Wine Country Christmas

Christmas morning... my eyes pop open and I see.....


Ahh how I love my hometown! I can totally live without a white Christmas. A few more pictures out the bedroom window where I was staying...





On Tuesday night my parents, brother, sister in law, nephew, sister, sister's boyfriend, and I set out with hymn books in hand with the intention of caroling to some of our friends. We ended up only subjecting one family to our surprise singing and we visited with them for a bit. Then we went to find a few houses that had been rumored to have amazing light displays. We hit the jackpot with the first house we went to. We even ran into a lady from the ward I grew up in, while "ooing" and "ahhing" over the electric bill that this guy was going to have. It won't embed the video, but there's a link to a video of it HERE.

(Cash & Clay --- Honor)

On Christmas Eve, we congregated at the home where Cammie was house sitting, added my sister in law's parents to the bunch and had a lovely dinner. We watched the MOTAB Christmas special on PBS and sat and talked/laughed before opening Christmas socks from my mom.


(Dad & Mom --- Mom & Honor --- Cullen with her camera)


(Cammie, Cash & Mom --- Cammie being sly & Honor being oblivious --- Cam & Honor being ADORABLE!)


(Cam, Honor & JP's intrusion --- Dad & Honor lounging --- Cammie, Honor & Clay working on his Wallace face)

Cammie and I slept in on Christmas morning before spending the day at Mom & Dad's playing Yahtzee and watching movies. That evening, everyone else descended on our day of vegging and we had a family dinner.

(Our sprawling family --- Cammie & JP being entertained by Clay --- Clay entertaining Cash and the rest of us)

JP did a magic show for us (he's amazing!) that ended with our card being stuck to the roof... I think it's still up there. Poor Mom doesn't know what to do without any of her REALLY tall children left at home to help out.




We were determined to get a family picture. JP took one or two, but then we tried to get some with him in it and Cullen was deemed the timer setter on the camera. As you can see, she didn't always make it back in time to pose. Of course we couldn't pass up making fools of ourselves.





Ahhh a lovely Christmas Day! Friday was spent having lunch with my mother and my dear friends Nancy and Vickie. Then I ran some errands with Cullen and Cash and finished things up with pizza back at their house with Clay while we watched YouTube videos. If you know Clay, you know it's one of his favorite things to do. It's called "Mitchell Quality Time".



I hope that all of your weeks have been as enjoyable as mine was. Happy Holidays!

Random tid bits from this week

Last night Grant crawled up in our rocking chair with the two halves of his Goodnight Moon book and started reading it to himself.  The video is really dark, but I could hear certain vocal tones that sound like the way we read it.  There's also one part where he says "hush" twice (no doubt the brush, mush, hush part).  I thought it was pretty cute.

I've posted Grant doing the motions to this song before, but it was almost a year ago and he's mastered most of the hand gestures to it.  Just excuse the singing of his mother.

This is my latest scarf project.  I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it.

Goodnight, Goodnight Moon

Grant put an end to (one of) his Goodnight Moon books this week. I don't know if it was an act of two year old aggression, but for one reason or another he took out his frustrations on the mittens/kittens page. As consequence for his actions, we're only going to read him one part of the book at a time. He'll have to be satisfied without saying goodnight to the clocks, socks, little house, mouse, comb, brush, nobody, mush, old lady whispering "hush", stars, air, and noises everywhere. Something tells me he'll get just bring us our OTHER copy of the book instead. Isn't this book amazing?! I wonder if Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd got together and said, "Hey, let's write/illustrate a book that will not only be a best seller and be in every single home, but let's convince people that they need to own more than one copy!" I don't know about other homes, but growing up, we had this book in various sizes, shapes and textures! It's genius, I swear! They must have seen the little Grants of the world coming a mile away!

Grant has always been fascinated with the camera - rarely being happy to pose because he's constantly trying to get his hands on the technology. The other night I let him play and watched to see what he would do with it. After pressing the button to view the pictures and flipping through them, he set the camera to take a picture, put it on the floor, checked the screen, hit the button and tried to make it around to the front of the camera before it snapped the picture. No dice! He stayed on the performing side of the lens and hit the button a few more times, each time trying to get a little lower to look in the camera. He didn't have much success, but still it provided us with a lot of fun for one evening as we watched. I wonder if he'll become the first world renowned photographer who's work consists entirely of self portraits.

Eventually he gave up and started wandering around the room watching the screen as he moved. He managed to snap a picture of Jeremy, but had his finger partially over the flash I've cropped the picture a little bit.

Getting In The Holiday Spirit - Take 2

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Snow Day 2008!!!

I feel like I should be writing more, but I just want to get these pictures posted on here.... sorry for the lack of details.

The park across the street from our apartment complex.

Dang it Mom! Why couldn't we find my gloves?!?!

Grant's 2008 Snow Angel

Grant was determined to go down the slide even though the bottom was covered in snow. I think he changed his mind once he got to the top, can you tell? Gravity took care of the fear though and he slipped sliding perfectly down the slide and laughing at the bottom, sitting on the pile of snow that he'd just cleared off.

He also insisted on going on the swing, even though his little nose was getting pretty red!

He loves swinging on the "big kid" swings on his tummy.

Feeling Scarfy?

My name is Honor and I knit! Well, not with knitting needles, but on a hat loom like the one shown below (thank you, thank you, thank you Cullen - who gave it to me as a Christmas present the other year and really got me hooked - pun intended).

Scarves have been my favorite thing to make because I'm more likely to actually wear them than I am anything else i could make. This is the one I finished tonight and I was so happy that the picture I snapped was able to capture all the different colors in the yarn. Simply beautiful!

These are the other scarves I've made that I still have in my possession, in order from newest to oldest.