2012 Christmas Card

The Stroller

Santa brought both our girls strollers this year and had I known how motivating Q would find it I probably would have asked him to bring it months ago.  You see, before Christmas morning she was taking steps here and there but she wasn't really "walking."  But the stroller changed all that, take a peek:

Checking it out...

Five minutes later...

Twenty-four hours later...

And there you have it ladies and gentlemen.  The stroller from Santa is officially how Q learned to walk.  If you're wondering how long it to her to completely ditch the stroller and start walking around on her own, about 4 days.

Christmas!

 On Christmas Eve we baked and decorated sugar cookies for Santa!  Aunt D and Y were very creative and thus their cookies came out a lot prettier than mine.

Q, while she couldn't really help us decorate all the cookies, she did more than her fair share of eating them.  She managed to find the perfect spot around the table we were using to decorate and each time I looked at her she had a different cookie in her hands (and mouth).

In the late afternoon/early evening various family members started to arrive.  We ate, laughed, played a had an all around great time just hanging out together.  Aunt S recently bought a new camera and she was able to take lots and lots of great pictures!

We put the girls to bed, and shortly thereafter Santa arrived...

The girls (mostly Y) woke all of us up bright and early to head down stairs and open all the gifts.  They did a pretty good job of waiting until everyone was gathered together before they started.  Here's a photo taken amid the chaos.

It snowed a little on Christmas Day but the next day (Boxing Day in Canada) we were walloped!  We had read one report on Christmas Day that told us we'd get several inches at home (Michigan) but only a couple centimeters in Canada so we thought we'd try to head out early.  However, the following morning when we checked the weather reports we read that the snow wouldn't begin until later in the evening with a 1 inch accumulation and the rest coming later in the night, so we decided we'd be safe leaving after dinner.  And then the snow started falling, and falling, and falling and we realized there was no way we were going anywhere!

Y begged and begged to go out and play in it but we hadn't brought along any snow gear.  So we finally settled on placing plastic bags over her feet and socks (to at least keep her feet dry) and then letting her wear her NON-snow boots out.  Luckily Nana B. is really short so she was able to fold the legs of her snow pants up a few inches and make a few quick adjustments at the waist and Y was able to wear those out.  She attempted to run in the snow, she fell in the snow, made snow angels in the snow and build a snowman with Nana B. (which actually looks more like a snow duck).  All of these while Q and I watched them outside of the window.

Uncle L, knowing that Aunt D wasn't feeling well decided that he would go out and brave the freezing cold temperatures to build a snowman for her.  Coming from Peru this was the largest accumulation of snow she had ever seen, and she was too sick to even play in it :(.  But luckily for her, there will surely be plenty more opportunities!

Christmas Card Photo Attempts

After a failed last minute attempt  to have family portraits taken to add to our 2012 Christmas Card I had the bright idea to just take some family photos around our Christmas Tree.  That too, did not work out so hot.  Mostly for the same reasons it didn't work out in studio...Q was just not into having her picture taken.  But I thought I'd share a few of the attempts that turned out decent, though not Christmas Card material.

Christmas 2011

We had an awesome Christmas spent in Canada with our family and friends there.  We arrived on Friday evening, had dinner and just relaxed for the night.  On Saturday, Christmas Eve, we went to spend a few hours with a friend who's visiting with her new husband children - it was great to catch up and just sit around laughing and joking.  After returning in the early evening we had dinner and then again sat around talking, mostly laughing at each other or something Y said or did.  She also put on her new princess apron to help Nana B. in the kitchen but really ended up doing pretty much everything but what was intended.



Christmas Eve

 We awoke on Sunday, Christmas morning, to go to church.  I had been preparing Y all week telling her that we would go to church first and then come back to open presents.  Preparing her beforehand as well as her being only 3 and not quite as impatient as she could be helped us attain this seemingly impossible task of convincing her to wait.  Once we came back we even got her to cooperate long enough to take some family photos!

