-) Holiday Home Tour (-

Hi everyone!! Welcome to the holiday decorations tour of my home that I've put together for the BooMama Christmas Tour of Homes. I think that the tour is the best idea ever, by the way.
Earlier this year we moved into a small 900 square foot house, which was a big adjustment (we lost about 1200 square feet in the move). So I had to rethink a lot of my decorating this year.
Let's start in the breakfast room off the kitchen.
This isn't the greatest picture, but I hung these ornaments from the ceiling over our small table. It's the table we always use to eat at, so it's fun to have it a little more festive in there, and I love that the ornaments are out of the range of grabby 3 year old fingers.
Next is my dining room table.
I put together an advents calender type thing for my three year old where he opened one present per day starting Dec 1st. I put those little gifts in a red and green bowl and mixed them with pinecones and ornaments. They're on either side of my nativity that I love so much from Willie Rae studios. Click for a closer look. I don't think they make this nativity set any more, unfortunately.

I love how the bowls turned out, and the advents presents have helped my little one to keep track of the days really well. It's been fun.

The bowls are starting to look pretty empty now though, with so few days left....


Next to the living room. I have a great old fireplace in this house with a nice mantle, so I enjoyed decorating it.

I got those beautiful stocking hangers from Pier 1 two years ago after christmas for 75% off. Whoo hoo!
I love how the bowls of ornaments turned out, and the only thing I wish I could've done differently is had real pine up there on the mantle instead of fake. But oh well.
Here are some various friends I've collected the last few years on the windowsills next to the fireplace.
My mom made one of the reindeer. She's amazing!

The tree is directly to the left of the mantle. It has less ornaments on it this year than it usually does. We have a hardwood floor, and I was a little worried that between the 3 yr old and our large hairy german shepherd, some of my favorites might end up shattered on the floor. So those stayed in the box for next year.
I like my tree to have a lot of fun different ornaments on it, and I love the multi colored lights.
The only consistent thing on the tree is a whole bunch of red jingle bells. I got those when my 3 year old was 1. That was all I decorated the tree with that year. It was a good idea.
I love live trees the most, but this little artificial tree has been really good for us to have the last few years, it's accommodated our student lifestyle quite well. Maybe next year I can get a live tree.
Close ups on a couple of favorite ornaments:
I think this fish also came from Pier One. I've had it for probably about 15 yrs or more.
This is my mom's creation for this year. She makes at least one new ornament every christmas and I'm the lucky recipient. My tree wouldn't be nearly the same without my wonderful mom!

A lovely snowflake made by my dear friend Amy.

The finishing touch? A $15 dollar wreath from Costco that makes my house smell divinely like christmas every time the heater comes on. Thank you costco!!
So that wraps up the quick tour of our house. Thanks for looking! I wish I could give you some hot chocolate, but we'll just have to do that another time.

Merry christmas from our house to yours!!!

-> Christmas Decor Part 2 <-

Here is my mantlepiece. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I really don't have too much to say about it I guess, but it does make our living room feel really cozy and christmassy. I love having nice mantles or fireplace ledges or whatever to decorate. They're my favorite.
Some detail:
Some friends adorning the window sills:

The tree will be part three! Thanks for checking these posts out--these are mostly for my moms and family who won't be seeing us for christmas, but if they make anyone else smile then that's great!

...The Evening News...

One of my ice storm pictures got to be on the news last night!
I sent in a few to the weather team at our local NBC station, which we often watch, and sure enough, we watched that night and there was my picture! It made me happy.
Here's the famous picture itself. Yay!

-> Christmas Decor Part 1 <-

This year I spent a good amount of time thinking about how we should do our christmas decorations before I started working on them. The house we're in now is quite a bit smaller than our last house, and so I have a lot less "decoratable" spaces. In fact, we had to displace Kris's string base that had been living in the corner of our living room so that we could fit the christmas tree in! So it took some creativity to do everything I wanted to do.
I was thinking about ways that we could decorate that would be fun for Max, and maybe even include him somehow. I thought maybe an advents calendar would work. I couldn't really find any that I liked though, and I was reading a magazine that suggested giving small gifts as an advents calender. So I thought I would go for it and do it myself. I got a playmobil nativity scene and wrapped all the individual pieces, also wrapped up some boxes with little treats and a few christmas books that we already owned (that Max doesn't remember at all) and some PJs for christmas eve and then numbered them all. I didn't think this would be that hard, but it took me almost an entire saturday to do it!
I put the little presents in some pretty green and red bowls with some pine cones and ornaments and placed them on the table next to my lovely nativity.
What do you think?
Now I just wish I didn't know what was in the packages! They look so festive and exciting.

