The Newest Fincher-Family Member:

this cuddly little ball of fur is tilly's new aunt (??)! mom and dad are just thrilled to welcome little gracie mae into their home. they've had her in their arms just 24 hours but i can already tell that they are completely smitten :) we were lucky to get to meet her as they made their way home from branson missouri. tilly was, of course, thrilled....when is she not!....but she really can't wait for little gracie to pack on a few more pounds before they can really play.

if you look closely in this picture you'll see gracie wearing the christmas present tilly gave her...she was too excited about it to wait until christmas to give it to her :) tilly said every girl needs a little bling!so what else were we up to this weekend?? other than than meeting gracie, we had a pretty had a productive weekend with christmas parties and christmas shopping. i am happy to announce our christmas shopping is 99% complete! we have just a couple more things on the list that the "Ali" family has requested we bring to them in kuwait. christmas in kuwait...less than 2 weeks away....i can't believe it! in case you didn't know Ali is the arabic spelling of our last name, or so say the guys who issued our visas to get into the country. just wait until they see just exactly how un-arabic my redheaded-freckledy self is!! welcome to kuwait mr. and mrs. ali!!! i can't wait!!!

here are a couple more pictures i thought i'd share (just so miss tilly doesn't get jealous with all the "ooo"-ing and "aaahhh"-ing over gracie). these are pictures of tilly-daddy time. after a hard day of frisbee throwing there's nothing that tilly loves more than to snuggle in chris' lap. she also loves to dance in the kitchen...good thing she gets all her rhythm from her momma :)

Bahston:

schmoopy and i had an awesome last minute trip to boston this weekend! planning started about 3:30 on wednesday afternoon when my director decided to send me up to boston to do some testing in a lab on friday. of course i wanted to spend all weekend there and we worked it out so my hubba-hubby could meet me there on friday night. woo hoo! we did nothing but eat good food and take in all the beautiful christmas decorations. it was perfect :)

i did get to go to the blue man group on thursday night and it was absolutely the craziest thing i have ever seen...let's just say the night started with me putting a pancho on and tying a streamer around my head and ended with me covered in banana pudding and almost drowning in tissue paper!!

Happy Birthday Casey!

ya...i'm totally hoping you run for office one day!! i hope you had a fantastic day :)

The Bloggiest Blog I've Ever Blogged-Part II:

i hope everyone had a fantastic-lip smastic thanksgiving :) you know it's time for the holiday season when mr. turkey makes an appearance on our front door step!

this year we met my parents, brothers and their wives in the mountains outside of gatlinburg. mountains!!! yea!!! us memphis folk just don't know what to do with mountains :) here's sara, casey, me and chris with our extended family. ya, i know we ended up with all the good looks....

okay...so they were just askin' for it when they put this sign up at clingman's dome....

aww....schmoopy, schmoopy......

all the kids....

all the girls.....

all the boys.....

and who are these fine ladies???? lookin' good, lookin' good!

The Bloggiest Blog I've Ever Blogged-Part I:

so ummm, ya...i have a quite a bit of stuff i've got to get caught up on here!! we'll let's start where i left off...

the same week that we had the halloweenie party we also had a going away party for tonya and jason. good times! i'm so sad they are moving like 15 hours away from us! we'll miss you!!

here are the lovely ladies having loads of fun 'cause we through kickin' parties, yo! i love how shea is going after tonya's hair! she' like, man i gots lot o' hair too...let me show you how all the young chicks are wearin' it these days....

and we just couldn't let the mckennas go without a photo shoot with the cartners and alleys! work it, work it!

ya...that was waaaay to serious for this motely crew....

much better. nice, trish.....

ya...i'm pretty sure that's chris' hand :)

hey....where did jason go???

there he is!!!

good times, as always. we'll miss you mckennas!!!

Party Down:

first and most importantly....happy birthday steve/daddy-o! wish we could be in kuwait to celebrate with you :)

we had an awesome time last night throwing the neighborhood halloweenie party! our neighbors who have been on northwood drive for 8 years said it's the best turn out we've ever had! woohoo! we really have great neighbors and it was so much fun to hang out with the ones we've known for a while and meet some new ones. if your street doesn't do a halloween party, i would highly recommend starting a new tradition (or telling some new people who have moved in that they inherited the party with the house)!! with the help of the harris family and templeton family, we set up some tables, got our fire pit out, set up a tent with orange halloween lights and cooked up some hotdogs for the dressed-up kiddies before they went trick-or-treating. our neighbors all brought yummy appetizers and desserts and we had a great time. one of our neighbors made an awesome grave cake that had a tombstone and a skeleton buried in it and everything! you can't really tell from the pictures, but the tent with the lights had an awesome orange glow to it that could be seen all the way up and down the street. everybody loved it! the monster eyes i made were a big hit, too :) i also had a very spooky door decor....kinda funny that i had to clean up all the real cobwebs to put up some fake ones!!

i wish i had gotten more pictures of the kids all dressed up. they were so cute and all so proud of their costumes! we even had a little 2 week old baby make an appearance as a sugar baby :) my favorite was the little 1 year old monkey! he was hilarious!

those of us without kids handed out our halloween candy from the tent and hung out by the fire pit and several folks came back to hang out. the best part is that I was still in bed by 10pm. what a great night :)

hope you had a great night, too!

