Some Holiday Adventures

Making a Gingerbread House

Meeting with Santa!

When we were covered in snow!

Opening Christmas Presents! Excited for Ballet Clothes!

Singing Karaoke Christmas Morning with Lindsay

Go away Snow!!! GO AWAY!!!!!!

I have to say that I love how beautiful snow is, and it looks beautiful when it's falling from the sky and on the trees and mountaintops. I've always enjoyed drinking hot chocolate from the comforts of inside watching the snow fall outside. However these snow storms we've had in the Northwest are causing real big problems. Especially in Gig Harbor! People have been without power for days, luckily ours wasn't out very long. Most communities in Gig Harbor get their water from wells which run on electric pumps, so no power means no water too.

The snow just keeps coming and coming! The cities here don't have the equipment to clear the snow between storms and won't use salt on the roads because they say it hurts the environment. So the roads, especially on raft island are awful. It snows and gets packed down, it freezes and turns to ice, then it snows on top of that and it becomes an vicious cycle. Today it started to rain and made it even worse. Now the slush will freeze tonight and make real dangerous ice.

I feel like I've been stuck in my house for a week, resisting the snow. My shoulder hurts from shoveling so much snow. Our driveway is really long and I've shoveled it twice. I refuse to shovel any more snow! The worst part is that we don't really see an end in sight.

Atleast the kids have been enjoying the snow. It has caused the school to take 3 snow days already, and it would have been more it the winter holiday break hadn't come. The girls have been playing in the snow all week. It's also a good thing we already had snow gear, since all the stores are out of snow boots and gloves. Not a single store in the county has snow chains for tires, and some gas stations are beginning to run out of fuel. UPS can't get me my packages before christmas because of all this snow.

What a Day!

All I can say right now is "What a Day!". It started at 4am this morning. I woke up to see the power had gone out and all the clocks were flashing. It appears the power went out at 2am. Then I got a telephone call at 6am from the school district telling me that school was being cancelled for the day due to freezing temperatures and snow forcast throughout the day.

Now, I had planned to spend the day making caramel and christmas treats to hand out. I even thought that having Emma home would actually help today since I didn't have to keep watching the clock. Well, needless to say, it was a nonstop, crazy day. First thing this morning, I helped the girls bundle up so they could go play in the fresh snow, hopped in the shower and started getting ready. Eddie called and said the Comcast cable guy was almost to the house to fix the internet, so I rushed to get the dogs inside so they didn't bother him. While the cable guy was here the two neighbor girls came over asking if Emma and Leora could play. I welcomed them in knowing they would help keep the girls busy. I started making caramel since it takes an hour to make and I had a lot of work I needed to get done. While making the caramel I was talking with the cable guy, talking with Zara from next door who seemed to be more interested in me than playing with the girls, and was trying to keep things for the girls to do (playdough & movie "Horton hears a Who" were some solutions).

With all the distractions this morning and my schedule being thoroughly thrown off I had completely forgotten to feed the dogs breakfast! The dogs get very irritable when they don't get their food. Normally it is obvious that when I forget to feed them because they keep bugging me until I do, but with the neighbors over I think they were distracted too. Molly started a fight with Leo over a piece of food the girls had dropped on the floor that she wanted! It was pretty intense between them so I got mad and put them outside. The dogs fight occasionally, and Molly usually instigates it. This time Molly got her comeupance! When Leo bit her ear during their scuffle he tore a 2 inch hole threw it and cut her in a couple spots on her face. She had blood all over her face and throat. When I saw the hole I flipped out.