So far it's been working out great for Max. He's able to keep track of what number each day is and he loves the playmobil. We've been talking about the different characters of the nativity as we open them up. I hope it's helping him to learn. It's definitely helping to build excitement for Christmas for all of us I think!

Stay tuned for part 2....

Katamari Damacy

So what is Katamari Damacy? Only the single most awesomest video game ever. The basic concept is a little guy pushes a ball around that stuff sticks to. At first, only small stuff will stick, but as it snowballs, you can work your way up to rolling up pretty much anything: animals, people, monster octupii, skyscrapers, trees, etc.
The game is also very Japanese psychedelic in a yellow-submarine kind of way.

For us, it all started fall 2004 when some good friends invited us over to play the game for playstation 2 at their house. Ginna, who had been openly anti-video game system, was very skeptical. Still, she was willing to give it a try. We played and Ginna couldn’t get enough. I liked it too, but Ginna liked it the way I liked Mario Bros when I was about 10 yrs old. As we drove home, I suggested that we should consider getting a PS2. To my surprise Ginna was into it.

We set out to get one, but sony was just introducing the new “slim” models and since it was close to the holidays they were all sold out. We liked Katamari Damacy so much however, we bought the video game for Christmas even though we didn’t yet have a system. Fortunately, Kenny and Kelly still had an old system back in Utah that would still work if the moon was in the right position and you finessed the system just right, using appropriate positive affirmations.

We played Katamari as much as we could while we were in Utah for Christmas break. Kenny even stayed up all night one night playing it on the big screen TV in the basement, trying to beat the game.



Kenny let us take the PS2 and soon we were home and playing. It was great fun, especially during the winter when it was too cold and yucky to do much beside stay home. Also--those of you with kids will understand this--it was great to have something fun to do together after Max was in bed.

Katamari was so great it influenced us to buy a new TV so we could see it better. Luck was ours and while we were in the store looking for our TV, a new shipment of PS2s arrived. We bought one, only to have it stolen when our house was broken into a few months later.

Eventually, we bought another PS2 and we were back to our Katamari. A sequel had been released and everything was great. Still, as much fun as it is to play after Max is in bed, I’ve been waiting for Max to figure out how to play it with us.

Max + Katamari = Love
Recently, Max has really started to enjoy Katamari. He has figured out how to move the character around and he has a great understanding of the game’s objectives. Now, he is constantly requesting that we play Katamari or Na Na Na as he calls it. Ginna and Max like to play together from time to time and I join in too.

Saturday, we were at a birthday party for a girl from Max’s school. The party was at Gymboree. There were activities and games, but we struggled to get Max to participate. Max likes to do his own thing anyway, but I couldn’t figure out what he was doing. Then it dawned on me. Ginna took some pictures with her phone and I made a little slideshow using some music from Katamari. I think it’s pretty obvious what Max is up to.

∞∞ Seven Random Thingys About Me ∞∞

My dear friend Megan tagged (or challenged is how I like to think of it) me to come up with seven random unknown but interesting things about myself. This was really really hard! I'm not really used to delving too deeply into my habits or thoughts I guess, and so it's been interesting to do so. Hopefully my seven things aren't too boring and hopefully some of you don't already know them! Without further ado:

1. I really don't like vegetables. The only ones I can really say that I like a lot are carrots and broccoli. That's it. Kind of sad huh? The ones that I like OK are cauliflower, some squash, lettuce, kale, potatoes, sweet potatoes, (do those count as veggies?), green beans, corn. The ones I find tolerable depending on the presentation are onions, some squash, alfalfa sprouts, spinach, artichoke, peppers. I HATE tomatoes (yeah, sorry dad, I still do), brussel sprouts, eggplant, asparagus, beets, olives (wait, are olives actually fruits?), okra, kohlrabi, peas.
Alright, that's a long enough list. Do you get the picture? I'm not so good at vegetables which makes eating well a little bit of a challenge. I've become a lot more adventurous in the last few years though, and have extended and improved the happy part of the list. My plan is to keep working on it. But no tomatoes. Never tomatoes.