She received lots of gifts and enjoyed slowly unwrapping each one.  She got all the things she requested from Santa, which was really only a Belle Tea Set and princess stuff.  After all the presents were unwrapped she played and all the adults relaxed until it was time for dinner.  Since Christmas fell on a Sunday this year, it was observed on Monday so B got that day off work too, it was nice to have him for an extended weekend!

I'm still patiently awaiting that year when we'll get to spend Christmas in North Carolina with my family, holidays make me miss home even more.  But we are grateful to have family within an hour's drive of us in which we can go to spend holidays with and be able to enjoy their company. 

Christmas Bows

This year, unlike past years, I had a difficult time finding Christmas dresses for the girls that I really loved. And so I settled for dresses that I thought were okay but I was determined to make them better.  And so I set out to make flower pins for the dresses and matching bows for their hair.  I knitted several different bows and liked none of them until I saw the end result of a couple bows which I had knitted for a friend at church.  I then knew which bows I'd be making for the girls!

Here's the end result:

Bows for their hair

Slightly smaller pins for their dresses.

Christmas in a Nutshell

So I have fallen behind in blogging yet again.  This should be no surprise to most of you but hopefully in the coming year i will have more to say as our life gets more hectic and more interesting.

I know that I have failed to write a Christmas post.  It has been my intention to write this long drawn out post full of information and pictures of all the gifts which were received.  However, I have decided against that and will just say that we had an awesome Christmas.  Lots of fun was had by all and it was great to watch Y actually open the presents on her own this year.  It was her third Christmas but watching her tear open gift after gift after gift was pure joy.  I also took lots of pictures of all of her gifts but since most of you are also on my Facebook friends list you've probably already seen them.  For those of you who are not Facebook friends I will share one picture with you.  It happens to be my favorite and really sums up how Y felt about Christmas this year!

I can't wait until next year when she really understands even more about Santa and all things Christmas!  I hope your Holidays were as fantastic and memorable as ours

Enjoying a sleigh ride through a display of Christmas lights.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Ok, the truth is that I didn't invent anything but I did have a necessity and so I decided to create a solution.  To get to the point I'll give you a little background info.

I picked out Y's Christmas dress really early this year.  By "picked out" I mean I saw it and I knew it was the one I wanted, I went in an bought it a few weeks later, which was still over a month ago.  But from the moment I saw the dress, I knew what I wanted for her hair when she wore the dress.  I wanted a Poinsettia clip that I could either use as a bow or with a black or white crocheted headband depending on my (and her) mood.



The Dress - it's paired with red tights and black shoes.

Seems pretty easy, right??  Yeah, I thought so too.  So I started checking out stores when I first saw "the dress," looking for the bow I wanted.  I never found it and I attributed this to the fact that I was still way ahead of the Christmas outfit game.  So I would look every now and again as I went in stores and I'd also peruse different Etsy shops as well as Ebay and Amazon.  Each time I'd come up disappointed.  And finally, about a week ago, a few options showed up on Etsy and Ebay but then I hit another wall...they were asking $5-10 plus shipping for ONE bow.  I didn't wanna spend that much on a single bow that I couldn't even hold or touch before deciding if I actually wanted it.  (Note:  had it been in-store for $5 I probably would have bought it but when you add in shipping fees - $3.25 to ship a bow that doesn't even weigh 2oz is crazy to me - I had to pass).
So I began looking at craft shops for flowers to make my own bow...this lead to more disappointment and frustration!!!  I kept coming up empty handed at every store I went to...until I went to the store I felt was least likely to have what I was looking for.  And I was right in my assumption, sort of.  They didn't have what I was looking for in the form that I was looking for it but they, unlike all the previous stores, did have something that would help me improvise and CREATE what I was looking for.  They had this:

Armed with the right tools and necessary embellishments, I created this:



The first was taken without flash and the second with flash, neither is very good but the lighting was pretty crappy.

And the best part is I only ended up costing me about $1 per bow and I made 12 bows, which I will be sharing with my niece and some friends here locally!