A Sassarific Pig Birthday

So Hannah is obsessed with pigs to the point of wanting to save her money for a 2K miniature pot-bellied pig. I figure if she saves her money that long and still wants one, I might just have to give in. In the meantime, Hannah had a "Sassy Pig Sleepover Spa Birthday Party" or something like that. It ended up just being her and her best friend. So we did facials and nails,
went shopping at the mall, got new hairdos with Sassy Pink Dance Diva hair and makeovers at Libby Lous,lunch at a restaurant of her choosing, made pig crafts and a piggy cake and had an all-around fun birthday. It must have been an awesome one, as she claimed it was better than a day at Disney. Now, I find that hard to believe, but maybe in a 9 year old's mind, it was.

The word of the day was "sassy". When we found Sassy Rings (aka mood rings) that determined how sassy you are, they were a must have. Sorry my old mind just thinks of sassy as being smart-mouthed, but hey I am getting old, so what do I know?

A "Nosy" Memory

Someone on SBA asked if you child stuck things in their nose and it brought back this memory. When my Hannah was about 2 or 3, I kept noticing a foul odor coming from her. I kept thinking it was bad breath. I kept brushing her teeth day after day but the odor never went away. Don't remember how we ended up at the doctor's office, but I mentioned this horrid smell. He said it could be something stuck in her nose. I had never thought of this before and she had never claimed to have anything in her nose or that her nose bothered her. Sure enough the doctor looked up there and noticed something in there but wanted me to take her to an ENT to have it removed. I tried several ENTs but they kept saying I couldn't get an appointment for at least a month. I finally found one to see her the next day. He goes in and pulls this huge grayish looking stuff out of her nose in the matter of a moment. I don't know how something that big got into her little nose. She later claimed to have shoved the "fuzzy" up her nose. When I asked what a "fuzzy" was, I found out that it was the filling from a pillow. I could never figure out why she did it and how it never bothered her.

Feast One Hundred & Seventy Seven

To jump start my blog again I thought I would fill this questionaire out that I have seen other do.

Appetizer
How many times per day do you usually laugh?

Surely not near enough. Now if I am with Jen then it is a non-stop laughter fest.

Soup
What do your sunglasses look like?

Don't usually wear sunglasses and being the cheapy that I am, it is usually something I grabbed from the dollar store.

Salad
You win a free trip to anywhere on your continent, but you have to travel by train. Where do you go?

Well if I can to stay on my continent, I would probably explore Alaska. I could see the beauty of there without being outside and cold.

Main Course
Name one thing you consider a great quality about living in your town/city.

I love that within walking distance there are several parks, a lake and a quaint uptown area with some neat mom & pop type stores and good places to eat. The other part is that I can hop in my car and be to almost any type of retail establishment I could dream of within 15 minutes.

Dessert
If the sky could be another color, what color do you think would look best?

I guess I would make it a light purple since I love the color purple. I'd keep it a light version though so it would not be gloomy.

Latest Craze!

So has the craze hit your house? I'm talking about the Webkinz craze. For those still not sure about what this is, let me explain, you buy a stuffed animal with a secret code. You then use this code to access an online game where you earn money for your webkinz and have a virtual pet complete with a house and food. It is filled with lots of games and such. Anyways, Hannah started the craze at our house, which has spread even to Lucas. As you collect more and more pets you get more rooms and "exclusive items". Then to make it even more interesting you can buy clothes, charms, body sprays and other webkinz merchandise, which grants you access to even more things in webkinz world. So you can see the addiction to this craze.

Here are just a few of the Webkinz Santa or other people gave Hannah for Christmas.

Just to let you know too, I know at least one kid that says "I'm cool" because I like to play the Webkinz games too. And, no I don't have any of my own. I just play on their accounts and earn money, which they in turn blow through. Hey, that sounds like real life!

Funny Shirts

Well if I had to pick one item that makes me think of Lucas this past year, it would be funny shirts. He lives in t-shirts with funny sayings. In fact, it has become somewhat of a competition amongst the kids on what their shirts say.

Imagine my surprise when shopping at Walmart and I discovered Christian-based funny shirts. Lucas was enthralled with all the choices. Unfortunately we could not get all the ones he wanted as others must have found them appealing too. Anyways, we did end up with 10 new shirts, which was good because some of his t-shirts were getting pretty worn out.

I am so proud that even being a teenager in the rough world of middle school, he isn't afraid to express his beliefs.

There was one in particular that he wanted and they didn't have any. It was 2 stone tablets with the 10 commandments and said something like "Take two tablets and call me in the morning". He would need either a men's medium, first choice or a men's large. I would gladly pay for the item, shipping this to me and a little something else too if anyone can find one.

