Christmas Tradition

One of our Christmas traditions is to walk into one of the most decked out Christmas stores we can find, and walk around until our eyes are glazed over and we can't take one more minute of holiday cheer.

A store where we can turn around every corner and find ornament displays that beckon us with their candy colors in every possible shape you can think of.


I want to eat them up they look so yummy. Maria and I took a picture of our selves in front of the poinsettia tree.

What am I going to do when the day comes that she maybe doesn't want to do this with mom anymore??

Every table top was covered in some sort of insane cuteness and holiday themed cheer. After only 30 minutes of being there, I think I was high on peppermint and fir. I was convinced I too could go home and create anything with a little moss, hot glue and poinsettia leaves.

I was also convinced that I could hang brightly colored garland ever so perfectly and come up with this:

Some things were just a bit ridiculous. How big of a tree would you need for this ornament?

Perhaps we should go with just one color, and make a winter wonderland out of our greenhouse...I mean living room, with snow owls and penguins.

We oohed and ahhed over every little item- especially the tiny villages.

By the end, we even thought the upside down tree, decorated in an aquatic theme was pretty. That's how brainwashed we were. Who doesn't need a pink metal flamingo at the base of their tree?

I can't even tell if there is a tree under all of these decorations:

But I do know what someone wants from Santa this year!

For her to NEVER get any older, for her to always think shopping with Mom is the bomb and for her to live in my pocket where we can go everywhere together.

Yes, we had a Christmas

I have been remiss about posting Christmas pictures because I have been lazy. Lazy, okay? I said it. Now karma is biting me in the butt because I keep trying to edit these photos and the edits are not saving. So you are going to have to overlook the red eye, the dim light and the un-cropped chaos that was our Christmas.

Here is my elf.

Santa lets me keep her down here all year long. I think sometimes that Santa is either trying my patience or testing my sanity. It's ok though, she is pretty cute.

This is unbridled joy as my teenager opens her gift from Grandma (who she calls Emma) and realizes that she has the best Emma in the WHOLE WORLD. She looks over at Emma with the "Oh my GAAAWWWWD! No you DIDN'T!" look.

Isabelle has just opened a new kindle. Her hearts desire.

I would like to point out that she had no such expression upon opening any of the gifts from her parents. Emma just kicked our ass.

I can't wait to be a grandparent and do this to Isabelle.

This is a whoppee cushion. It made be giggle and cry and hold my stomach. It was funny.

This is 2 brothers getting as much enjoyment from a whoppee cushion as they would have had they been 10 and 12. Go figure. But since they are 35 and 37, they made the baby sit on it. But, they laughed just as hard -if not harder. Especially since the baby would yell "Excuuuuuuse ME!".

(yes, he is 3 and I call him a baby, I am sure he appreciates this)

This is my ham. She opened an actual book. OMG, actual books get big kudos as well e-books in our house.

This is what I felt like after having 4 rounds of opening gifts in 2 days.

Post Christmas Fun

I have been reluctant to post anything because I just feel at a loss for words. I think it is called Writer's Block. Although I am not really a writer, let's just pretend and call it that.

Ok, now that we have that out of the way, we have been having all sorts of crazy old fashioned fun around here. Take for instance, that we just removed the 3,452 ornaments from the tree and covered the kitchen table with them. Now we are going to see how long they will sit there before they pack themselves into the attic. This should be good because Morrie is about to eat lunch and has nowhere to eat it.

We started off the week by getting up early and going to work. Oh, wait, that was just me. Everyone else stayed tucked in their cozy warm beds. Then they got up late and met me at my office, saw the other 3 people who were working with me, and THEN we left and vacation started at exactly 12:31pm Monday afternoon. We took the kids out to lunch at a sports bar where we could all watch Arsenal beat Chelsea for the first time in...well...forever. Then we poked around the SAM gift shop because the line was waaaay to long to wait in for the actual museum part. Everything is pretty much on postcards and whatnot in the gift shop, so it was totally the same as walking around in the gallery.

We walked in the rain- to the kids horror- down to Pike Place and watched fresh donuts being made, fish being thrown and trinkets being sold. With Isabelle's new found love of cooking, we perused the shelves at Sur La Table. By "perused" I mean squeezed our way around the other 56 people in the tiny shop and looked at the shelves from 3 inches away as we tried to not block the walkways. It was fun. And by "fun" I mean people were in my personal bubble of space and I broke out in a cold sweat.