Eddie had taken my car to work since his car couldn't make it up our driveway this morning. So I was left with his car and the truck, which wouldn't fit me, Molly, and the girls together. The roads were bad because of the snow. I just kept saying, "You had to get in a fight today! Of all days! Today!" I really didn't want to leave the house and fight the weather. I cleaned her wound and tried to bandage it. She immediately got the bandage off, so I decided I needed to take her to the vet. I called a few local vets cause I didn't want to drive the distance to her usual vet. No one answered their phones, and some of them were closed because the schools were closed. That's what you get for living in a small town I guess. I found a vet in Purdy that could see her, so my neighbor let the girls go over there and I took Molly in. The snow was bad enough that I just stayed at the vets office during the procedure rather than risk going anywhere. Molly is now all bandaged up, which she keeps trying to get off. We carried her to the truck because she was still pretty tipsy after the procedure was done and I wanted to get home.

It was an expensive fix for Molly too. My jaw dropped when they told me how much it cost for the procedure. I was wishing I had just taken her to her usual vet. It would have saved me a lot of money. They nickled and dimed me for everything. I'm going to dispute some of the charges when I go back on Friday to have her bandages changed.

So a day of making christmas treats turned into a day I don't want to repeat anytime soon.

Zoolights at Pt Defiance

Last night we went to see the Zoolights display at Pt Defiance Zoo and Aquarium. They had lots of fun light displays of all the different animals and local places. My favorite was Mt Rainier and the Tacoma Narrows bridges. Another good one was a display of a bald eagle flying down out of the tree, catching a fish out of a stream and then taking the fish up to a nest full of baby eagles. They really put a lot of work into the displays. They use only LED lights. Evidently LED lights will save you 75% on your holiday light bill versus regular lights. The zoo is of course into conservation.

Emma was disappointed that there weren't more animals out. We had to explain that they were sleeping and the zoo doesn't want to disrupt their sleeping patterns. It was nice walking around the zoo through all the lights sipping hot chocolate. Well, Emma and I were sipping hot chocolate. Oh, how we love hot chocolate!

My First Apple Pie - Experiment

I love to make pies! So I volunteered to make the pies for this years festivities. This Thanksgiving I had a request for apple pie by Jeff, my brother in law, who evidently loves apple pie. I am usually not a fan of apple pie for various reasons. The crust is usually too dry and overcooked because the pie cooks so long to fully cook all the apples. Then the pieces of apple are normally too large so they don't cook properly and pull out of the pie when you try to eat it, leaving part of your slice of pie empty. I admit I don't choose apple pie to eat if there is another option, so I haven't tried very many apple pies. However, because I've never had an apple pie I thought was really good and learned Eddie felt the same way, I was eager to take on the challenge of making an awesome apple pie.

I searched for about a week online, reading reviews and ratings, and looking at butter content. Jeff told me that a good apple pie is all about lots of butter. When I saw the "Elegant Farmer Apple Pie" recipe at http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/gale-gand/apple-pie-baked-in-a-bag-recipe/index.html I knew I had found the recipe I totally wanted to try. You bake the pie in a paper bag! The logic behind it was so clear to me that I thought it could make the crust great.

The pie turn out tasting very good, but not so pretty. The pretty factor had a lot to do with my apple pie making inexperience probably. I have to admit that a scoop of vanilla ice cream was required to really make the pie good for me. I will try the recipe again. Next time I probably won't cook it as long and add a little more sugar to the filling. The apples were on the verge of being over cooked, but could easily be sliced through when eating which was a plus for me. I used Granny Smith apples. There is so much butter in the crust that it made it very soft and reminded me of a cobbler crust. The top crust fell during cooling when the apples settled, which disappointed me. It was very full of apples and not much extra filling. The apples punctured the crust during settling because the crust was so delicate.

Jeff kept a few pieces for himself before I took the remaining pie home so I took that as a good sign that it turned out pretty well.

Miss E's Ballet Class

Emma has started taking ballet classes. She takes lessons from an 18 year old girl, named Elise, in our stake that attends the Tacoma School of Ballet. The lessons are at Elise's house. Right now there are only 2 girls in her class, so it's nice how she gets lots of attention from the instructor. She really enjoys learning the different positions, watching herself in the mirror, and dressing up in her ballet garb. She hasn't gotten real ballet shoes yet, waiting until Christmas to hand those out, but loves to show us her ballet moves. In case you didn't already know, Emma loves being dramatic! Just check out these pictures! Here are a couple little videos from her most recent lesson.

