Wedding

The wedding - Alana Aston and Cameron Orth - December 16,2010 - Brisbane, Australia Temple.

I decided not to try and get pictures of the whole family for this post (so don't feel bad if you're not in it) and just keep it to ones of us, or shots I took - as that alone looks like it might be a mega post.

We dropped Jaren off to play with the other kiddies and helpers during the sealing. We took group pictures across the street from the temple by the gazebo at Kangaroo Point. Often tour buses will stop there - and this day we had all these Asians stopping to take pictures of us and the wedding group. It was a bit crazy. But what can I say, Asians love Jaren. They couldn't stop taking pictures of him. But for some, taking pictures wasn't quite enough.

 

Here's a picture of my sweet little family outside the temple, and Jaren cute as always.

 

I took these shots of my parents-in-law with Lani, which I think are fun and matching.

Here are some other pretty shots I got that day - I especially like these ones of Lani and my niece Jasmine. If I new how to photo shop I would remove that sign in the background, but otherwise I think they turned out really nice.

 


I thought this one below was cute of the boys.



I helped make these place cards for Lani and I think they turned out pretty.



As they were leaving Lani asked me to hold some of her stuff and hand it to her after they had gotten in the car. As I'm turning to walk away from her this other car zooms by and seriously came inches away from me. It happened so fast and I was so startled thinking that one more step and he could have killed me, or I could have lost my baby. Ugh, I shudder just remembering it.So that isn't that great of a photo but it's there for the memory and for my gratitude at not being run over that day.

 

Here are two of my sweet sister-in-laws who live too far away. Felicity's in Sydney and at the time Claire was living in San Fran. Fun places to vacation, but I wish they lived closer. I love when they come in for visits though!!!

It was a great wedding day, we had a wonderful time and were so happy to welcome Cameron into the family!!!

December Showers bring Bridal Showers

In Australia they have a tradition of having a "hen's night" which is like a bachelorette party. For Lani's we first went to a belly dancing place (so cool) and then back to her house for bridal shower games. This shot of me "catching the boquet" makes me laugh every time I see it.It was fun to be part of all her wedding plans and parties!

I threw Lani a bridal shower and it was such a fun night. I had Cameron make a video ahead of time answering questions about he and Lani, which is what my little sister did for me when I got married. Any question she missed she had to put another piece of gum in her mouth, don't be deceived by the picture, she really did get some right too. :)

Good times! I'm a sucker for a wedding. Congratulations (belated) sweet Lani. :)

December ('10) Family Parites

Here's a random collection of photos from some of our family parties that month.
Queen's Park with Mum, Claire and the kids

Going to the Brisbane Museum and Gallery of Modern Art. All those babies and yet none of us brought any wipes. That backfired.

They had this really great display where they had all these ribbons with wishes printed on them. You were to go through and pick out a wish that fit you and then write a new wish on a piece of paper and put it in the slot. I thought it was really interesting. I took two wishes, the first one said something to the effect of I wish I could go home or something about family but then I didn't want people to feel bad so I also took and more displayed another fine but less intense wish of "I wish I could own all the books in the world." :) Ironically a few weeks before this I had had my parents bring me out suitcases of my books from back home which then were all lost in the floods. And we haven't moved back home, so I'm kind of 0-for-2 on the wishes here, but I do get to come home for a visit this year, and Varian did order me lots of replacement books so at least there's some progress.

Here's Jaren chillin' with his cousins.

Lilly's blessing. They did it at the church but just as a family which I thought was nice and personal. Especially since our ward refuses to use a microphone so no one other than the 5 or 6 men in the circle can even hear the blessing (can you hear my total disapproval of this in my tone?). So it was a lovely blessing. My father-in-law Warren took these photos of Jaren and I twirling in the gym afterwards and I thought they had a fun effect, showing the movement and the happiness on his cute little face! (PS: I'm still a bit bummed that they went with calling her Lily and not Asia since Lily was my top name for Jaren had he turned out to be a girl. I love that name. :( Sigh. But Lily is adorable!)

 

Hiking to the Ipswich Water tower. How I love watching Varian play with our boys. What a great dad he is!

 

Swimming at Oma and Opa's

 Dinner parties and making dessert.

 

Games nights. Here we're playing scum (typically we're in to all the crazy German Strategy games, but the Aston have their crazy scum rules that they like to play). The 2nd picture isn't all that great but I love the expressions on Cameron's and Lani's face as I do some amazing move. :)

And we took a picture of Brandon, who had the most amazing hand, and then Chad who's highest card was like a 9 or something terrible.

 

Church and my nephew Rylan's birthday-beach party. Look at that fun cake Chad made him, Rylan and Zahn are Lego-addicts and I thought that was a cute idea! More December postings to come. :)

It's Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas (2010)

I'm sorry I've taken a bit of a blogging break. I've been gathering December photos from sweet sisters-in-law and hadn't realized how unorganized that month's photos had been. So I've loaded a ton of photos and hope to get posting again and up to 2011. :) Ridiculous I know, but frankly it's not like my current photos are as organized as I need them to be, so blogging in the past isn't all that bad.



In saying that, I still haven't gotten around to rescanning this adorable picture of Jaren and Santa (this was scanned in a hurry before and hence the picture is up in the corner) and we're having major computer issues so I'm posting it how it is. We lost the CD of it in the flood but luckily the picture survived. This was Jaren's first Christmas. Santa apparently has had one too many screaming babies on his lap and kept trying to give me instructions of how to put Jaren down without letting him see Santa. Yeah, not a worry with Jaren who is so super social and a man in giant hat and beard didn't phase him at all. I mean just look how happy he looks.

We went to the lighting of the tree in Brisbane which is a fun tradition I hope to keep. They have singers, choirs and dancers before lighting the giant Christmas tree in the square and it just feels Christmasy - which celebrating here in the Summer season I'm always desperate to feel. I am including the picture below of Jaren and Varian just because I think Jaren has the cutest little dopey smile (dopey in a sweet way).



Another thing we did to get ready for Christmas was to decorate "Grandma's" tree. My mother-in-law's tradition is that the youngest member of the family gets to put the star on the tree so here is our attempt at getting Jaren to do so. It was a fun night.

Jaren's face expression to the right cracks me up - he looks very uninterested in decorating. Really we spent most of the time trying to get him to stop grabbing the ornaments and tree, hence his pinned down hands in the shot below.

This was an especially fun Christmas because all of Varian's siblings were living here or traveled here for the holidays and we spent so much time together as a family. All the festivities made it an extra fun Christmas! Stay tuned for more shots of everyone.