5 years ago

5 years ago today, I had cold feet. Literally. They were muddy too.
But I didn't have cold feet, figuratively. Happy 5th anniversary, Eric! I'll save everyone the mushiness. I made Eric a photo book, so he's already read that stuff :-).

Merry Christmas!

Make a Smilebox greeting

Trauma for Kaylin

As if taking Kaylin sledding wasn't bad enough, we made her go here:

Looks cute and harmless, right?

Wrong! Apparently talking about Santa for days on end and telling Kaylin that he would bring her presents and give her candy wasn't good enough. Kaylin even told me that she wanted to ask Santa for applesauce and poptarts. If you couldn't tell from the picture, Kaylin did not take the opportunity to tell Santa what she wanted. I don't know if he will bring her applesauce and poptarts.

Maybe next year...

Snowy weekend

We've had a very snowy weekend. It started snowing again on Saturday afternoon and pretty much hasn't stopped. We were planning to go to a party on Saturday night. We took Kaylin to Eric's parents house early and brought extra clothes in case we ended up staying overnight. The hills to their house weren't great, so we stayed there and skipped the party. Eric's sister and brother-in-law came into town earlier on Saturday, so we had a big party. We brought some pizza and a movie and had a great time. Church on Sunday was cancelled, so we went sledding. Here is Kaylin's first (and only) run.

She went down the hill with Grammy on a garbage can lid. She wasn't a fan of sledding or the snow. Here she is with Uncle Parker, obviously not enjoying the snow:

Here are Kaylin, Parker, Carly, and Eric:

Sunday evening we headed home. The hills weren't too bad, but our driveway was a joke. We nearly got stuck going from the street into our driveway. It took quite a few tries to get into the driveway. Then we got stuck in the driveway. Eric and I had to shovel our way out. Our neighbor came out to help which was really nice. He didn't have a shovel, so he took mine and I got to sit in the warm car with Kaylin. The reason our driveway was so bad was because of the wind. Parts of our driveway had no snow (just ice) and other parts had three feet! After we put Kaylin to bed Eric and I went back outside and shoveled part of the driveway so he hopefully won't have as much work to do in the morning. I'd prefer it if he stays at home, but they missed a day last week and Eric is set on getting to the office. We'll see how the snow is tomorrow.

Snow day II

Here's our house with our Christmas lights up and some snow on the ground. You can see our Christmas tree in the front window too.

Eric has been wanting to rearrange the furniture in the living room for a few weeks now. Here's what we did:

My two cuties:

We rearranged the family room too. I took a picture of the first time, but then Eric wanted to rearrange again, so I didn't post the picture. I'm not a fan of the current arrangement (another reason to not post a picture), so we'll see how long it lasts.

Snow day

Eric left for work this morning and was home half an hour later. There wasn't much snow near our house, but as he got to Newcastle it got bad. There were cars spun out everywhere. All his guys called or texted to say that they couldn't get to the office and his dad called to tell him to stay at home. So Eric turned around and came home. According to the news, the Newcastle and Bellevue areas were hit about the worst in the area today, and that's where Eric's office is. He was hoping to get into work later today, but it doesn't look like that will be happening. He's on the phone with his guys right now telling them that they don't need to try to get in later today. As of this morning schools here were just running late, but then they ended up cancelling around 8:30 am. I feel bad for the high school kids (and teachers!) who were already on there way or at school! I love having Eric at home, so I'm glad it's snowing so much. I'm not getting anything else done, but that's okay. Yea for snow and staying home!

SNOW!!!

It started to snow Saturday evening. Sunday morning we had to go and play in it as soon as we woke up. This is Kaylin's first "real" time in the snow. Last year she was crawling at this time, so we didn't take her out in it. Here we are dressed and ready to go:

Poor Kaylin could hardly move. She was wearing pj pants, baby legs, jeans, 2 pairs of socks, and sweatpants. Hopefully she was warm.

She wasn't too sure about the snow. Her mittens came off immediately, but she didn't like to get snow on her hands. She kept making me wipe it off.

