Dec 17, 2009 | Holidays |
The Great Christmas Shopping of 2009 has officially begun.
Grandma and I braved the chilly wind yesterday afternoon for our somewhat annual shopping trip together. On a scale of 1-10, it would have rated only about a 6 for level of success, but up in the high 9’s for eventfulness. We stopped at Joann’s first where I only spent about 12 minutes deciding which beads to buy. I think it ranks up there as the shortest time I’ve ever spent in that aisle. Way back in early November I bought a beautiful silver pendant to put on a handmade necklace for Erika’s gift. It was going to be THE gift of the year. So good that I had no desire to think up a Plan B because there would be NO NEED. No need except when the whole gift failed and I had no Plan B to fall back on. To make a long and tragic story short, I returned to the drawing board{aka the craft store}, and returned victorious with an even better idea: I would make her dangly earrings instead. I am praying{seriously, I really am}that they will come out well as its almost Christmas and, once again, I haven’t made other plans if this gift fails too. I guess I don’t learn from previous mistakes very well. *
As we were preparing to head to the next store, we discovered that Grandma’s car wouldn’t start. What could have been a tragic 5 o’clock news story of two Christmas shoppers stranded in a parking lot in the freezing cold with NOTHING TO EAT{the news people like to over-dramatize}, made us burst into fits of laughter over the whole thing. We called my uncle for advice{her car is a fancy Hybrid so I just was just about no help at all}and five minutes after we asked him to rescue us, the car started when Grandma pushed the unlock{of all things}button on her remote. That made us start laughing again{I don’t really know why},and we were barely got back to our dignified selves before going into the next store. All in all it was a very entertaining afternoon.
***
Tomorrow I’m babysitting the twins and their big sister Keegan. I’m so happy because I haven’t seen them in forever and ever over a month and I know they are going to have grown so much…maybe even rolling over, laughing and pulling hair! It will be the first time I watch all three of them but I’m excited about it. The more the merrier!
As a side note, I’ve been wanting baby carrier/sling lately to use with the twins and OH LOOK! theres a giveaway!
Dec 15, 2009 | Holidays |
Welcome to our Christmas home!
This is the first year we’ve used this lantern as a Christmas decoration and I love the way it looks. It was so easy to set it on cotton and wrap pine and fresh holly around the bottom. I think it looks very elegant too.
After the tragedy if having to leave real trees behind for fake{translation: not real at all}a few years ago, the tree and I have come to terms and decided to be friends. Not best friends, just friends. Real or fake, its always exciting to see how beautiful and different the tree will be every year when all the lights and decorations are on.
If you know me at all, you know that I love 1) stars 2) silver and 3) anything sparkly. That pretty much sums up my feelings about our tree topper.
This is my Baby’s First Christmas horse; my very favorite of all our tree decorations and the one I put on first every year. As much as I love it, I don’t know if I’ll be able to take it with me for my own tree when I have my own house because the tree “at home” wouldn’t seem the same without it!
We take our mantle decorating very seriously. We’ve had many different, shall we say, ideas and themes that have shown up over the years, but we alw
ays have up the church, house, and little tiny people. One year Aaron put up his little green Army men at strategic battle locations throughout the landscape which was really a strech , but I allowed* them only in honor of our friends serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The snowmen in the back have been given as gifts over the years and we usually try to buy atlest one new figurine a year.
* The “I allowed” is used in the sense of ‘the amount of power the big sister who is the chief Christmas decorator’ yields.
Notes:
* The glass vase filled with the pretty red and gold ornaments started out as an ornament wreath about two weeks ago. After repeated tries and failures, I decided to simply put the ornaments into the vase thereby making just about the easiest possible decoration ever.
* I made wreath in the top right using Christmas tags from gifts Daniel and Erika gave us last year. They were to pretty to throw away so I hot glue-gunned them to a wreath form of some sort{thats just the type of concrete fact I’m known for}I bought at Michaels. I really like it because its different from any of the Christmas decor we already had.
