem real. Clearly I've been horrible about updating this - I promise to do better. We had a busy April as we celebrated Brendan's 6th birthday and my 32nd birthday, I went on a vacation to Virginia to visit friends and run my first ever 5K race, and we geared up for warmer weather (little did we know that would never happen!).

May was also busy with Mother's Day, my 2nd 5K, Brendan's Kindergarten Graduation and last day of school, and our trip to Duluth/Bayfield over Memorial Day weekend for a wedding and mini family vacation.

In June we went to my parents to visit and ride in the equipment (Chance got his first ever tractor ride and we ALL got our first ever sprayer ride in the Hagge!) and have a great time! We passed the one-year anniversary of the tornado on June 6th without incident, though we are still cleaning up from it and will be for quite some time, I'm sure. June 19th was the Relay for Life, where Chance was one of the torchbearers! I received over $700 in donations, which is so wonderful - a HUGE thank you to all that donated!! The night started out a little rocky when huge thunderstorm blew through, but after it was gone it was followed by the most beautiful double rainbow I think I've ever seen. The luminaries were ruined in the storm, so we were unable to light them, but were were still able to hold the ceremony - it was great - Chance was a total ham and had a blast being a torchbearer! The day after the Relay, we headed to the Twin Cities to celebrate my cousin, Nikki's graduation. It was such fun to see the family and spend time together. My cousin, Jacinta and her husband, Matt and their son, Calvin (who is the same age as Chance) also came over and we were able to get some great pics of the boys together.

July 4th was celebrated at our home - Grandma Carol and Cameron came down to share the weekend with us. The weather was fantastic all weekend, which really was the only really nice weekend we've had all summer. We shot off fireworks on Saturday night (the 4th) and really enjoyed the show. We bought them from a different location this year, and I think we'll definitely be going back! A lot of bang for our buck (pardon the pun)! July 7th, Cary celebrated his 38th birthday and the following weekend we took the kids to the zoo in Wahpeton, which was a lot of fun. The weekend of July 17th and 18th was Cary's 20th Class Reunion in Duluth, so he and I left the kids with Grandma Carol and Cam and headed to Duluth to partake in the festivities. The reunion was really fun - it was great meeting so many of his classmates, and seeing some of the people I'd met at his 10 year. Cary had a wonderful time seeing his class and they had a really great turnout which was awesome! In between reunion activities, Cary and I took the alone time to do a few things you can't do with three little kids; we saw a movie at the Omnimax (Imax theater), toured the Irving (a boat that now serves as a tourist attraction), drove all around Duluth and revisted Cary's old stomping grounds, drove up the shore of Lake Superior (Cassy borrowed us her Corvette, so we were able to ride in style!) to Gooseberry Falls and Palisade Head, and grabbed a bite to eat at Betty's Pies. It was an awesome weekend!!

We arrived home from Duluth to sadness, however. Our Golden Retriever, Cami, succumed to kidney failure over the weekend while we were away. Based on our research it appeared she must have had Lyme's Disease (unbeknownst to us) and in rare circumstances it can affect Golden Retriever's by shutting down their kidneys. We were very sad and the kids took it very hard. She is buried on the hill in the pasture where she loved to run. We were very fortunate to find an adorable new puppy almost right away, though. Roscoe P. Landstrom is a Siberian Husky/Golden Lab cross and has done a lot in the way of helping our hearts heal. He's a wonderful puppy, very well behaved, mild mannered, loves the kids, and has really become a member of our family.

Last weekend we went to Itasca State Park where Brendan tried out his new roller blades for the first time, Halle rode bike, Cary was on 'blades, and I pushed Chance in the stroller. It was very fun, but a little stressful as it was both Halle and Brendan's first time on wheels on the trail - and there are a lot of hills at Itasca!! We ended the day by going to the huge playground there, where all of the kids had a blast, of course.

Whew - that was a long update -- I'm sorry I've been so bad about updating! I will be better!!

Above are a few pictures from the past several months...to see all of the pictures please visit our web-album - the link at the top, on the right hand side under "Landstrom Family Photos" - be sure to check out!!

Where does the time go??

It's April already, how can that be?? As usual, I've been sporadic about updating - life keeps getting in the way of my computer time! March was another busy month as it contained two very important milestones...Chance has been cancer-free for ONE year as of March 20th and our baby girl, Halle, turned 4 on March 24th!! It's so hard to believe that it's already been a year since we were in the hospital with him and everything happened. We are so very thankful things turned out the way that they did.