They always get to have a Ballet Freestyle portion of class:

My Twilight Movie Review

So you all know that I am a fan of the Twilight books. Mostly because I am a fanatic for vampires. For me there's just something sensual about them. So of course I was going to see the new movie by Summit Entertainment. I went opening day at 4:30pm with my sister Lindsay.

I like reading user reviews on Yahoo before I go see a movie. For those of you who don't know what those are they are ordinary people that have seen the movie and write and rate what they saw. Yesterday I started reading the User Reviews of Twilight and I felt very disappointed about what people were saying. The first 4 reviews posted that I read rated the movie a D! The average rating was a C+, so some were better and some were worse.

I'm rating this movie a B-! And that is being generous. As my sister Lindsay put it, "It was just what we expected it to be, not great". However, if you are a young teenager you will probably really like it. The movie was absolutely catered to that crowd. It was full of immature moments and cheesy lines, some of which are direct quotes from the book. The theater had lots of young teenage girls that kept screaming at parts throughout the movie. They made the movie worse by being so distracting.

This movie's greatest downfall was it's director, Catherine Hardwicke. She did not do a good job. If and when they make another movie, which the movie ending eludes to, they absolutely need a different director. It is the directors job to direct the actors, to inspire and get the right performance out of the actors, and she did not do that. She didn't have the right vision or ability to lead the actors to where they needed to go.

So if you can't tell, some of the acting was bad. I actually didn't mind Kristen Stewart's performance. Bella in the book is awkward and not too interesting. That's what makes her so ordinary and loved. I felt Kristen achieved that and did okay. My biggest problem was with Robert Pattinson's performance. It felt very forced most the time. The most irritating thing was his facial expressions. They portrayed ideas and emotions that weren't accurate with what I think he was trying to. He confused me! His performance is one of the reasons I blame the director, because sometimes he achieved the right reaction, but there were many key times he confused the audience with his facial expressions. There were many lines that could have been delivered better or maybe just written better, many left the audience laughing instead of helping the story along. Also, if you haven't read the book many of Edwards reactions to Bella at first won't make any sense to you.

Last, the special effects weren't too bad. I thought it was fun and added to the movie, but you could tell there wasn't a big budget for them. They basically used a lot of wire rigs. The FX when Edward is in sunlight looked weird to me and didn't dazzle me. :( I kept waiting for him to dazzle me.

I think Robert Pattinson was cast as Edward just because he has a great smile, since that was the only time I felt he was dazzling. Also, Rosalie should have been a lot more beautiful!!! They should have cast someone that is a natural blonde. Nikki Reed didn't suit the look. Emmett (Kellan Lutz) and Alice (Ashley Greene) were fun. Peter Facinelli did a great performance as Carlisle. Billy also did well. He pulled it off with some great humor. Jacob's wig wasn't as bad as I had heard, and I think Taylor Lautner is a better actor than Robert Pattinson.

Since this blog is already way too long! Thanks for reading! Take this all for what it's worth.

YouTube Rocks! Star Wars Tribute!

This is lots of fun! In my opinion, impressive. YouTube has so much stuff on it. I love checking out what people put on there. This is a tribute to Star Wars/John Williams that someone posted.

Our Halloween this Year!

This year we had lots of fun for Halloween. We made caramel apples, went to the pumpkin patch to pick out our pumpkins and carved lots of pumpkins to decorate our driveway and porch. Emma was Ariel from the Little Mermaid and Leora was a Bumblebee. I made Emma's costume and Leora used one of Emma's past halloween costumes. We tried to spray Emma's hair orange, but the color just didn't show up very well on her dark hair. Next time we know she'll need a wig.
Eddie and I took the girls around to about 12 houses and decided we had walked enough. Houses aren't right next to each other on the island and lots of people weren't participating. :( We learned that not very many kids trick or treat on the island because of that. We probably only got 10 trick or treaters all night long. I was a little disappointed since Halloween is possibly my favorite holiday. We just have a lot of candy left over. Emma and her neighbor friends helped me decorate our front porch with spiders and cobwebs. We put jack-o-lanterns along our driveway to make sure people knew they were welcome. I didn't want the thought of barking dogs to scare away trick or treaters. Surprisingly the dogs behaved very well. They just hung out in our bedroom most of the night. They didn't bark at the doorbell a single time. It was miraculous!

