Merry Christmas!

Hey everyone! We're back home and we're going to kick off the New Year in a few hours. Our Christmas vacation was a wonderful time for family, relaxation, and of course...food. We flew in on Saturday the 22nd meeting up with everyone to surprise Sarah's mom. She thought that we wouldn't be able to make it until after Christmas. It was a great idea that the girls schemed up months ago.

Despite the ever fearful trend caused by global warming, we enjoyed a beautiful white Christmas. We saw about 12 inches of snow for the whole week. This allowed us to display our prowess in such gentlemanly sports as sledding, tubing, snowball war, king of the snow hill, and the ever favorite...slam the other guy's face into fresh powder.

Of course, we brought the cameras to capture the moments. Here are some of the highlights. For the entire collection, visit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cross-photo/sets/72157603596211095/show/

Oh BABY!!!

That's right, our first pictures...kind of. Sarah is due July 9th, we are both very excited. Enjoy!

Thanksgiving - Jacksonville

We just got back from Jacksonville on Saturday night. We had tons of fun. Greta cooked us up a storm. Heather and Chris were so great to host us all in their house.We loved seeing the boys, man... have they grown. Here are some pictures.

B-Course Graduation

Here are some pictures from Ryan's graduation. We were glad to have both of our parents in town for the big weekend. We had a non-stop, fun packed weekend as we showed off our "new" home and surroundings. Sarah got to taxi in the back seat of the F-16 on Friday. It was a great opportunity to snap a couple of photos. We also went to Marley Park that weekend to get some family photos taken. Enjoy!

Carpenters

Just a sneak peak at what we are creating in the wood shop....What will it be??

Anthony's wedding

We recently flew out to Anthony Felix's wedding in Austin, TX. What a fun time! It was a reunion of all sorts. The top picture is "Team Ryan" back together again. The next picture is the Cross's enjoying the Texas humidity, and the last one is the old OCF gang with Lt. Colonel Falconer. Thanks again Anthony and Joy for inviting us. It was absolutley beautiful. God bless you two in your life together.

Halloween Party

So last night Ryan's squadran had a Halloween party. Costumes mandatory!! We dressed up as bikers....obviously bikers who had a mis-communication. The plan was to be SNL Cheerleader, but we couldn't find the costumes. Perhaps next year!

Ryan Finishes The B-Course

On Friday, Ryan had his last B-Course Flight with the Tops Dogs. We will celebrate his graduation on November 2.

Lady Crud Tournament

Friday night was the big night for the Lady Top Dogs. We had our annual Ladies Crud Tournament at the Officers Club. No, we didn't win, but we had a lot of fun and came in second place. This picture was taken with my good friend Emily Larson. Check out those sassy dog collars.

Gilbert Engagement!

Last weekend we took engagement pictures for Corey and Susana. The weather was perfect, the sunset was awesome, and we had a lot of fun taking pictures for them. We tried to make it as painless as possible...standing barefoot on rocks is nothing, right guys?

We are super excited about their pictures and have included several of them in this post. If you want to see all of them you can go to: http://www.gilbert.photoherald.com/

Sedona/Assignment!

This past Saturday we took a quick drive up to Sedona. We hiked around a little, enjoyed the 80 degree temperatures, ate some food, and took a couple of pictures.

Also, we got our assignment on Sunday night. We're going to Misawa, Japan. We're very excited to see another part of the world and get to enjoy the sights, sounds, and culture of Japan.

July 4th

We took a break from the heat of Arizona earlier this month to go to Scottsbluff for the July 4th weekend. It was a wonderful and relaxing trip. We both had a ton of fun with the whole family there. We played golf, went to the pool, ate lots of great food, played ligretto, went to some movies, raced go carts, conducted our own fireworks display, and a ton of other fun things. We were having so much fun that we almost forgot to take any pictures while we were there. Here are a couple of our favorites from the trip.

Solo!

So this post is a little...or a lot overdue. So I had my solo flight June 5. Sarah was able to go out on the flight line and take pictures of me. We've been pretty busy since then and I haven't had a chance to update the blog. So here's a quick update with a couple of pictures. The first is me getting ready for engine start and the second is the Top Dog salute as I'm taxiing out.

The "wild" West

So we got into town April 9th (close to midnight). We got into the house no problem, but we lacked a couple of necessities...electricity, water, etc. So we slept on a mattress that we found in our garage and woke up on Tuesday to get to work. The movers showed up in the morning and dropped everything off. Luckily, Sarah's Aunt and Uncle live about 45 minutes from here and gave us a hand over the next couple of days.

On Saturday, when most of the "fun" was over, we drove up to Wickenburg for some outdoor fun with Rob, Holly, and Helen Marie. We went hiking near Vulture's Peak and enjoyed the sights. The terrain was awesome, the horses were fun, and we even had a close call with a true Arizona diamondback rattlesnake. No, I didn't get any pictures of the snake. I wish that I did, but it wasn't the first thought that came to my mind. Afterwards we went back to Rob and Holly's for dinner. We talked and ate, we ate some more, we ate dessert and talked, then made some more dessert and talked. We finally left just before midnight and drove back to the Valley. Thanks for the day of fun guys!

Rewind

So we've been a little busy lately so it's time to rewind the tapes a little bit and catch everyone back up that actually reads this. I'm not really sure how many people do read this...ok, so here's the deal, if you read this before May 13th (our 1-yr anniversary), send us an email at crazycrossfamily@gmail.com ...if you don't want to do that, leave a quick comment on here.

Just humoring myself and assuming that I have an audience, here we go. In March we took pictures of the Haynes and the Browns. I'm sure we wrote something about taking their pictures earlier, but we didn't show any pictures. So here are the pictures, enjoy!

We're BACK!

We're up and running in lovely Phoenix, Arizona!

Yes we have some pictures...no they're not going in this post. We haven't taken them off the camera yet. Details of our time here will come later as well. First, we must recap the past.

So the cruise was a good time. We met two families, the Ryan's and the Clabeaux's. We spent lots of time hanging out with them and roughing the ports of call with a sort of reckless abandon. The quick break down on the ports of call...

Jamaica was pretty, but it was pretty expensive to go on the tour to Dunn's River Falls. We hired a cab with the Ryan's and we were off. The falls were $15/person to get in and if you take a guide, you'll hold hands with people all the way up...not cool. We chose not to take a guide and had a good time following Sarah as she blazed the trail up the falls. As you leave the falls, you are sent through the gauntlet of high pressure sales from the "poor" locals...again, not cool. Afterwards we hit a "local" place to eat and were charged over $20 for food that was maybe worth $5. Then we hit a local beach and played around before we had to call it a day.

Grand Cayman was very pretty, but it can be well summed up if you simply call it a tourist trap. The redeeming part was going to the Courtyard Marriot beach and walking up the beach 200 yards around the corner to have the beach virtually to ourselves. It was fun to splash around and do some snorkeling, but the real fun began when Mike saved the day and picked up some ice cold beer at the local liquor store.

Cozumel rocked. We (Clabeaux's this time) hired a taxi for the afternoon and he took us to the East side of the island (away from 95% of the cruise line passengers) and to this awesome beach area where we spent a good portion of the day. As things would have it, we ran into the Ryan's there. We took a bunch of pictures at this beach because it was so pretty. When taxi time was running out we took a tour of the rest of the island and got dropped off to do some shopping.

I could probably write a couple more pages about the trip, but its getting late, I'm tired, (insert lame excuse #3 here), and you just want to see the pictures anyway. So here are a couple of our favorites, enjoy!