The concert was amazing and I love Lady Gaga even more now than I did before. My mom had said that we were going to be the oldest people there, but we we far from it. There were people of all ages there, in fact the people sitting next to us were older than us and two of them were doctors. Ken chatted their ears off until the concert started. We were 3 rows from the front, left of center. We were almost directly in front of these mammoth speakers and it was so loud. So loud that after about half way through the first song by the opening act I felt sick to my stomach. The bass was shaking my entire body and it was like it gave me motion sickness. I tried to tell Ken, but of course he couldn’t hear me. A couple of minutes later we seen that people around us were rolling up small bits of napkin and stuffing them in their ears. We did the same and it was perfect. I actually ended up leaving them in the entire concert except for Lady Gaga’s encore.

The opening act was a group called Semi Precious Weapons and they were freaks! This guy was dressed in fishnets and the music was screeching nonsense. Check them out on Youtube if you want to see what I mean. I think they only performed like 3 songs - thank goodness!

Semi Precious Weapons:

Jason Derulo was the second opening act and he was really good. I liked all of his songs a lot, only his dancers that were a little dull.

Lady Gaga was pretty much everything I expected her to be. She sings very well live unlike some other artists who have to lip sync to certain parts of their songs (ahem, Britney Spears). She opened up to a song called Dance in the Dark which is my new favorite song by her. I ended up taking a lot of photos and videos with my tiny little Sony Cybershot. Her dancers made the show, without them it would have not been the same. Lady Gaga’s dancing could use some work, but she was still fun to watch. The music was incredible…even with napkins stuffed in my ears! Ken says he expected a little more shock value beings she always does crazy stuff on TV. It was pretty mellow, I mean she cussed a few times when talking and there was some sexy dance moments and such, but nothing too drastic.

Songs she performed… some have photos, some videos(all my videos were removed due to some violation of their rules…it takes to long to upload them, so sorry, no more videos to share!)

1. Dance in the Dark
2. Just Dance

3. Love Game
4. Alejandro

5. Monster (also a new favorite!)

She was talking during these photos…about how sexy we all think she is :p

6. Teeth (this song is just strange…still don’t like it)

7. Speechless (LOVE it, so emotional)

8. The Fame (don’t really like too much)

9. Money Honey

10. Boys Boys Boys

11. Poker Face
12. Paparazzi (I thought she would have done something crazier for this song. Her outfit was just awkward looking…)

13. Eh Eh - Nothing Else I Can Say (ENCORE)

14. Bad Romance - (ENCORE)

I loved the concert…so glad we got the tickets. As part of our Hot Seat package we also got two pairs of these Lady Gaga Heartbeats Monster headphones that they sell for $100 at Best Buy as well as other places online. I seen tons of people are selling them cheaper on Ebay. We are keeping both of ours, even though they are kinda girly looking.

Lady Gaga was better than Britney, but not quite as good as seeing Coldplay in concert. That has been my favorite concert so far.

There might have been a few more pics I didn’t share here. Check out the set here.

It feels like just yesterday that I was posting a picture of my elliptical and saying that it would be my best friend for 2009. Ha, that sure didn’t happen did it? I don’t typically make New Years resolutions, but I do have some things that I would like to work on this year. Such as cooking my family better meals (less fast food!) and doing some sort of physical activity at least 3 days a week (start small!) Ken has vowed to stop smoking again, lets hope he sticks with it this time. The kids have all promised to be on their best behavior and listen to Ken and I at all times. Yeah right!

For NYE we went to dinner at Sakura’s with a bunch of friends and then we all came back to our house. We had fun just hanging out with everyone.

Many people have done a review of 2009 on their blogs. I thought I would post one too, but I am going to do it a little different and pick what specific entry from the month that I want, rather than picking the first one like others have. If you want to read the entire entry, just click on the read more link after each blurb.

January 2009 - Lucky Day
Yesterday Andrew tried out for a travel baseball team and made it! They actually asked him the day of the tryout to be on their team. Read more….

