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celebrate nest play things to do

Christmas Preparations

So finally {2 days before Christmas} I feel prepared for Christmas. This season has been quite busy but over the course of a few weeks we finally got our tree/decorations up, baked a bunch of goodies, and got all the shopping/wrapping done! yippee! 

So here’s our lovely tree from Home Depot. We have quite an eclectic mix of ornaments, each with their own story 🙂

 

And we weren’t too thrilled with the tree toppers last year so we went with this guy, our penguin in a reindeer hoodie! We like him 🙂

 

And I can’t go long before having a blog post about food can I?? Well, these goodies are long gone already. I made them for a couple parties and work friends. Peanut blossoms, peanut butter bars, peanut brittle, sugar cookies, rum balls and snickerdoodles = YUM. I’ll gladly share any recipes if you’re interested, just leave me a comment. (I also made stroepwafels with my mom today but they will get their very own post)

And here is my Tante (aunt) Dicky! She lives in Holland and was out for my Opa’s (grandpa’s) birthday (which I will also post about later) She’s a pretty cool lady…I like her. We are going to plan a trip to visit her ASAP!!!!

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celebrate reminisce things to do

Happy Anniversary to us!!!


Well, it’s been a year of fun and excitement. Partly it feels like we’ve been married forever, not in a bad way of course, but because we know each other so well and are so comfortable together. The other part of me feels like it’s gone by so fast and there are still days where I suddenly remember I’m married and it’s a little shocking. I guess 1 year of being married doesn’t undo a mindset of 25 years of not being married (does that makes sense?). But seriously, we’ve had so much fun together and I really appreciate the family and friends who have supported us and love us and pray for us.So, yay us! 1 year and still going! I guess it’s not that much of an accomplishment compared to 50 years but still, it’s exciting to us!

Soon I’ll post pics from our anniversary weekend, wahoo!

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celebrate play things to do

Happy Halloween Part II

So here are some photos from our annual Halloween party on Saturday!! A lot of people went all out this year and that makes us happy 🙂
First, here’s my girls Bible study crew, well most of them…
Then the gentleman’s brother and sister-in-law as Goulet from SNL and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
The F fam as a sheep and Bo Peep. We found pieces of hi’s costume all over after the party.
The Q fam as a cowgirl and either terrorist or anti-terrorist, I don’t think we ever found out the answer to what he was. But I do like how you can pretty much only see his eyes and mouth!
The V fam as Moulder and Scully from the X-Files of course!
Another F fam as the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood.
The B fam as Suzanne Sommers and Richard Simmons, complete with thighmasters!
And us as Joy and Earl Hickey from My Name is Earl. And now you can see the finished product with hi’s facial hair. YIKES!
The V fam as Mario and the Princess!
And The P fam as Juno and Pauley Bleaker from Juno.
Awesome costumes this year! There were more but I guess we didn’t get photos of them, sorry guys!!
Happy Halloween!!
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celebrate things to do

Happy Halloween!!

For the most part, Halloween had been pretty anti-climactic. The group of people I work with (support staff) chose to be the “Reading Ropers” this year as our “hero” for Halloween. (Schools don’t celebrate actual holidays so ‘dress up as your favorite hero’ is what we do) Anyway, it kind of sucks when other people decide how you will dress since I didn’t have anything western. So off to dad’s house I go! I borrowed a cowboy hat and a bolero tie but didn’t have any boots. So I wore my rainbows and figured I’m more of what you would call a Californian cowgirl. Plus I’d take flip flops over boots any day.

 

Aaaaanyway, the day definitely got better when I got home from work. We started on the gentleman”s costume for tomorrow’s party. He’s been growing out his beard and tomorrow I’ll post pictures of the final product and our costumes.

But here was the process of the de-beardification or whatever…

first, the before picture:

Then the first stages of buzzing:

Then the full goatee:

Then the partial goatee? I don’t know what you’d call this:

And then the handlebar mustache:

He finished it after this but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see the rest!!

I bet we make our parents proud.