Here are some recent pictures; I also started a web-album where I am putting the lions share of the pictures we take, I will continue to post some here, but to see the ones that don't make it on the blog please visit this site... http://picasaweb.google.com/acmewildcat1 All of the pics are there! I'm actually in the process of uploading some of our older pictures to the web-album as well, which is why there are sporadic older albums there. Feel free to browse through what you want to!! :)


Chance wearing my workout headband... Practicing one of his favorite pasttimes...eating!

As I said above, Halle turned 4 years old on March 24th! She's growing up so fast!

We held a joint birthday party for Brendan - who turned 6 on April 8th - and Halle, this past Sunday at the local bowling alley. Brendan had two friends at the party, and Halle had one. And let me tell you, bowling with 5 kids that are 6 and under isn't easy! It was a great time and the kids had an absolute blast! The best part of the day was that Grandpa David and Grandma Connie and Aunt Kahri, Uncle Colin and Cousin Kenedi decided to surprise us by driving 4 hours and showing up at the party! We had NO idea they were going to come and were all so excited to see them! Grandma Carol and Cameron came, as did Aunt Erica and Josh (both of which were a HUGE help with the kids while they were bowling so I could handle everything else - THANKS guys!) Aunt Erica was also generous enough to make both kids seperate birthday cakes, which turned out beautiful. I'm so impressed with her cake-decorating abilities! The kids are so very lucky to have such a wonderful family!

Here is Halle's gorgeous cake...

Halle and her friend, Macy - Macy is a month older the Halle, believe it or not! Halle is tall for her age!

Brendan's awesome cake!

Brendan and his friends, Brody and Coby...

Time to blow out the candles!

Presents! Chance and Kenedi hanging out at the bowling alley - (I LOVE this picture! Look at Chance hamming it up, and Kenedi giving him that 'look'! HA! So cute!)

After the party at the bowling alley we headed to our house to have some dinner, open more gifts and share some laughs...

Grandma Carol made Halle this gorgeous princess dress - I wanted to take a better picture of her in it after the party so I told her to put it on and dance in a circle like she was dancing with a Prince. The look on her face is what she thought of that suggestion! :)

Hi there!

Hello! It's been far too long since I've had a chance to update. We've been keeping busy as usual, and over the past 6 weeks we've done a wide variety of things including; going to Brendan's first hockey "game", which was very cute. We attended parent/teacher conferences for Brendan - which went really well; according to his teacher he's a great kid and has had no problems adjusting to life as a Kindergartner. His math skills are excellent; the teacher utilizes a program by which kids can learn math at their own pace and as of our conference he was already at the point that she hopes they are able to get to by the end of the year! She think's he'll probably test completely out of the program before the year is through. He's also reading easy books, which is so cute to hear, and best of all he loves school. Erica and I went to my first NFL game, the Vikes playoff game on Jan. 4th ,which despite the loss was a fun experience. Cary and I and our friend, Mike, went to see AC/DC in Fargo on Jan. 17th, which was a fabulous time. On Jan 23rd our neice, Kenedi, turned one and we attended her 1st birthday party in Guelph the next day. Brendan's school sponsored a "Muffins for Moms" breakfast where moms were honored, which I attended this past week. Also this week, I signed Halle up for preschool which she will attend 4 days a week begining next fall. Chance's vocabulary has increased by leaps and bounds of late, and he's discovered that he loves nothing more then climbing onto and standing up on everything he can. And if all of that wasn't enough...I also started training to run my first 5K!

Here are a few pictures from the past 6 weeks:

VIKINGS GAME

Our seats were awesome!

AC/DC


BATH TIME

Chance hair gets curlier the longer it gets! He's got the personality to match, that's for sure!

HOCKEY GAME

Brendan is #9

He's on the lower left in black...
SLEEPY KIDDOS

They crashed on the way home from Grandpa David and Grandma Connie's house...

HELICOPTER UP!

Brendan got a helicopter from Santa - can you find it in these pics? It's in the air!

Happy New Year!

Hard to believe today marked the start of 2009...crazy! Since Cary and I had the day off we spent part of it lounging around (since we stayed up until almost 4am talking and spending time together!) and the latter part outside with the kids. It was Chance's first time outside in full snow-gear - he had a great time, though he was a bit skeptical of the snow drifts since the couple he tried to scale caused him to dive in face first. Brendan and Halle both wore their snow-shoes for a bit while they trudged around in the deep snow, which was fun for them as they barely wore them last year.

Here is Chance, fully decked out in winter gear...

A couple of shots of the kids hanging out in the snow...

Chance on his first sled ride...

...oops! On the way down the hill he fell backwards and couldn't sit himself back up....

Despite the tip, he had a blast!

The wind chill was cold, however, so after a bit we headed inside. Check out the curly hair and red cheeks!