* The bobble head baseball player standing on the rooftop is Luis Gonzalez, coming to you straight from the Cheerios box about eight years ago. He really has served no purpose in our household at all but we’ve had him for so long now we wouldn’t know what to do without him. Feel free to snicker about that last sentence. And so he generally resides on the piano, the mantle, or where ever else he is in the way likes. Someone thought he’d look good up on the roof and while I took him off to take a good picture of the mantle, I thought we should have atlest one picture of him to pass on to future generations. After all, Christmas is made of memories like that.
Thanks so much for stopping by; I hope you’ve enjoyed our Christmas home! I hope your Christmas will be a happy, beautiful, joyful time filled with all the people and things you love, and with the memory of why we really celebrate Christmas!
And I even hope it will be filled with stars, silver and sparkly things too. ♥
Christmas is forever, not for just one day,
for loving, sharing, giving, are not to put away
like bells and lights and tinsel, in some box upon a shelf.
The good you do for others is good you do yourself…
~Norman Wesley Brooks, “Let Every Day Be Christmas,” 1976
Dec 11, 2009 | Holidays |
Its been one extreme or the other when it comes to Christmas trees around here. Thanksgiving marked that day I decorated the largest tree ever, and Tuesday will go down in history as the Day of the Smallest Tree(mark your calenders, it was December 8th). Mrs Becker and I spent the afternoon together and created more memories and stories that will be passed down to the next generations. We also created this lovely Christmas tree:
When I got home and told Dad we decorated her tree, he said “I saw it and you could probably only fit about six ornaments on it”. That may be the case for regular decorators, but not for the originators, creators, and founders of the Day of the Smallest Tree.
Mrs Becker didn’t have a star or angel for the top, so I used this little Hummingbird instead. It was really very appropriate for her because she and her husband(our pastor who died in April)love birds.
I would love to have jewelry fashioned after this ornament. Maybe someday when I have my own jewelry making business, or am married to a really rich man who will special order it for me, I will. I’ll be sure to keep you updated if when that day arrives. : )
Dec 8, 2009 | Holidays |
I feel so behind with everything Christmas.
I’ve been working so hard(translation–getting to bed after 1:00 just about every night)at my school the last two weeks with the goal of finishing it all by last Friday so I would have three full weeks to prepare for and enjoy Christmas. Very sadly, I didn’t quite reach that goal so I’ve been a little discouraged. I had *big* plans for all the projects and the decorating I would be starting today so its hard to put it off just a little longer. I’ve been so tempted to just start everything RIGHT NOW, but I know I’ll never get back to the school if I do that. I LOVE this time of year and I hate feeling like I’m losing any of this precious time. On the upside, I only have a little bit left so I’m hopeful I’ll be completely finished by the end of this week at the latest and all the Christmas wonderfulness can begin!! (Unless of course, those essays decided to be difficult which is totally possible based on past experience.)
I have been able to do a few things that made me feel better and more Christmasy:
* decorated the mantle
* watched the original, aka the BEST, How the Grinch Stole Christmas
* began making an ornament wreath with Dad
* went to the Messiah on Saturday
Daniel and Erika meet us at the Messiah and who do you think they had with them?! Dani! I was so excited to see her; it was almost like a Christmas present. She graduated from the music department there so she know a couple people just about everyone that walked by which made her “very, very excited!”.
Is anyone else doing this? 
I think I will be. Hopefully we’ll have all our decorations up by then and since I’m guaranteed to be to photographing them anyways, and almost guaranteed to be be posting them, I think it would be fun. Even if I don’t, I can get lots of ideas from seeing others decorations!
Tomorrow I’ll hopefully be helping Mrs Becker, a friend from church, decorate her adorable little itty bity Christmas tree. Every little Christmas thing that I am able to do gives me a little more motivation to NOT give up on my school, and to remember everything that makes this time of year so wonderful.
Dec 2, 2009 | Holidays |
I’ve been so busy with school that I haven’t even had the chance to do a Thanksgiving day post. My OCDness is somewhat stressing me out because its already December and I HAVEN’T FINISHED WITH NOVEMBER YET. But onto Thanksgiving.
Mom wrote a Fruit of the Spirit on each Clementine we had in our centerpiece and Elizabeth promptly decided that “goodness is my middle name”. Apparently humility is not.