2. I love to sing. I love that we get to sing at church and I take advantage of that fact. However, I absolutely hate it when somebody is singing the same part as me and I can hear them. So if I'm singing soprano and the person behind me is also singing soprano loud enough for me to hear them I have to switch parts. Bass or tenor works fine for me as long as I can't hear anybody else singing it.
My singing and sightreading skills have really had a hard test lately. Kris got called as the ward chorister and he's been picking the hymns that nobody ever sings and nobody knows except the really old ladies. So usually if I don't sing the songs really loud nobody sings at all. It's been interesting. I used to think I knew pretty much all the hymns in the book but Kris has helped me to realize that just isn't true.

3. I really dislike politics. When I was about 11 or 12 my mom got me this great book. It was some kind of kid's guide to politics and I thought for sure I would end up as some sort of politician, maybe even president. No way. These days sometimes I don't even want to vote. I feel like voting without researching into all the issues and candidates is no good. And I hate discussing politics because I never feel like I know enough about what's going on to have an opinion I can stand behind. I am not the kind of person that can just pick one side of an issue and argue it unless I know all about it and have proof and examples to back me up.
So I just avoid politics as much as I can.

4. I didn't know my hair was curly/very wavy until we moved out here to Kansas City. I thought it was straight. It's not. I can make it straight but it wants to wave and curl if I just leave it on it's own. Weird huh?

5. I am terrible at sewing. Some of you might find that weird if you know my mom. She's awesome. And my mother in law is awesome too. I have a fabulous sewing machine but I barely know how to use it. Maybe someday when I have a little more time I can learn more and won't be so terrible.
I did make one thing once I'm very proud of. Witness the pea pod:
6. I'm really scared of badgers, wolverines and wild boars.

7. I spend most of the time when I'm trying to go to sleep planning what I'm going to do the next day (most of which I never get done) thinking of the phone calls I need to make, thinking about the work things I need to do and writing emails to people and blog entries. Most of the emails and blog entries I write never actually get written in real life, but sometimes I'm confused and think that I actually did write them. And they're so much more witty when I'm half asleep than they really are once I do get around to writing them. So all of you out there that have been waiting for an email or a phone call from me, relax. I probably already did it. And Megan, you were probably wondering why it took me so long to write this entry? It's because I wrote it like 7 times already and every time it was great but I couldn't remember any of what I had written the next morning.

So there you go. Now maybe you know me a little better. Maybe not?

I'm not tagging anybody especially, but any of you that feel the urge to do this, please do. It's fun to learn things about each other. Actually I take it back. I'm tagging Kari, Lorri (lorri, you really need your own blog!!), Charlotte, Lechelle and Miffy. Let's hear it guys!!

::Chinny Chin Chin::

Here's an update on the chin, 11 days out from the incident and 6 days out from the removal of the stitches.
Looks pretty good, don't you think? Kids sure heal fast. It's amazing.
Special thanks to my Aunt Lorena who told me that the stitch removal wasn't a hard thing. I was really worried about it up until she told me that. And she was right. It was no big deal. Max was really great. He stayed still and let the doctor do her thing, and even started giggling at the end. I'm not sure what the giggling was all about but that's ok.
I bet in another week it'll hardly be visible. Yay!

••• I & J •••

I guess that really should be pronouced Iyuh and Juh--in Purple Dragon speak.
I did a deplorable job of keeping track of what happened during I and J weeks. The only snack I can remember is ice cream. That's pretty obvious, isn't it? Sorry. I promise I'll make up for it during Kuh week.
Anyway, here are a couple of the fun projects that the kids did during these weeks.
A jack-in-the-box (which was a big hit with Max) and an igloo:
An indian headdress (yes this looks VERY similar to the thanksgiving week indian headband, but I promise, it's different):
And last but certainly not least, here's an awesome picture of a Jaguar. I love it:
Pretty cool stuff. J was always his favorite letter when he was small so I think he had a good time.
Back with kuh kuh kuh week soon, stay tuned......

Ken Hendricks, Green Candidate?

For those of you who are following Ken Hendricks' run for president, you can check out some new info I've added to his blog, A Better Choice.