Happy Halloween!

well...i certainly have some catching up to do on this bloggo, don't i? let's get started. hmmm...what have we been up to lately...

our sweet little wiggle-butt, tilly, turned 2 on sunday! happy birthday stinker-pot!

we've been spending lots of time with our friends the cartners and the mckennas. the mckennas are leaving us for beautiful berwick, pa next week...so sad, but it sounds like a great place to visit so you guys be sure to have plenty of room for the alleys and your little furry neice, tilly :)

tonight is our semi-annual neighborhood halloween party (we missed it last year). we received this responsibility when we bought the house we live in now and are happy to carry on the tradition, even if it does include lots of confusion like neighbors sending out invitations with our names on them...long story!

maybe i'll have some good pictures from the party tonight to share.
i hope you all have a safe and happy halloween!

Weekend Fun:

chris and i had a nice relaxing weekend spending time with friends. on friday night we went to our friend john's b'day party. he's from seneca, sc and he and his wife were married in a little catholic chapel in clemson down the street from where chris' grandparents live (small world!). i worked with his wife, luciana, in the lab at UT. she's argentinian so we had some fantastic food! i don't think we'll ever miss a party they throw!

i'm never good at remembering a camera, so i'll have to rely on tonya and jason's awesome pics of our jeeping adventure this weekend. it's a really odd feeling to be out muddin' in the city of memphis, but there's this spot about 10 min from the house that we took the rednecked wrangler and jason and tonya took their liberty (we're both 2 jeep familes!) off roading for a little fun. tilly and kenzie are best buds and had an blast, too. tonya and i were so giddy driving through the mud puddles we couldn't stop smiling a laughing! chris and i had so much mud on our tires that when we drove home it was flinging mud all over us and somehow i ended up with mud down my pants!!sunday we went to church then out to pei wei for some good eats with friends. chris and i worked in the yard and cleaned the house on sunday afternoon before jacob and trish came over to help us eat some cheesecake. we planned to watch some amazing race together, but thanks to a congressional debate that bumped our show, the girls got to whoop up on the boys in a game of scene-it. victory dance, trish!

Mmm....Cheesecake!

check out this rockin' b-day present case and sara sent me:

LEMON RASPBERRY CREAM CHEESECAKE Creamy, tart lemon cheesecake baked on top of a moist raspberry-soaked white cake, loaded with raspberry-soaked ladyfingers and finished with a layer of lemon mascarpone mousse.

mmm...i know you are all jealous!!!

Till-Till:

ja-cob took this great picture of our tillster this weekend at the park. she had so much fun she could hardly move the next morning :)

A Birthday Ditty:

haaaapy birthday to meeee
i live happily
with my schmoooopy and poooopy
how great can life be :)

Chris' Pride and Joy:

well my sweet little '98 jeep wrangler has gotten an awesome 100,000 mile face lift and made all my hubby's dreams (well one of them at least) come true. a rockin' new bumper, some gi-normous tires and lots of shiny stuff that i really don't know what it does up underneath the body and here she is....

chris has worked long and hard and is so proud, as he should be. it's lots of fun to see heads turn (to look up at us usually) and check out his handiwork. while she looks done, i'm sure there's only more to come...it's like some crazy addictive habit. those jeep parts magazines should really come with warning labels. WARNING: redneckin' your jeep may be habit forming; may cause your husband to disappear to the garage for extended periods of time and when he returns he will be uncharacteristically dirty!or maybe...WARNING: may cause your wife to appear exponentially hotter! :)

Crazy Cat Lady:

oh my goodness! i actually got a picture to load! woohoo!! this is a great one, too... my bro, casey, sent this to me and i thought it was hilarious. i'll have to get it for our old neighbor, smelly melly. she had like 180 cats, 8 dogs and a bird and liked to wear her pj's around the neighborhood, that was until our new neighbors ran her off with a little drama that included the action five news! great story.

Don't make me get the flying monkeys:

i wasn't sure how much longer to let this bloggola go on without discussing the inspiration for the monkeys-in-flight blog address and monkey butts in the title. i cannot pinpoint where exactly my hubby's fascination with monkeys began, but i do happen to believe that it was only magnified during our trip to monkey town just outside of cape town, south africa a few years ago. just picture me, chris, our great buddies darren, rob, jimmy and ashley cruising down the highway in our rented bmw (driving on the left side of the road, of course) headed to monkey town singing the whole way, "won't you take me to....monkey town! won't you take me to....monkey town!" (to the tune of funky town in case you missed that). the whole way there we discussed exactly what monkey town must be...would there be monkeys to welcome us into monkey town? would they be walking around like waiters taking our drink orders? would there be a monkey godfather smoking his cigarettes over in a corner of the monkey town bar? while monkey town wasn't exactly what we imagined, it certainly was a memorable day.

