Um, rain much?

So....Mommy could use some sun. And I don't mean for her complexion. She really would like to see the sun and here is why.

That my friends is an ominous bubble. (Actually two but the other is very faint. We just took pictures from two angles so you could see what we could see.) Mommy was attempting to do yoga on the Wii Fit this morning because her yoga class was cancelled and we were sent home from the gym because she had driven through six inches of standing water only to have them close the road right after. (Did you get all that? Apparently there is a river in St. George and it's causing some problems.) Anyway, she was doing a sun salutation when she let her gaze fall naturally and what did she see above our TV? "THE BUBBLE". Um...not good apparently. A half hour later she and Daddy have created a precarious "ladder" to try and get in to the attic (guess what is now on our shopping list?) and first Daddy on Mommy's shoulders and then Mommy on Daddy's shoulders which finally worked and Mommy was "Spider Woman" into the vast amount of insulation sprayed up there to see if she could even see anything. Well one truss was obviously a lot wetter than the others. Shoot.

We weren't quite sure what to do because it's been raining FOREVER and Mommy was pretty sure she wouldn't be the only person calling about leaks. However call she did and luckily she got a guy out to the house in an hour and it was fixed twenty minutes later. All is well.

But we'd like the sun now.

At least it hasn't been a full week...

in between posts that is. Clearly, Mommy and I are still lacking in inspiration and drive for the blog. And somehow we still have to hit 100 for the year. Why? I don't know. Ask Mommy. I think it's some of her "OCD" behavior. And don't we all have a little bit of that in us? I'm starting to think that we'll have to split up the posts just for the sake of numbers!

However, we finally have something to blog about that cannot be ignored. We went up to Aunt Rachel and Uncle Troy's house for the annual "Waffles and Wassail". Okay so it's only the second year they've tried it but it's still fun and will be a staple. We eat waffles for dinner and watch "A Muppet Christmas Carol" on a big projector screen. This year it was kind of spoiled because we were an hour late. Let's just say Utah Valley and my parents are not on speaking terms and it doesn't even have to do with BYU. (The freeway felt more like a parking lot in two separate places.) I still loved seeing my cousins and eating yummy food but Cara and I stayed up WAY TOO LATE. Luckily, we got to stay at Aunt Margaret's again. Her room is so cozy. (Sorry no pictures of that evening. Aunt Rachel has some though...maybe we'll steal!)

The next morning brought on even more breakfast food with a holiday get together of Daddy's friends. We went to Oma and Apa's and made hashbrowns and hot dogs (Daddy called them sausages) and pancakes and fruit...it was delicious. And the little Ruby came to play. We had fun building blocks. Daddy and his friends with their wives (all of them are married now!) sat and talked and giggled and got pretty sleepy from what they ate. Good times. Sigh. Daddy even did most of the preparing and cleaning up.


Here are some silly pictures of us getting ready to leave Oma's house...
Peace!

Look, Cara! It's snow. I get to stomp in the snow!

I don't know....

It feels pretty wet and cold

After that fun time, we took Daddy to the Gateway so he could meet Uncle Troy and watch the new Tron movie. OH did I mention that I got to watch the old Tron after we watched a Muppet Christmas Carol? I was especially sad when he lost his friend Ram but I liked their matching outfits. Anyway, we bought Grandma and Grandpa a Christmas present and then Daddy went to the movie and I went back to play at Romney's house. I discovered that she has seven princess or fairy dresses and all kinds of costumes. Is this the face of pure joy or what?

Actually maybe this is...I had put on like six different out fits by this picture.

We also went to Mommy's favorite mall and watched a Christmas movie at Aunt Margaret's. We were a little bummed that the big cousin girls were not there to play with. But the kitties were! Mommy forgot to get a picture of us with the kitties. Darn it.

On Sunday, instead of church we went up to Temple Square and saw the Nativity with Baby Jesus and then we went and saw the Daddy Jesus. (My own words.) He kind of scared me but I listened so reverently to Him talking and then wanted my picture taken. We also looked at all the neat movies downstairs with the cool mannequins. It was a very fun trip up north.

A Few Christmas Hang Ups.....

Guest post by Mommy:

So I enjoy Christmas....I wouldn't say I'm a Christmas fanatic. I'm not the "amazing deal, Black Friday Gal" or the "Christmas threw up on all my stuff Girlie." But my house is decorated and it is decorated Thanksgiving weekend, I get a real tree, I watch my favorite Christmas movie OVER AND OVER again and honestly can barely wait until Thanksgiving to do so. I love thinking about Santa coming on Christmas Eve and have only been able to sleep that night since having children and the exhaustion that accompanies that. The smells are wonderful, the way people treat each other (generally) is amazing. You feel more appreciated. Yada Yada Yada..you get it.