Santa's Late Delivery

Well I guess Santa's last present got delayed when Michael saw the UPS man coming to the door for me or Santa had a brief lapse in memory. In any case, I finally got a pair of real "crocs" and fuzzy ones at that. Wouldn't you know the weather warmed up into the 60s for the next few days. Oh well, I am sure good old Ohio is still due for more snow.

For those of you concerned by the last picture of crocs that I only had one leg (see comment section), I made sure to post a picture of my 2 matching shoes. I actually have 2 left feet, but I try to hide that fact.

Keeping a promise (so far)

Well I said that I was going to take a photo a day & so far I have managed to do so. I do though need to charge the camera tonight or there won't be one tomorrow. I barely got in today's photos before it shut off.

So my photos for yesterday were of our puppy Blizzard. He has changed a lot from the little ball of puff that he was in July. He is a good dog except for this habit of knocking things off the table or the island in an effort to chew it up. Who needs a paper shredder when you have a dog like this? It was definitely hard taking pictures of him. He was in constant motion. I finally had Hannah tempt him with her Ramen to get him to stay still long enough to get a picture that wasn't a moving ball of fur.

Today's picture is of my latest obsession. I never was much of a "shoe person" until I discovered "Crocs", or in my case,imitation "crocs". I'm too cheap to buy real ones and anyhow it is more fun to have lots of pairs for the same price as one real one. So this is my fun! Can you guess which are my favorites? There is one pair out of the bunch that rarely gets worn but I figured I should have them for times that I wanted to act conservative.

I asked Santa for a pair with fuzzy lining for the winter, but I must not have been good enough to have him bring them for me. Santa did get me "croc bling", aka jibbitz, but I haven't figured out which pair to put them in yet.

Snow

Snow equals fun for a kid and pain for the parent. I know it took me longer to get all the stuff they needed to play in the snow gathered up and put on them, then it did for them to actually play in the snow. Oh well, better outside playing in the snow together than sitting in front of the tv or computer not interacting with each other.

So to go along with my photo challenge (see previous blog), I figured that since I am sharing them on the blog and I am doing this to improve my photography skills as well, I'd love feedback throughout the year on how I can make my photos even better.



Photo Entries for January 2, 2008

Challenge

So I was reading SBA and saw a challenge. I am going to give it a try and see if I can stick with it. The challenge is to take a picture every day for the whole year. This will serve to document the year and hopefully improve my photography skills. Hopefully it will prompt me also to blog as well and maybe even scrapbook for a change. I just hope I don't get too busy once we get back into our routine to remember to take a picture every day. I'll apologize in advance, but there will probably be a lot of pictures of the kids. :-)

So here are my pictures for January 1. We took the kids bowling. It was fun despite their competitiveness. They did relatively well with the assistance of the bumpers, although I worried with Lucas' power that he might take out the bumpers (rails) a few times. We joked with him that it was bowling not pinball. Sorry the picture of Parker is grainy. I was experimenting with the camera's setting under the lighting of the bowling alley. It looked good on the camera but terrible once I put it on the computer. So a new photography lesson learned. Had to laugh at how Parker would lay down a lot of the time and watch his ball go down the lane.

Traditions

Funny how you do things year after year but don't really think of them as traditions until you go to do something different and everyone wants to do what you have always done. For several years now, we have spent New Year's Eve at home with the kids playing board games, breaking a pinata and at midnight shoot off tons of confetti and poppers and drink some sparkly juice.

This year our town planned a big celebration for New Year's to kick off the 150th anniversary of our town. I thought the kids would be excited to go and check it out. Instead I met resistance. As a compromise, I promised that we would still do confetti, poppers and silly string when we returned home.

It was an interesting evening out on the town. Luckily the rain held off until the New Year and the weather was relatively mild. We were entertained with a light show and a ball raising/lighting in the center of town. We even got to eat at our favorite pizza place. I have to say it is the closest pizza to home (Pittsburgh) that we have had in the 7 years we have lived here.


Kids by town Christmas tree. (I still need work at taking night shots)

Still the kids were anxious to get home and cover the family room with confetti and such, the likes of which take us over an hour to clean up, even when we use the shop vac.

Happy New Year!

Well one of my 2008 wishes is to at least update my blog 2 times a month.
So here is number one of what I hope is at least 23 more entries this year.
Hope you & yours have a great 2008!

Here is a picture of the kids taken after our annual confetti battle!
More on our evening to come but it is 2 a.m. and I am ready for bed.