February 2009 - Superbowl Sunday
We decided not to have a Superbowl party this year…mainly because the bulb in our projector burnt out. Read more…

March 2009 - Some days are better than others
The kids had a half day of school today due to the end of the trimester so I scheduled the 3 younger ones dentist appointments. Read more…

April 2009 - Random Happenings
Is it odd that I enjoy when my youngest two kids ask me silly questions like…When will I get fur on my pee pee? Read more…

May 2009 - Gradulations Day
My baby girl graduated from Preschool. I am glad it is over with. Read more…

June 2009 - All Play and No Work
Our yearly zoo membership expires tomorrow so I thought it would be smart of me to take the kids to the zoo today and then I won’t have to renew our membership until 2010. Read more…

July 2009 - 4th of July
4th of July was pretty low key. Read more…

August 2009 - Vacation Photos
I have such a love-hate relationship with my Canon Rebel Digital camera. Read more…

September 2009 - School Open House
Last night was Open House at the kid’s school. Read more…

October 2009 - Andrew is FOURTEEN!
This past weekend we celebrated Andrew’s 14th Birthday…twice! Read more…

November 2009 - Halloween Photos
A little late, but here are some of our photos from Halloween. Read more…

December 2009 - Trip to Chicago
We had a great time in Chicago earlier this month. Read more…

Here’s to 2010! Wishing you all a year of health and wealth!

Another Christmas come and gone. They sure are coming faster and faster the older I get. This year Christmas came in the blink of an eye. We were so busy remodeling our house and dealing with all the chaos that came along with it, that I barely had a minute to sit back and enjoy the holidays. Usually we have our tree up the beginning of the month and this year we had it up about a week before Christmas. Which unfortunately is the exact reason why the darn thing is still standing as I write this. Ken swears we have always kept the tree up until after New Years, but I say that Call of Duty is beginning to fry his brain. Oh well, two more days and this tree is coming down.

I have quite a few stories to tell about our remodeling project, but let’s save that for another time shall we. The house still has a couple of things to be completed before I share the end result photos. You will see some of the completed work in some of the photos (some photos are from Ken’s brothers house). We went shopping yesterday to buy the tile for the backsplash for the kitchen (why does everyone save this for last?) and Ken got sick during our shopping expedition. All of 6 of us have officially had the flu now. Let this be it for the season, thanks.

This year for Christmas the kids actually slept until 8:30am! The kids opened presents from us and Santa and then my parents came over as well as Don and Emma. We had brunch and the kids opened more presents. Then around 2pm, we all went to Ken’s brothers house to celebrate with his family. They also invited my parents and Don and Emma for dinner. It turned out to be a really nice day, not too rushed, yummy food, and the kids had fun opening presents and playing all day. The day after Christmas we went to my parents house to visit with my mom’s side of the family and my sister came in town too. Her baby girl is such a cutie. I never did get my camera out when we were there because we got side tracked with Emma who had an allergic reaction from something. (Send me some pics of the girls from Christmas Heather, lol!)

Some Christmas presents still have not found a good spot so our house is still a little unorganized. I figure why bother cleaning because the kids just keep getting everything back out anyways. Soon they will be back to school and I will be back to work. I haven’t worked much this month and I am ready to get back into the swing of things. This year has been an amazing year for our family, we are grateful and can’t wait to see what the new year will bring. Happy New Year to Everyone! Thanks for visiting our little spot on the web!

View all of our Christmas Photos Here.

Karli requested to have her nails painted half red and half green.
Sent from my BlackBerry

View all the pictures here!