She mostly stayed on the patio, or in the driveway in the front. She didn't like the deeper snow in the grass.

Apparently we were pretty much the only ones around here who had church yesterday. What's up with that? We slipped and slided our way to church and back. I played in Handel's Messiah yesterday night at the stake center. Most of the musicians were there (2 cellos couldn't make it) and all of the soloists were there. Not a lot of others came, but it was still great. Thanks Michelle and family for braving the cold and ice to come! I had a lot of fun and I'm planning on playing again next year. If you want to join me (Kim? Ken? Others?) let me know!

Christmas gift tags!

I hosted my 2nd annual Christmas gift tag exchange party last week. It was a huge success (if I do say so myself, and I do!) We had lots of fun eating, chatting, admiring people's tags, and playing fabulous party games (thanks for humoring me, ladies). Everyone's tags turned out so well. I always have a hard time putting the tags on presents because I don't want to give them away. For your viewing pleasure and holiday crafting inspiration, here are this year's tags:

Thanks again for coming ladies!

Clam Lights

A little over a week ago we went to the lighting of the Ivar's Clam Lights at Coulon park on Lake Washington. They had fun Christmas music playing and a boat parade after the lighting. Most of my pictures didn't turn out since it was dark outside. Here are the best ones:

Here are Ivar's dancing clams. I always remember the dancing clams commercials, so I thought this was funny. Their legs "moved", so it looked like they were running in place or something.

My laptop came last week! This is my first post using it. Yea! I love it already! Thank you Eric!

Vanilla Joy Giveaways

The last time that I posted about giveaways on Vanilla Joy, I won one. So, if you want to try to win one too head on over soon. Current giveaways include $25 to Shade Clothing and the Silhouette Digital Craft Cutter. Amazing stuff. And more giveaways are coming. Good luck! If you win the digital craft cutter, maybe I could borrow it once in awhile??? Thanks!

Gift tags

I finished my gift tags yesterday!


I got the idea for these tags from Kelsey (you have to scroll down a few posts to see her tags). Thank you Kelsey!

I thought my tags were pretty awesome, until I saw Kim's. I even tried to take a cool picture like she did. Unfortunately my two "cool" pictures came out blurry. Even the picture I took of one tag alone was blurry. So this is the one you get.

Thou shalt not envy

I can finally wear this lovely number all the time now. I even went shopping in it today. I know you're jealous.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

On Friday after Thanksgiving I put up my Christmas decorations! Just like when I put up my fall/Halloween/Thanksgiving decorations, I realized that I don't have very many. The good thing about that is that I got them down from the garage and put up during Kaylin's nap time. I had to wait a couple of days to decorate the tree, though.

Kaylin was excited when she came downstairs after her nap and saw the tree. She kept saying, "Tree! Tree!" She went over to the nativity and started woofing at it. I told her that there weren't any dogs in the nativity. So then she mooed. There aren't any cows in my nativity. So then she neighed. No horses either. Finally she realized there were sheep and she starting baaing. Apparently she was pretty confused by the donkeys and camels.

I am super excited to have a fireplace this year so I can hang our stockings from the mantle. I love our stockings. I made them myself. If you blow the picture up you can see that I cross-stitched our first initials on each stocking.


All of the grandkids on my mom's side of the family have a Christmas ornament theme. My theme is bears. Every year I would get a bear ornament from my parents and often I would get one from my grandparents too. My parents would often try to pick an ornament that related to something we did each year. For example, the year I went to Japan I got a bear on a paper crane. I love looking through my ornaments each Christmas. Here are all of my bears:

Our tree is decorated mostly with my bears. Kaylin's theme is angels, and she has a couple of ornaments of her own. Poor Eric just has some from work. I also put up small red and silver ball ornaments to fill in the gaps.


The tree looks a little crooked in the picture, but you can see that the window looks crooked too... don't worry Mom, my tree isn't crooked this year like it was last year :-). Also notice that the tree skirt matches our stockings. Love it!