However, I have a couple of hang ups and I think this is where I hang on to my adolescence and try not to grow up even though this was one of my favorite parts of Christmas growing up. Christmas cards and neighbor gifts. I'm TERRIBLE at this. I pretend every year to send out Christmas cards. I don't have a real list. I haven't even decided yea or nay about sending them out this year...uh and it's December 13th. Which is funny because I genuinely enjoy receiving the cards and reading the newsletter or snippet that comes with it! I can think of 30 plus people whom I would love to stay in contact with even if it was just through a Christmas card every year and yet...I don't have addresses and probably won't make a real attempt to get them. So I think I'm writing this blog post in an attempt to tell the few people that read this that I love you all, I miss you (if I don't get to see you), I want to receive your Christmas card and I will hang on to your envelope to pretend that you are getting a card from me maybe next year and that I had a wonderful year and was blessed with finally living in St. George for a whole year and getting our dream house in April that we put an offer on the Monday after Thanksgiving 2009!

Oh and as far as the neighbor gifts go, I'm thinking that I'll wait and see if I get any and then it might take me until Christmas but I'll think up something cute dang it.

Finally, Mom, the park!

Mommy finally took advantage of some of our good fall weather that showed up after weeks of below normal temperatures. She actually took us to a park. Cara has not had as much park time as I used to get. I had to tell her all about how things work.

But she picked up on things pretty quickly


Pardon my bad hair day. The halo of sun behind doesn't help the static that came from going down the slide. Pay more attention to Cara. :)

Lights....

And here is what our 99% decorated tree looks like...(it is missing two ornaments, a new one to represent Gabby and the one with the picture for this year.)

And this is what Daddy did to the outside of our house. Let's just say that our next door neighbor has a lot more bushes in his yard and a nice big tree still. We could only stand so many trips to the store trying to do this much to our house this year. (Can I mention that a 1/4 of our lights twinkle?)

Our Griswald Moment

Guest post by Mommy:
I am hoping you are all familiar with the Griswald Family. You know, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation or the other like 3 movies they've made. My favorite is the holiday version. If you are not familiar with it, this post won't be as funny and you need to go rent it. :)

Well in the past, Pete and I had agreed that we would do small trees and that with each child we would add a foot to the tree height. Last year's tree was maybe 4 feet. (And picked out in 5 minutes by just Daddy in the snow.) This year we went to get the same traditional 3-5 feet cheap tree and Pete expressed his desire to have a big tree. I was easily persuaded. It is our first Christmas in the house. Anyway, the bigger ones on that lot were quite a bit more expensive and I had seen at Costco that they were selling real trees for about 45 bucks. We ran over to Costco and got our tree. Well the tree came collapsed and bundle up with string. We noticed that the one they had out was big but we figured it was on two pallets and that was skewing it's appearance. Um...we were wrong.

First of all, when Pete tried to get the tree in to our trusty five year old stand, the legs exploded off just as Pete tried to pull it to standing. I mean, plastic parts flying every where. This should have been a warning to us. But no, we go buy a different more sturdy stand. Pete tries to do a fresh cut on the tree and after twenty minutes of sawing has only made a small dent so he gives up and just puts the stand on. We bring it in to the house. Set it up next to the TV where we had planned on. Did the ceremonious cut of the twine (the girls were in bed by the way). And I broke in to hysterical giggling as the branches started to unfold. We didn't shatter the windows but we met the height of our ceiling and the square footage of the space we wanted to put it in. This picture really doesn't do it justice. You can't squeeze past the tree to walk in to the room!

Plus all of the dead pine needles foomped to the floor and created a circle of brown that involved two vacuum cleaner canisters being filled.

We ended up moving the tree in to our little music room so that it fit better but that also entailed a lot of furniture rearranging including moving the piano. And now I have to buy all new decorations for our gigantic tree because our little minitature balls that fit so perfectly on a small tree just ain't gonna cut it. :)

Another catch up blog

I know that we posted about Thanksgiving in a timely fashion but we've skipped some stuff! For instance, Cara got her first hair do! Aunt Angie put her hair in to two little pig tails which look a lot more like antennae. We know that we will look back on these first pictures and giggle but it's always so exciting for little girls! This was actually the second time she wore her silly hair and we've done it to her since then. She really doesn't appreciate having her hair pulled that tight!

We also kicked off our Christmas season early and Mommy and Daddy took us to the Jubilee of Trees the weekend before Thanksgiving. We got to see LOTS of decorated Christmas trees. We even got to see Santa...and that went well. (Mommy wants to add..NOT.)

Then we posed for pictures while cheering for Uncle Eric at a basketball game. We got to hang out with Uncle Eric a lot that weekend because Grandma and Grandpa were back in Topeka, KS watching Aunt Becca's college soccer team take 5th in their division Nationals. Very exciting. They only lost one game but it kicked them in to the consolation bracket early. But they were amazing! And we still say "Go Aunt Becca". It was nice to see her at Thanksgiving. Actually I was so excited to see her that after Mommy went to the gym on Wednesday morning, we went straight to Grandma's house so I could wake Aunt Becca up. I was her shadow all day long and talked her ear off. Cara didn't recognize her at first until she climbed out of bed and then Cara gave her a big smile and reached for her and wanted to sit with her.


We also need to include this great shot that Uncle Eric took of me. We were just being silly for the camera but I posed for him. I will hardly ever do things like this for Mommy!