Amazing that a year has gone by since this little guy entered our lives. He is nothing that we could have expected and more than we could have ever imagined. What a dream come true.

Christi sure can make cakes. She made this beautiful one for our budding artist who turned 6 on the 17th of January. Complete with a real paintbrush!

The craft party was a big hit and all the kids had a great time making pop-beads, capsters, and other various crafts.

Lucas got hit in the head twice by the pinata. Once by me, swinging the thing around, and and once by Christi who dumped the whole thing on his head. Happy Birthday.

Micah is growing like a weed so we decided to slow him down a bit.

Check out this monster! Jacob hooked this 9.5 pound catfish on the last cast of our trip. The largest fish of any kind to be caught in this lake (as far as we know). Jacob had been determined to catch a catfish the whole trip and had been coming up empty. As you can see from the photo it was nearly pitch dark and he was still out there fishing (with me by his side).

I had just declared that I had to go inside because I was freezing and Jacob was ready to hang it up as well. Suddenly his bobber rocketed under the surface and his pole got hit hard. He was so stunned he couldn’t speak when I asked him what was going on. He started reeling like crazy but the fish kept on getting further away. I had to help him out a bit to bring it to shore and I honestly thought we would lose it because it was too big for the gear.

But having done a little bit of deep sea fishing on a Mexico trip a number of years ago, I somehow was able to get it to shore. Granddaddy had to pick it up with two hands and carry it ashore.

We thought it might be too big to taste good. But it was delicious! Honestly some of the best catfish I ever tasted. Helps when you eat it within about an hour of catching it!

A great finish to a really fun holiday trip.

Amazingly, we added this extension to the old dock in just 3 days. The dock makes a “T” shape now and extends another 8 feet. Christi’s brother Michael was no help at all as we slaved with hammers and nails for 72 straight hours. Michael would just stand over us laughing and eating donuts.

In any case, we are very proud of the new dock and looking forward to catching the monster catfish that you can see boiling up on the right side of this picture.

The Crump & Dysart kids were great all weekend and had a ball playing outdoors on this summery winter’s day. (Oh yeah… the pizza was great too)

The weather for our Texas trip this Christmas and into the New Year has been the best. Days have been in the 70s and 80s and the evenings have been cool and beautiful.

I took this shot on New Years Day as the sky was filled with color and the sun descended on our dock building project. We have seen some of the most amazing sunsets on this trip.

This was taken from the far side of the lake and you can see that the water level is very low from the hard drought that is hitting Texas hard.

Always a smile from this boy. Even though he doesn’t sleep, he is an angel to the core.

Here is crazy Jacob as Napoleon Dynamite on Halloween.