Pop Goes the Monkey

So I know this is a week late, but seeing how we still haven’t posted our Christmas photos from last year, a week isn’t all that bad. Last Monday was President’s Day. This was the first time in a decade I’ve had President’s Day off, and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. What do people do on President’s Day? Kind of an odd holiday.

Anyways, I wanted to do something, so I decided to take Cassie and Peter up to the Children’s museum in Salt Lake. Sandy had to get in some work, so I invited my Mom and sister Sophie to come.

It was pretty fun, but extremely busy. When we went to the Children’s museum in Appleton, there were other patrons of course, but we were able to do most the activities by ourselves. Here, there were about a million kids. Every activity was infested with ten to fifteen little monsters pushing and grabbing and stuff like that. Thankfully Cassie isn’t to shy. She just squeezes in and has a good time.

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

With Christmas rapidly approaching, I thought it might be fun to look back at a couple of recent Christmases. Here are some pictures from Christmas of 2006. I’m hoping to post 2007 tomorrow, but we’ll see if I get around to it. I have to work, and then we have a big dinner and a bunch of other stuff planned, so who knows.

So we haven’t been the best at updating the blog the past few weeks. As you all know, this is a terribly busy season and thus, sometimes the small things like blogging get neglected.

We’ve definitely been keeping busy the past few weeks with shopping and wrapping and cooking and preparing neighbor gifts, etc. For the most part, these have been fairly mundane activities with few snapshot moments, but we have accumulated a few photos.

I’m sure with Christmas coming, there will be plenty more blogging opportunities before the end of the year. But until then here is Thanksgiving through this weekend:

Here are some more of my favorite family pictures we took this fall. My friend Amy took them again and I think she does a great job.

So, Adam has done all of the posting so far, mostly because I just can’t figure out how to do it. I remember when I was a kid and we used to laugh because our mom had a hard time playing Nintendo with us. I now find myself rapidly turning into my mom. I have no idea how to plug our TVs into the wall and hook them up to the cable, TiVo, and DVD player and now that Adam has an i-phone I can’t figure out how to turn it on much less make an actual phone call with it. But, that being said, since it is Adam’s birthday I can’t really expect him to do this post so here I am attempting it.

Adam is such a great husband and dad. He has a million times more patience with our children than I do (then again my patience is usually almost nonexistent) but his patience is probably the thing at this point in our lives that I appreciate the most. He works hard to provide for our family and we love him to death. Happy birthday!!!

Hey everyone! We’re out in Appleton, Wisconsin enjoying the frigid weather, visiting with family, and the cheese. Yesterday we took the kids to the Appleton Children’s Museum and I must admit, it’s a pretty cool place. There was TONs of stuff to do. I’ll let the pictures below do most of the talking, but on the whole, it was an enjoyable experience. We went fairly early in the day, so for the most part, we could do all the activities without a hundred little monsters trying to push their way ahead or us.

Anyhow, the pictures are below. They were taken on my iphone so the quality isn’t all that great. We have some other pictures from our trips, but they are all across our three digital cameras so I’ll probably get them all together once we get home.

So I finally got around to plugging in our old family PC. He’s been gathering dust for the past six months or so and since we have four other computers, I haven’t been pressed to get him operational. But I finally plugged him in and was able to copy all our family photos off of it and onto our media PC.

Anyways, with Halloween approaching in a few short days, I thought it might be fun to break open the archives and show off Cassie’s first two Halloweens.

2006

In 2006, Cassie was 3 and a half months olds and about as interesting as those flour babies they make you carry around in middle school. So here she is, dressed in a glorified potato sack:

2007

The next year, Cassie was a walking, babbling star. She also was (and still is) quite opinionated, and there is one thing we know for certain: she hated her Halloween costume. For the most part, she screamed and screamed until we took the costume off. Then she happy again.

Tune back in this weekend for Cassie’s and Peter’s latest Halloween adventures!

Sandy came and brought the kids up to my work tonight so that we could drive over to Thanksgiving Point. They’ve got a lot of fun stuff going on right now. We decided to do their Barnyard Boo since Cassie’s still pretty young and we had to lug Peter around.

We did the the Barnyard Boo last year as well with Sam and Jessie for Cadence’s birthday. It’s pretty fun for the little ones. There’s a lot of random activities and lots of animals to look at. It’s fun because Cassie knows how to say the names of all the farm animals, but this is the first time she’s seen them all in person while knowing what they are.

She’s pretty bashful around them, though and she never really wanted to get too close. She also didn’t want to try the pony rides again this year. She just likes to keep her distance and name the animals from afar. She does pretty good with the names and sounds, but for some reason she thinks pigs are really pirate piggies. Weird?!

Cassie and I went to the pumpkin patch at the South Ridge Farms in Santaquin today. It was pretty fun. We took a ‘hayride’ which really means a trailer being pulled by a tractor. The hayride pulled us down through their orchard’s to a pumpkin patch filled with pumpkins of every shape and size. We picked out one for for each member of the Thomson clan.

The weather was pretty cold, enough that we saw a small amount of snow on the hayride. As you can see, Cassie didn’t appear to be enjoying herself at the start. But we bundled up and she did fairly well once we arrived at the pumpkin patch, she cheered up and seemed like she was having a good time.

See more photos below:

After eight years, I’m turning in my final day as a CirclePix employee today. I just wanted to shout out to all my coworkers and say, “Thank you.” It has truly been a joy to be on this adventure with all of you.

I started my CirclePix career in 2000, as a processor. At that time we had around 10 processors to do 200 tours a month. Rob gave me an opportunity to write some scripts that made it possible to do many more tours with just a single processor. I went back to school for a semester, and when I came back to CirclePix, it was to a drastically different company.

Before I left, the company wasn’t huge by any means, but we had dropped from 20 employees all the way down to six. But that small group had me and Greg and Rob and Faleni and Tyler. We all worked extremely hard and we started to see great results. The rest is history.

I’ve had a blast watching this company grow from 100 tours to a thousand tours to 10,000 tours and beyond. We’ve had a lot of great ideas succeed and had a lot of great ideas not work as well, but rain or shine, it was always a great place to come to work. That is a testament to Rob and the family atmosphere he built.

I’ve made countless number of friends over the years. These friends are the most honorable, hard-working, fun loving group of people I’ve ever come across and I can honestly say that I have learned from each of them. They have made me a better worker, a better leader, a better friend, and an overall better person.

I wish all of you at CirclePix the best on your future journeys. The leadership of the company has a really good plan for the next few years, and I’m excited to see that vision executed. Good luck every one and stay in touch.