there are so many memorable adventures with monkeys in south africa, including the monkey raid of juice-boxes in one of the south african teacher's cabin, and watching them eat fruit along the side of the road while we drove out into the bush, but probably the most memorable was driving down to the cape of good hope and seeing a family of baboons walking along the side of the road. then, something we still laugh about to this day, one particularly smart and brave baboon decided to hitch a ride on top of the mercedes in front of us! we could only imagine that their sunroof was open and the nice view of that baboon booty! though monkeys are a love of chris', their hineys are the inspiration for his favorite title for all those typical memphis drivers, "monkey-butts!!" and believe me...this place is full of them :)it's been quite a while since we've chilled with the primates in south africa, but more recently we've learned of chris' love for monkeys playing apples-to-apples. it's sooo much fun and i highly recommend it to anyone who, like myself, has a short attention span for games (no monopoly please!). most people seem to play apples-to-apples by the very few rules it has, but chris has made up his own rule. the card "flying monkeys" trumps everything and is a guarenteed winner if he's the judge!

Splish Splash:

Sure, he looks so innocent...but what has happened to my bathroom??

Girls just wanna have fu-un:

growing up with two brothers, working all day with a bunch of engineering boys, and living with a boy has really made me cherish my girl-time when i'm lucky enough to get it :) this weekend i had some really girlie-girl time at my friend kristen's baby shower. i got to help with the shower at joanna's house by making all sorts of yummy (if i do say so myself) - brunchy things. these are friends from our old church and it's so much fun for us to all get together and visit since we all go to different churches now. but thanks to all those pregnant folks, we actually get to see each other fairly often to have these baby showers!

after the shower i came home to hang out with my buddy tonya, who had been hanging out with the boys all morning documenting their fun with jeeps :) it's always a fun time when tonya's around! we also watched the ultimate chick-flick "bring it on"!

wednesday night i went to a girls bible study that i just love. all the girls are so sweet and really are awesome about challenging me and each other with living life to glorify God. we are doing a great study by jennifer kennedy dean called "live a praying life" that i would highly recommend! my pal trish talks all about it on her bloggarooni!

last night i made some new friends at supersuppers. For those of you going "Whaa???" SuperSuppers is a business where you can go in and prepare meals to freeze and use when you need them. this was my first time to go check out supersuppers, so i visited their 101 class that just happened to be full of a single-ladies church group. we had free snacks and samples of some of the food they make, got a discount on the dinners i made, and even got to take home a free dinner. i had a lot of fun with my new friends and...mmmm...the food was yummy, too!

you said it cyndi!! girls just wanna have fu-un!

Computer Nerd:

Hallelujah! I finally have gotten pictures to post on my last blog. I still have a few more to add, and I can't seem to do anything about the font, but at least you can see our smiling faces :) I really dislike 'puters and just want them to work when they're supposed to without me having to understand how they work...but, I'm pretty proud of the fact that I solved this problem all on my own...without computer assistance from my live-in help desk! Woo hoo :)

For all you folks with the same issues and you are using Internet Explorer, you may want to try downloading the Mozilla Firefox browser. That worked for me. So now I have a new browser just to post pictures in...crazy!

Don't I sound like I know what I'm talking about?

Excuses, excuses....

so, i've been a complete slacker with the bloggo this past week...sorry 'bout that. we've had all kinds of fun stuff going on and just no time to sit down and share with you about it. so, here is my list of excuses why i couldn't post anything for you guys:

1. Jesus.
ha! try to top that! we've started visiting a new church. (there's a whole bunch of drama there with our old church, but since my goal in life is to live drama-free i won't go into that here.) we're visiting Union Avenue Baptist Church which is just about 8 minutes down the road from us. here's their website if you'd like to read more: www.unionavenue.org . it's a small church family that meets in a beautiful church building in midtown Memphis. the people were immediately welcoming of us and the pastor is so nice and so wise. we've started attending their tuesday night bible study and have gotten to meet lots of new people. i also go to a girls bible study with a group from our old church on wednesdays, so i visit with all those friends and so i can get a double shot of God's word during the work week!

2. Jeeps.
certainly no where near #1, but still a very important part of our family :) chris has been spending much of his free timing dreaming of fixing up the jeep wrangler, buying things to fix up the jeep wrangler and driving to get things to fix up the jeep wrangler. he is rednecking-out our jeep with some 35" tires, a 5" lift (good thing we're tall!), a soft top, a rack with KC lights, etc... he actually drove to knoxville on friday (7hrs!) just to pick some stuff up and drive back the next morning! but just look at how proud of the new tires he is!


3. Jason and Tonya.
okay, so it's not really their fault that they are so much fun to hang out with...but i do think tonya enjoys distracting me from other things i need to do way too much :) we took tilly down to see aunt tonya, uncle jason, and all her cousins on sunday night, so tilly was just in heaven. chris and jason talked jeeps constantly, so he was in heaven. and tonya helped me make chex mix, so i was in heaven! we always have a great time hanging out with our yankee doodles yankeedoodles2.blogspot.com . we also got to hang out together on monday when we met them at the riverwalk downtown on the mississippi. their pictures turned out better than ours, so here are ones I swipped from them:
This poor little guy was scared of dogs and his mom was trying so hard to get him not to be!
Don't we look like we're having fun :)

so, there you have it!