::disgruntled drainpipe::

It's too cold and dreary, even for drainpipes.

::wordless giveaway winner--in green::

YAY for Katie Gee!!!
(OK, so it wasn't totally wordless! Katie, can you email me your address and I'll send these cute little snowflakes your way!
ginnahendricks(at)yahoo(dot)com. Wish I could've made a snowflake for each of you. Max actually requested that. He wanted to keep drawing names.)

::other places::

Happy February!

I'm over here today celebrating love. If I were you I'd tune in for the whole 14 days--and beyond. Megan's blog is a delight.

I'm also sort of here. Well I'm not there exactly, but people I love are. And I instigated it.

Have fun linking along.

We'll announce the giveaway winner later today.

Thanks for leaving me comments and making my birthday just a little more happy!!

::my birthday in photos::

Pancake breakfast:

with bacon and overeasy eggs--my favorite!

Some fun presents:

Special Italian bistro dinner:



What a great day!!

::me me me::

This post is about me.
It's my birthday today. Yay for me!

But really I think it's yay for my mom. Because how would I be here to talk about myself if it wasn't for her?
So thanks mom--and dad! Thanks for making it so I could be here and have birthdays.

Last year I asked everybody to leave me a comment as my birthday present. I loved it so much last year that I want to do it again!

So if you read this, will you leave me a comment and say hi? I'd love to hear from some of you that I maybe don't know--or those that I know but I don't know are reading...you know what I mean. And of COURSE I want to hear from my lovely friends that often leave me comments. Youguys are the best.

And I love comments--I mean, don't all bloggers love comments?
So tell me hi--and if I don't know you, tell me how you found me?

Wish you were all here to share some cake. A lovely friend in the ward brought me over this gorgeous cake:

The good news? It takes as good as it looks. Scrumptious.

I got my hair cut yesterday (for my birthday). What do you think?

(I like this picture except there's just something weird about my hand--it looks way bigger than it should be, doesn't it?)

(this is how Max makes me feel on a regular basis)

The best news about my birthday? It means that we ALL made it through another long cold (unless you're someplace nice) January. And that's great news, isn't it?

::giveaway!!::

It's about time around here for a giveaway, don't you think?
I promised my friend Beth like a year ago that I would do one when I won something in one of her giveaways. Lame it took me so long, but oh well at least I'm doing it!

Leave a comment here before midnight on Sunday Jan 31st and you'll be entered into the drawing for 2 pretty little snowflakes!
(one winner, two snowflakes)
Here they are:


The first one is the standard pattern from here. The second one is my own little variation.

They have lots of uses. You can hang them from the ceiling. You can pin them to the wall. You can put them away in your Christmas decorations for next year's tree. You can stick them under your door to keep the cold air out. You can wash the dishes with them. You can use them as coasters. You could sit on them at basketball games. I'm sure the list is endless really.

So enter if you want to! We'll pick a winner sometime monday morning.
Happy friday!

::skye::

My parents found out a few days ago that our old collie dog Skye was really sick.
They had to make the tough decision to put him out of his misery.
We've had him since I was seventeen.
He was such a great dog and a good friend to all of us. Especially Piper, our Australian Shepherd.
We'll miss him. I'll especially miss his goosing--his head was at just the right height to hit most people right in the crotch with his nose when he was going about his customary greeting.
We'll also miss his ridiculously high pitched yip. It wasn't very manly but it was cute.

Dogs are such good friends and fun to have around, but they sure do remind us of our mortality with how fast they age, don't they?


Love you Skye.

::legos::

Max has just barely gotten interested in legos. And he's very very interested in them right now.
I've gotten him some legos before, and even spent time putting them together for him, but he never really caught the vision. He didn't realize you could customize and change things I think.
I really like legos. I think they're a lot of fun and they're good toys for learning dexterity and fine motors skills and lots of other things.
I have to give Kelly & Lechelle the credit for this. They gave us Lego Star Wars for the Wii for christmas and Max has really been enjoying it. Once he started playing that he started thinking about legos a lot.
He started playing with the sets he had and making star warsy type things out of them.
Then he took his chore money he'd been saving and purchased a small official Star Wars set.

He was thrilled. Ok, I know in this picture it looks like he's a little less than thrilled, but that's just his "cool guy" smile.

I also got a little set that you could make a house and car and dog out of which he thought was really fun. Especially the dog. The little dog is so cute!

He enjoyed that. But we had a problem. The Star Wars set he got only had good guys in it. No bad guys. Lots of blasters but no bad guys. The poor people in the house and car set kept getting enlisted as bad guys and it just wasn't right.
So I told him that if he could try hard to keep from chewing his fingernails for a week I would get him the bad guys.
I made him a chart of course, and he did well enough (with lots of reminders and mercy of course) that he could get the bad guys. Now he's complete.

It's just fun to see him playing and having fun and being a little creative with it.
And it's fun to see him enjoying Star Wars--it was definitely a part of my childhood, and Kris's too. Fun stuff.

::buzz & woody::

We love PJs from the Disney Store. It's my new favorite place to get them. Not only are the PJs adorable with characters we love on them, but they come in sizes bigger than 5. And somehow it's hard to find good PJs for those that are older than 5.

What could be better than pretending to be a toy when you're going to bed?
I love how the Woody PJs even have "boots" at the bottom. Max was a little bummed that there wasn't a pull string on the back of the shirt though.
I especially love his side profile. He's got quite the figure, doesn't he?


Max was a little confused as to why I was writing my name on his foot. You're not though, are you?