I Guess She Wanted a Mullet!

Our little Leora decided yesterday morning, while I was doing the dishes downstairs dealing with a plugged dishwasher, to cut her own hair. I admit that she had ample time to do this since I was very focused on unplugging the dishwasher. I have caught her cutting her hair before, but it has only been minor cuts and she mostly would trim her hair. However, this morning she went to town on it. These pictures don't even really show the extent of the damage she accomplished.

She cut out so many huge chunks of hair, and left quite a few bald spots. The sink was full of hair. She pretty much had cut herself a mullet! Cut off most the hair on the top and sides of her head. Now my initial reaction was just shock. She already had so little hair, and we have been waiting 3 years for that to grow. I was so surprised that she cut so much off also because she loved having the long hair, or so she said. My next reaction was to laugh, but that was short lived since I figured I should get mad at her. After telling her how naughty it was to cut her hair I called Eddie to tell him. I kept laughing about it while I told him what she had done while Leora sat in my lap crying. I couldn't decide what to do with her hair since she butchered it so badly. Eddie told me to shave her head! I could only hear Colleen Abbott's voice in my head telling me not to do that. Her mother shaved her head at age 3 believing it would help her hair grow back in thicker, and she told me once that I should never do that to my children.

I decided the only other option was to cut her hair real short and hope it grows back in in those bald spots soon. It will probably take a few months with how fast Leora's hair grows. When I told Leora that we needed to cut off the rest of her hair because of what she had done she freaked out. I put her on the bathroom counter kicking and screaming. Each time she would start to calm down while I was cutting her hair she would look in the mirror and see me cutting the hair and start crying again. Hopefully she was traumatized enough by the event that she won't do it again.

Funny that I took her out to a couple of stores yesterday and to Emma's soccer practice and no one said anything about her hair. No one laughed or said anything! I concluded that maybe they thought she could be a cancer patient or had some disease and was loosing her hair.

After the inital shock, I have to say that the haircut is growing on me and she doesn't care anymore that it has been cut. Eddie's new nickname for her is "Butch", she gets mad at him everytime he calls her that. With any luck it will help her hair grow in faster from having the drastic haircut.

Karaoke Songs

Well, ever since Eddie's birthday we play SingStar on the PS3 atleast once a week. Emma more often! But I've discovered that it is fun to Karaoke. So I have put together a playlist of my favorite songs to sing. My all time favorites are "Total Eclipse of the Heart -Bonnie Tyler" by myself, "Time after Time -Cindy Lauper" with Emma, and "It's Tricky - RunDMC" with Eddie. The playlist is here on my blog, and if you are reading this from my actual blog then you are probably already listening to it! Enjoy it for what it's worth. =) Be warned there are some country songs!!!!

Cut's Island aka Dead Man's Island

It was such a beautiful day yesterday that we took the boat over to Cut's Island, which is a small island that is really close to our home. It is known by the locals as Dead Man's Island. It is part of Kopachuck State Park and can only be reached by boat or swimming to when the tide is low. When the sun is out you can see seal's laying out in the sun to warm up. Last night we saw this baby seal and his friend seagull. The seal kept moving up the sand closer and closer to us when the water would touch him, and this seagull would follow. They were good friends!

The seal didn't seem to care that we were there. Emma got within 10 feet of the seal and it just looked at her. She said it was talking to her, but she couldn't understand the language.