By far the biggest excitement of the day was going over to Daniel and Erika’s for our first holiday celebration with them as a married couple. To make a long story short(which by the way, my family thinks I’m incapable of doing),Daniel and Erika bought her parents house from them as they’re moving to SC in January. Daniel moved in after the wedding so currently all four of them, plus Gramma H, are living at the house(Wesley’s out at college). So not only was it Daniel and
Erika’s first holiday in that house, it was her parents last. It was so nice to be there for both of those, but even nicer that we could all be together as a new family. Just us with no one else
around so we could all really visit with each other.
They did a beautiful job with the table and made us all cute little place cards. Daniel insisted that we turn our place card around so that “everyone else at the table will know who we are”. Apparently he forgot that we all know each other very well, and just possibly 6 of the 11 other people at the table lived with him for 20 some odd years. The illogical thoughts that sometimes come from the mouth of a biomedical engineer are truly staggering.
Before dinner we helped decorate The Christmas Tree. Apparently there are very specific methods to decorating at 12ft.{fake}Christmas tree: colored lights and red-and-white striped candy lights go on first; shiny colored balls are then strategically placed deep inside the tree in spots that will catch the most light; only then can you move onto putting up the “real” decorations. I don’t thinks its an exaggeration to say that that tree has about 500 decorations hanging on it. It was so much fun looking at all their decorations. We spent half the time saying to each other “look at this one!!”.
The completed tree in all this glory.
After the younger generation play Pictionary while the older talked politics in the living room, we joined forces to play our traditional Thanksgiving game of Trivial Pursuit. I feel it should be stated that the boys team had much easier questions then the girls: “what is the largest sea animal?”, “what animal lays the largest egg?” We got questions like “who was the mayor of Chicago in 1935?” We then finished off the day by watching a slide show of the wedding pictures. A lovely end to a lovely day.
“Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest man it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow.” ~Edward Sandford Martin
Nov 26, 2009 | Holidays |
B- babies,butter(I really am thankful for it!), Barney Fife, books, baseball, blogs and the blog friends I’ve made, brothers
C- church, cousins, children, the children I call mine, craft stores, colors, cd’s to listen to on long car rides, Christmas lights, clothes,coffee
D- Daniel, Dad, Dr Suess stories, daisies
E- Erika, Elizabeth, Emma(the new movie)
F- faith, family, friends, forever and always faithful friends, fun, always having food, fabric, fuzzy socks, flowers
G- grandparents, game nights with Autumn and Joanna, Gerber daisies
H- Mr and Mrs H. and Grandma H.(Erika’s parents and grandmother), hugs, hot chocolate on snowy days, my home, happy days, hearing
I- cookie dough ice cream, Ibuprofen
J- jewelry, Josh Groban(more specifically,his music), jelly
K- Katie~who becomes more special every day, Kashman(yes,that’s his real name), Kim~who makes me laugh every Thursday
L- laughter,love, the gift of life, Lindt chocolate truffles
M- Mom, music, memories, the moments that take our breath away and make our lives beautiful, midnight chats, Molly, Morning Glorys
N- New England, nature, the Navy
O- the ocean, oranges, ostrich feathers,Oreos, outer space, the O’s~ Katie’s family that I can never get enough of
P- photography, the piano, pansies, pretty papers, surprise packages in the mail
Q- Quaint and Quirky(I am especially thankful that I thought of something that begins with Q!)
R- reading, rivers, rabbits
S- sisters, sunflowers, sunsets, sleep(oh, how I love you), Skittles, Spring and Summer, school(even though I sometimes feel overwhelmed and unmotivated), scrapbooking, sewing, Spellchecker, sight
T- tiaras, tea, the troops who defend us, Thursday night card games with Grandma
U- United States of America
V- volunteering at the preschool and childrens hospital, vacations
W- Wesley~our “step brother in law” extraordinaire, waltzing, fresh water everyday, the beyond beautiful wedding, wise councilors, waterfalls
X- the X-ray that showed Elizabeth did not have internal bleeding after her fall off the roof(Whats that? I didn’t tell you that story?)
Y- teams that a beat the Yankees
Z- Zachary, the zoo(because I still like to go there)