After a few movies we woke up and it was only Tuesday. The girls went shopping with Grandma and I dragged Morrie to the mall for some returns. He loved it. Really. We picked up the girls and needed some refreshments and of course that meant a trip to the bakery. Duuuuh. Donuts make the world go round.

Wednesday was the most exciting because I was able to play pinball!! We went bowling, ate greasy hamburgers and played pinball and more pinball in the arcade. Our standards are very low for what makes a good afternoon. We have raised our kids right.

"Wait!" you say, "where is the learning?". It's okay, we took them to the Museum of History and Industry yesterday and made them read all sorts of facts about our area. Isabelle had been begging to go, and because we encourage everything that I like, we went. Morrie was particularly interested in the "Purse and the Person" traveling exhibit regarding the history of the purse. I told him to pretend they were Eurpoean Carry-Alls, but he walked out faster than a greyhound chasing a rabbit. I think he had smelled the presence of a Hydroplane and had to go check it out.

I plan on watching tv for the next 72 hours, so please don't call. I will be watching very important reruns of old tv shows, movies on TBS that I have seen 53 times and Oprah's new network shows. I am verrrry excited about this. I will be watching from my room where we have installed FLEECE sheets because they are the best invention EVER made. The bed is always warm and ever so soft. We are still trying to kick the kids out and we told the cats to not throw up on them, but other than that it has been great.

Happy New Year!

Lessons Learned

I have learned some valuable lessons recently. I learned that if you get all your shopping done early and things seem to be going really well, then you will definitely land in the emergency room with a case of pneumonia- thus thankful that the shopping is done- but wondering if you had left it, would you still end up sick?

I learned that little hands make cute iamges.


I learned that if your star is too heavy for the top of your tree, it will just fall right on OVER.

I learned that the cat and dog will sit together on the same couch, but the cat may not necessarily enjoy it as much as the dog.

I learned that giving birth to elves was the right thing to do.

But, they sure think everything is funny.

I learned that when I wanted to create a Christmas card and then realized that I failed to take many pictures of the girls together...ever...all year...that I would have to find some other image to represent the two of them.

Hmmm...I don't know if this is the right one...Isabelle doesn't usually wear hats.




I have also learned that Santa is sometimes peeking in on us from the least expected places.

Be good!

Neices are great!

We were so glad to have Sam home at Thanksgiving, it had been far tooooo long since we had seen her last. She had the nerve to go away to college, Gonzaga no less - which I am sure my kids will now idolize and expect me to cough up the change to get them there! This is right after she walked in the door!

Maria was awfully glad to have her back as well.

This is Sam's "before" photo. This is on December 23rd, when she was feeling pretty goood. She was a seasoned college person, and had triumphed over her first trimester and had loads of gifts in front of her to open!

This is Sam's "after" photo. It was taken the evening of December 24th, when she felt pretty yucky. I don't even have a picture of her on the 25th, because she felt sooo yucky she couldn't even open her gifts. This is what our Christmas was like. We all looked ok on the 23rd, and by the 25th several members of our clan had fallen ill.

By yesterday, the 28th, we had 10 of the 17 family members struck down with the flu. It was not exactly what we all planned on when we decided to get together for the first time in years- for Christmas. Next year, maybe we'll just meet in August.

Balls!

Well, I did a whole post about decorating and somehow blogger decided it wasn't good enough and erased it. Shoot. However, I do have one story left that I didn't tell earlier. Last year when I packed up all the ornaments, I was SUPER organized. Each container was packed in precision like manner. When the lid was lifted off this year, a large peice of paper said "Maria's Ornaments", or Isabelle's Ornaments", or "Family Ornaments", or "Balls". That way the girls would immediately know which box was their's and spend 45 minutes opening it without complaints of "Where is my Reindeer/Star/Santa/Etc ornament?????".

Well, needless to say the children were SO excited that they ripped the lids off the containers and grabbed the first package out of it and started unpacking. My beautiful signs drifted to the floor like some forgotton toy from "Toy Story". It took a whole day for my husband to notice a peice of paper laying around that said "balls". FYI, he is very, very sick, normally his radar would have picked up on it within 15 seconds. I look up from the computer and he has it conviently placed with a grin on his face. Then he staggered back to the couch and and said something that sounded like a 12 year boy (normal) whose voice is cracking (not normal, result of nasty cold).