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celebrate play things to do

meet mr. meowkins

So we got a little too excited about Halloween and carved pumpkins a little too early with Leslie and Jon. The gentleman and I worked on this one together, so meet Mr. Meowkins!
Unfortunately Mr. Meowkins met his untimely death just 4 days after we made him. Yeah, it happened fast!!!

The good news though, is that jared didn’t cut open his finger like last year! We were at the E.R. until 3:30 am and of course, I could have just super glued it back together.Oh well!

Categories
celebrate play reminisce things to do

life moves

I feel like life has been flying by. I am a busy person, always have been, I like to keep busy and have lots of hobbies, jobs, activities all going on at once. It’s nice a lot of the time, but sometimes I just get run down, or overwhelmed. Another side effect is that life seems to whiz by and I have to slow down to enjoy it and that’s hard for me. We’ve already been married 8 months, started a business and are planning on going to Portugal in August (more to come about that)…but I feel like I was just wedding planning yesterday!

 

I’m very inspired by many blog writers that I know. They are so good at keeping up their blogs and keeping them interesting. I am definitely in a mood to do that! I doubt anyone actually reads our blog, especially since I never really told anyone about it…so mostly it’s just for me to be able to reflect on the craziness that is my life. And have something a little more personal since our business one is so…well…business-y. So, here’s a few snapshots of the last month and I’m going to try to blog more often so I can actually devote one blog per activity instead of lumping them all into one like I’m about to do 🙂
So, 2007 was the year of weddings. I think we went to like 10 or 11 (including our own!) So many of our friends have gotten married lately and that used to seem crazy to me but now it seems normal because what is crazy is friends having babies!! I think this year will be the year of babies! Tiffany had her Caleb in March and a few of my friends are currently pregnant. That really makes me feel time fly. Little Caleb is so cute and such a blessing!

When I lived in Santa Barbara for school, I used to be a mentor for Jr. Highers. Well, one of my former students is Katie who just got married on June 28th! That was really crazy and made me feel a little old 🙂 It was really cool to see all my old Santa Barbara friends and see Katie and her new husband Jason, congrats you two! It was really fun to actually attend a wedding. Lately we have only been working at them and so it was nice to be a guest for once.

And of course, seeing my new name on a party favor is still very exciting!

The wedding was actually in Solvang so of course we got there very early and had some goodies, wouldn’t you?

Very pretty trees and vinyard, a nice location, but very very dirty!!

 


Ahh, my favorite time of summer, the Del Mar Fair…err…San Diego Fair, whatever! Anyway, this is one thing I have rarely missed. We have always gone as a family every year and now the gentleman and I are making new traditions. The Fair can get pretty boring, I mean same animals, same food, same displays. So, this year we tried something new. We did a “one day” contest. It’s a photo shoot. We got there at 3pm, they told us the contest and out we went for 2 hours trying to capture our assignment. Since the fair theme was “Summer of Sports”, we had to incorporate a whiffle ball into our picture. He won 3rd place! It was just fun getting to see the fair in a different way. OH, and don’t forget the free wine tasting we do every year, woot woot!

We also submitted two of our SidebySide videos and won 2nd and 3rd place! YAY. Now we are “Award Winning” SidebySide Video 🙂

And about baseball. I’ve never been much of a fan of watching sports on TV. I usually watch the Super Bowl only for the commercials (of course) but baseball is something that is to be seen in person. There’s something so fun about being at a game with 30,000 other people cheering and being all excited. Plus, Petco Park is just an awesome ball park! So we saw a winning game last night, (bet many of you haven’t seen one of those this season) and it was great. I ran into my grandma there and we took this awesomely awkward picture! It looks like Kelly and the gentleman are on a date and Ryan and I are two “3rd wheels”…awesome! Plus, we were talking about the olympics and saying that we don’t have any great rivals like we used to with Russia and I loudly said, “well, what about North Korea” as a joke and right after I said that, this Asian family sitting right in front of us all turned to look at us. Whoops! They probably didn’t hear what we were talking about at all, just the “KOREA” part…haha. Oh well. Then I had them take this picture of us…so hopefully they realized we weren’t saying something racist or something! hah.Anyway, there’s my blurb.

Stay tuned. I have a few exciting things coming!