We had a great time in Chicago earlier this month. It was chilly, but not so much that it wasn’t tolerable. We just had to keep bundled up when we were outside. The drive there went pretty well. The kids didn’t complain at all since they had more room in our new Yukon. It is bigger inside compared to my Acadia, but the trunk space is quite small. We liked that we were driving into Chicago at night…it makes it so much more exciting for the kids since it was their first time there. We stayed in a suite on the top floor (46th) of the Marriott right on Michigan Avenue so we were right by all the shopping. I have no complaints about the hotel, it was very nice. However I did call down to complain that they wanted to charge us an additional $15 a day for internet connection, haha! They gave it to us at no cost after I said we were already paying so much for our room. I wouldn’t even have cared about the internet, but Ken freaks out if he can’t check email at least once a day because of our business. Truth is he was probably worried his mafia would die off or something (from Facebook, nevermind if you don’t know what I am talking about.) We didn’t take our car anyways while we were there. Which the hotel charges $45 a day for parking your car there by the way. Nothing is cheap in Chicago. We took a taxi a few times, like to the Navy Pier, but most of the time we walked everywhere. We did take a horse and carriage ride one night. The kids thought that was pretty cool. We ate at all really good restaurants- Giordano’s, Ditka’s, Rockit Bar and Grill, and Pizza Uno. We did lots of shopping of course! Karli had a blast at the American Girl store and had no idea what we bought for her for Christmas. She also picked out some stuff at the Disney Store. Andrew bought a winter coat at North Face which we allowed him to wear because he was “too cool” to bring his heavy coat to Chicago, but later realized he made a mistake. After we returned home I made him give me the coat and told him it was part of his Christmas presents! Blake and Chase didn’t really get anything big, just some small stuff. I bought my very first Louis Vuitton purse. Well actually it’s not a purse…it’s a Pochette, which is basically like a clutch. I wanted something to carry just my money, credit card, keys, and cell phone around. I’ve joked and said whenever I close my own job I am going to treat myself to a matching purse. My pochette is a Christmas present too. We also went ice skating. The kids all did very well except for Karli. She had a hard time and was either hanging on me or the wall. Chase was a total natural. The funniest and possibly most annoying part of Chicago is the boys all kept doing these “Parkour” tricks. They would jump off walls, benches, etc and yell “Parkour”. The funniest part is the entire time we were in Chicago I thought they were saying Hard Core…not Parkour! LOL! If you watch The Office, you will know where they got this from. If not…here is a clip from You Tube below! We also made a pit stop at the Notre Dame bookstore on the way home and everyone got lots of goodies from there as well.

View all of our Chicago pics here!

I thought I would post some photos from November while I am putting my feet up for a bit.

We have been working super hard on remodeling our kitchen and family room. Today Ken actually printed a calendar for December and we have specific things we need to do every day to get done in time for Christmas. We can’t even put up a Christmas tree yet because we are going to paint next week. I will save all the details of our remodel for another time. I have been taking some pictures to share the progress with everyone eventually. We also just both bought new cars yesterday, which is also another whole story. It’s been crazy busy around here and I keep thinking that our neighbors (hi neighbors!) must think that we robbed a bank or have a drug lab in our basement or something.

We have been extremely thankful that our business has been doing so well in these tough times. We have worked hard this year and we can actually take a breather this month and work on the house and sit back and hope that even more of the docs we have interviewing this month are going to close as well. December is kind of a slow month in this business anyways. Most recently I had been focusing on trying to land my own contract and recruit my own physician, and handle all the details without Ken intervening and it simply did not work out. Either the doc wasn’t a match or things were moving too slow and Ken would end up getting involved. I have been on the phone more often the past couple months than I have in two years and it isn’t that bad. Anyways, maybe I am not meant to be a “sales person”. I have things that I am better at and Ken has his. Together we make physician placements and that is all that should matter. Yes, I wanted to be able to take 100% credit myself for once, but I have stopped being hung up on the idea. So…as our business has grown, we can finally be less stressed about “When is the next job going to close”! We’ve been wanting to remodel our kitchen for two years now and we have patiently waited for things to feel right and let’s be honest - have the money to do so. I can’t wait until it is completed!

November is always nice when all the boys sports come to an end. We enjoy having some free time in the winter months. (Except for years when we take on other projects like remodeling!) Chase also ended up finishing up the month of November of gymnastics and he won’t be going back. The teaching was going so slow and we had spent a lot of money for him to only learn a few things that he didn’t already know. On the days he had practice he would complain and one day I asked him to put his sports in order of favorites. He picked baseball first, then football, then gymnastics. You can’t really be serious about gymnastics and play other sports as well. Of course we could have probably pulled it off for a couple more years, but if he was going to drop out eventually, what would be the point? We decided that maybe in a few years he will have a better judgment of what he really wants to do and may change his mind.

Here is Blake’s football team and a pic of him from his football banquet.

Chase and his flag football team….

Chase turned 7 in November also! He didn’t really want anything for his birthday. These kids are getting harder and harder to buy for! He got lots of money which will be nice for him to have some extra money for Chicago.