We built a fire to grill burgers and hot dogs for dinner. It's hard to feed children on a beach when they keep playing in the sand. Did you know that sand gets everywhere and on everything!?! Eddie brought his fishing pole to try to catch a fish. He still hasn't caught any around the island! I think this was his 6th attempt. We'll just say that he doesn't have the patience to sit and wait! However, I did get this great picture of him trying.

I've been wanting to get a nice picture of the sunset from Raft Island, where we live, because it is always so beautiful. So we waited until sunset before packing up to head home. I took quite a few pictures, but here are my favorites.

I also got a picture of Raft Island from Cut's. This picture gives you more of an idea of where we live. People ask me all the time if there are any stores or gas stations on the island. There are only about 80 houses there. There isn't room for anything else. On the right is the small bridge and the picture cuts off on the left at the edge of the island.

Saturday Night Live! Sara and Hillary!

Did you see this skit on Saturday Night Live? It is super funny! I love the interaction between the two of them. Hilarious!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PxJfaNgDoE

Sorry! The link doesn't work anymore. NBC took the clip off of Youtube for copyright reasons.

Eddie's Birthday

Eddie had his birthday yesterday. He's 31 now! He received lots of texts, emails, and phone calls to wish him happy birthday. He told me he was super surprised at the amount of attention he received for his birthday, especially since he would let us forget it if he could. Of course with me as a wife there is no chance of that! Eddie got off work early so he could attend Emma's soccer practice. Afterwards we drove up to Port Orchard to have dinner at a Chinese Buffet. There aren't very many of them around here, and Seattle was too long of a drive for the evening. When we got home we celebrated with candles and cake. Emma said her Dad needed to have a red and white cake, so I made a Red Velvet cake with whipped cream. Emma wanted him to have a Utah cake!

The girls and I gave Eddie the new PS3 game SingStar. It's a super fun karaoke game that let's you download new songs directly from the game while connected to the internet. Each download includes the original music video which you watch while you sing the song. After you sing you have the option of listening to the audio recording of your performance. We definitely need lots more practice! We didn't realize we sounded so bad!!!!!! You can also purchase an eye camera to go with the game which allows you to watch yourself on the TV while you karaoke, then you can share your performances with other people online. It's suppose to be the last karaoke game you will ever need to buy, since you can download additional songs that you want. Needless to say, we ended up playing the game for about 2 hours last night.

Our Professional Soccer Player!

Emma had her first soccer game today! She loves playing soccer and is learning lots. She mostly plays defense, and gets super excited when she kicks the ball away from someone to keep the ball away from the goal. Most of the game she was too concerned about staying in her position to get real involved, but towards the end she started going after the ball when in came inside her area. Emma says she loves playing soccer, and told our neighbor that she is going to be a professional soccer player.


Unfortunately her team lost their first game, but her coach didn't point it out. Emma announced after the game to us that no one won the game! It was just like practice! Her team is made up of 1st and 2nd grade girls. The team is called the "Voyager Huskies". They practice every Monday after school and have their games every Saturday through November 8th.


I ordered the smallest jersey size for Emma and the jersey goes down past her knees! So she always tucks it into her shorts. She is definitely the smallest girl on the team. The other parents kept commenting to each other at the game "Who is that little girl? Is she in 1st grade?". They were also commenting on how enthusiastic she was during the game. She just kept running, skipping, and jumping in place the entire game, even when she was on the sidelines. Eddie shakes his head every time he sees her skipping across the field. I can't help but smile because I know she is having fun. It's fun to see her enjoy the game so much, since soccer is my favorite sport to play.

And She's Off Again!

Emma started school today! She was very excited to be going back to school. She's a 1st grader! Her teachers name is Ms. Conti. We all know Emma is not a morning person and getting her out of bed to get off to school is not always the easiest. This morning she was excited to get out of bed and get dressed in the clothes she had picked out last night. She wasn't as excited to brush her teeth and get her hair done. Emma had a stomach ache this morning when it was time to have breakfast, so she didn't feel like eating. She was either too excited for school or a little bit nervous. Nevertheless, Emma went off to her first day of school without breakfast!