The Months of May: Twenty-one

It's twenty-one months of May! 

During the past three months Mary Allison dressed up like a little lamb and happily ran from doorstep to doorstep yelling "thank-you!" instead of "trick-or-treat," survived her first serious road-trip to celebrate Thanksgiving with family, and shrieked with utter terror and delight as she became acquainted with her aunt and uncle's sweet dog, Benson. She yelled "WOW!" as she ran full speed ahead into a park of twinkling Christmas lights, reveled in a Christmas filled with five of her grandparents, and took every ornament in her tip-toes' reach off of the tree, one by one. She serenades us with the "ABC's" and "The Wheels on the Bus," shouts "AMEN!" at the end of all of her prayers, and does a hysterical Donald Trump impression. This adventurous tot fills her days filling up her Fisher Price shopping cart, decorating everything in sight with (removable) stickers, and flipping through the pages of her books narrating the story as she sees fit. 

All our love, 

C + B + M

Christmastide 2015

We wish all of you the merriest Christmas and hope that the joy of the season has followed you into this new year. We filled our holiday to the brim with broken ornaments and crooked tannenbaums, Texas brisket and Arizona sun, and lots and lots of grandparents. [re: Five grandparents and just one grandchild.] Needlesstosay she revelled in the doting shenanigans and sneaky big bites of ice-cream from her Pop. Here's a peek!  

All our Christmas-y love,

b + c + m

p.s. sorry half of our Christmas cards are still sitting on my desk waiting to be addressed...

Thanksgiving 2015

I'm guessing that my parents never thought that their kids would end up living in Kentucky or New Jersey. It certainly wasn't on my fifth-grade MASH line-up. But somehow my big brother and I both flew the coup away from our beloved hometown in the Texas panhandle, both 1000+ miles (err... 2000 miles) away from our little white-bricked home on Elmhurst Road and no closer to one another. 

Ryan is a second-year anesthesiology resident at the University of Louisville and, as such, spends nearly every day and night scrubbed up putting patients to sleep and, more importantly, waking them back up. This Thanksgiving he actually had the holiday off so we (lost our minds and) decided to carpe diem! and make the 28-hour round trip to Louisville with our toddler. 

After surviving the winding mountain roads in the dark and fog from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to West Virginia to Ohio to Kentucky, we finally introduced our daughter to my brother and his sweet wife, Ashley. Mary Allison took no time to stick Uncle "Ay-an's" stethoscope in her ears and uncover her Christmas presents that Aunt Ashley had already wrapped. She quickly befriended their "woof-woof," Benson, with her sticky fingers, neck hugs and open-mouthed kisses. Our days were filled with good meals and even better desserts, parks and museums, baby-dolls and magna-doodles, family lore and many more reasons to be grateful for our Hogue reunion.

My dad said it best as he said grace over our Thanksgiving meal. "We are grateful to gather together today and pray that we would be blessed with many more opportunities to gather again."

They should be AARP models, amiright?!?

 Happy Thanksgiving!

b + c + m

October 2015

It's hard to beat October in Princeton. Each set of pictures was taken a week or two after the next. Just check out those trees, y'all! Green --> yellow --> orange --> red.

Loli came to visit!

All our sweater-wearing, apple-crisp-baking love,

b + c + m