We spent Thanksgiving at my parents house. My grandma and two aunts were there with their families as well as Don and my niece Emma. We played Pictionary after dinner which was a lot of fun.

I attempted to get pics of the kids, but of course they were acting like a bunch of monkeys!

Went to delearship to get an oil change for my Acadia and came home with his and her new cars!
Sent from my BlackBerry

Ken brought home a little present for me yesterday!

Sent from my BlackBerry

A little late, but here are some of our photos from Halloween. The kids made it trick or treating through the entire neighborhood, but Karli tired out pretty quickly. She kept laying on the ground resting and ended up skipping some of the houses that the boys went to. The kids seemed to have a hard time sticking together. I had to constantly tell them to wait and slow down. At the end of trick or treating I was thrilled to run into an old friend that moved away a year ago, but came back to visit with everyone. I miss her and her kids so much!

There are more pics at the end of this post, or view the entire set here.

Today Blake’s football team played in a championship game for their league. Unfortunately they lost, but they still won their division which is pretty cool. He had fun this year and really learned a lot and improved quite a bit. He will play as a 2nd year Junior next year and hopefully will get to play a lot more. Chase will have to play flag football one more year, but he can’t wait to get into those pads and tackle. Andrew of course is undecided about whether he will play football his Freshman year, but my guess would be that he will play again next year. I love football season, but a huge part of me is glad it is over and our family can get back to normal and eat healthier dinners and spend more time together in the evenings. Chase will still have gymnastics twice a week.

Sometime this week we are going to look at ceramic tile and granite counter tops for our kitchen. My (ex) brother in law works for a tile and stone company and we are hoping they will give us a good deal if we pick from items that they have in their warehouse. We still have more wallpaper to peel off. I swear this has been the slowest process in history, but now that sports are over I can get Ken to help and we can get things moving along. We need to pick out our floor and counters before we can paint anyways (to pick the right color). It would be awesome if we were done with everything by Christmas! Our kitchen will probably look way out of place compared to rest of our house. But next we plan on redoing the family room.

Ken surprised us with a weekend getaway to Chicago for next month. I’ve been there twice with Ken, but this will be the first time for the kids. I think they will love it with all the Christmas decorations. Our hotel suite is right on the “Magnificent Mile”, which is on N. Michigan Avenue right next to tons of shopping so we can walk rather than hail cabs which would be quite interesting with 6 people. It will probably be freezing outside, unless we get lucky and some of this nice weather sticks around for awhile longer. We will let the kids pick out a few gifts for Christmas and maybe we will find some gifts for family members as well.

Blake said he wanted to be a vampire again this year! Works for me!

Chase had a different mask on at school than he wore for trick or treating.

Some very useful information for Twilight addicts like myself…

Be sure to check out the following shows for guest appearances from the Twilight/New Moon actors! You can guarantee that my DVR will be set for each and every one of these shows.

How many of you have bought your tickets already? I am pretty sure I am still going to wait and see the movie on the 20th during the day…rather than trying to fight the crowds at midnight. I want to see the movie really bad, but I can wait a few more hours. =)

November 11:
Alex Meraz – “Rachael Ray”

November 16:
Kristen Stewart – “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien”
Taylor Lautner – “The Jay Leno Show”
Dakota Fanning – “Ellen”

November 18:
Robert Pattinson – “The Late Show with David Letterman”
Kristen Stewart – “The Today Show” and “Live with Regis and Kelly” and “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon”

November 19:
Robert Pattinson – “The Today Show” and “Live with Regis and Kelly”
Taylor Lautner – “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon”
Dakota Fanning – “The Jay Leno Show”

November 20:
Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner – “Jimmy Kimmel Live” (pre-taped)
Robert Pattinson – “Ellen” (pre-taped)
Taylor Lautner – “The Today Show” and “Live with Regis and Kelly”

November 23:
Ashley Greene – “The Late Show with David Letterman”
Michael Sheen – “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson”

November 24:
Ashley Greene – “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon”

November 25:
Peter Facinelli – “Jimmy Kimmel Live”

December 2:
Nikki Reed – “Jimmy Kimmel Live”

December 3:
Ashley Greene – “Jimmy Kimmel Live”