Moran Family Fun

Madison is seventeen! I know it shouldn't be surprising and it's probably a little silly to say, but really, wasn't she just three years old? Somehow she grew up and instead of playing with toys she's studying for the SAT and our mailbox is filled with letters from different colleges every day.  It's special but also a little sad to watch your kids grow up. We were in Pennsylvania visiting the Kennedys on Madison's birthday so we were lucky enough to be able to have them join in the birthday fun.  It was nice to have their amazing musical abilities singing along on the birthday song!  Her list of birthday wishes was pretty simple:  cheesecake for dessert, a new belt, a silver necklace, mechanical pencils, and pocket sized editions of the Lord of the Rings books.  One thing we love about Madison is her practicality - she would never ask for something off the wall like a pet monkey!  We're so lucky to have Madison in our family; she's i...

Can you believe it's been six years since I started this little blog? The time really has flown by for our family. Initially I started this as a way to keep our family and friends in the States up to date on our life in Germany.  We had a couple of family members and friends with blogs and I really liked the idea of having a place to have a family journal of sorts online so I decided to give it a try. I don't know how much everyone out there cares about our blog or the mundane things our family is up to, but it's been so great for me to have a place to write, share, and remember.  I love going back and reading about the everyday things that sometimes get lost along the way. Everyone remembers the big events - vacations, birthdays, holidays - but it's those little day to day adventures that get lost in time.  I thought I'd just share some statistics today as a way to look back over the last six years. 17,788 pageviews - mostly from IP addresses in the US, but Germ...

Something about this time of year makes me feel like sewing. I think it's a combination of the extra time I have because the kids have gone back to school from their Christmas break and the cold weather that makes me want to live like a hermit in our house. Whatever the reason, my sewing machine and I have been BFFs lately and the result has been a bunch of handmade items ready to be enjoyed. First up was a baby blessing outfit for our new nephew/cousin Ethan Brandley. I made the pants using the Big Butt Baby Pants pattern from made-by-rae.com It's a pattern I've made before, I think for another Brandley baby, and it's a fairly quick sew with really great results. I used a cotton fabric from Joann that looked like silk dupioni with a really nice silkiness to the wrong side of the fabric and a more matte feeling to the right side. I used a soft white flannel for the panel on the bum of the pants. The vest was made using this pattern I found on etsy. The only real...

My memory of my childhood is sometimes spotty, especially on the specifics, but I do have fond memories of exploring in the woods after school from the time I was seven or eight until I was around eleven and I decided I was too old to play in the woods anymore. If I wasn't off gathering pinecones in the woods I was roaming the neighborhood playing with friends or hanging out at the playground. Okay, there is a point to all this happy reminiscing. Across the street from our house is a community park where the girls occasionally have their own after school adventures and on the other side of the park is a sort of forest - not enough trees to be a real forest, but too many to really call it anything else. The kids just call it the woods. Earlier this month Natalie noticed a little path and a bridge heading into the woods and she immediately started lobbying me to let her go "on an adventure" in the woods. After a couple of days I finally gave in and we ventured into the...

As I was organizing one of our bedrooms earlier this week the thought came to me that it was the six month anniversary of our departure from Germany. I know it's not really an occasion to celebrate, but sometimes dates really stick in your mind, you know? I keep thinking that to really feel like Maryland is our home I should probably stop talking about/missing/wishing we'd never left Germany. I'm sure it doesn't make the people around here feel too hot that we keep saying things like, "Back in Germany..." So I thought I'd list some things that we are enjoying about life in Maryland to add a little balance and perspective. Convenience. We still live pretty far from everything and many of the places we go are a half hour drive away but we are still enjoying 24-hour gas stations where we can pay at the pump, grocery stores that are open until midnight, streaming TV without a VPN, Target, and fabric stores. I'll freely admit that the last one is mos...

A few days before the New Year Jared mentioned that we could have a bonfire on New Year's Eve. Natalie jumped at the idea and would not let it go so we definitely had to have the bonfire. I wasn't sure how we were going to make it happen since Jared was scheduled to work that evening and I stink at making fires, but then Jared called around 6:30 to say he was on his way home and the plans for a fire were a go. Hooray! At first the only person who was really excited about the whole thing was Natalie, but the rest of the girls warmed up (figuratively and literally) and started to have fun after a little while. See the fun they're having? All it takes is some fire and a little bit of silliness. This is my new favorite picture of our lovely Madison I snapped this photo of Emily, Samantha, and Natalie right after they finished up a pretty epic fire dance that included shouting in both Japanese and English. I felt bad for our poor neighbors. Abigail felt kin...

We had a pretty wonderful day this past Saturday. We had all of Jared's family here visiting and we also had two of my sisters and their families come to visit.  There was a great reason for all of this family togetherness - Natalie was being baptized! She has been looking forward to her baptism for a long time and for the past month or so has invited anyone she meets to come to her baptism. We are so grateful that Natalie chose to be baptized and that she was as excited about her choice as we were! I'm also feeling grateful that this little white dress somehow made it through five girls and two transatlantic moves in one piece and still looks somewhat decent! Of all our children, Natalie was the least nervous/most excited about her baptism. She was ready to jump right in before the font was even filled. Well almost ready, she wasn't took happy about Jared pretending to throw her in! Because the baptism was just two days after Christmas, we weren...