Today we spent an entire day in the car to get to my Tia Karen’s house where we will spend the next week. We love driving!
We started about 4:30am:
Along the way we saw some crazy stuff:
Got to sunny California by midday.
Ate at a Mexican restaurant for a late dinner
And made it to the BaycArea
And promptly conked out the last leg of the trip.
No fuss, no drama, no problems! A great road trip with cousins at the end!
2007 was a particularly challenging year for Christmas cards. I was 18 months old and we were trying to live up to the infamous fireplace picture from the year before.
Like, I said. That was a hard year.
Christmas is one of the best times of year to show off some Do It Yourself Projects. A few new things in our house this year were handmade with love. DIY doesn’t mean perfect, but it means a lot of fun.
One of the things we did this year was make homemade notepads for my teachers. Online, there are a lot of great tutorials for DIY notepads, we didn’t use one in particular.
First, you gather all the paper you want in your pad – we printed out some of my drawings that were scanned. Then, you glue the edges (you don’t have to use a fancy clamp, books worked just fine.)
Then have kinko’s cut them down to the size you want!
I made these for my teacher:
And these with the school logo for other teacher’s and administrators:
We have new stockings this year – using this simple stocking tutorial, mom fashioned stockings out of some of my dad’s old work shirts. You can make anything out of an old dress shirt!
The patches came from this wonderful vendor on Etsy that we met at a craft show recently.
The red and green accent fabrics match the quilt that Grandma is working on – here is what the finished product will look like:
Everybody is DIYing.
Here is an ornament Annabel made out of painted pasta and red pipe cleaner:
Here’s one I made:
Dad didn’t make anything yet, but since he is so amazing, his Secret Santa at work made him something extra special for his office.
Today, Viviana showed us a tutorial on how to make gift bags out of any kind of paper.
So, we made this one out of a watercolor painting I made last week:
We are posting our Christmas cards by the kitchen table so we can look at them during dinner. We used paper chains and painted clothespins.
Finally, here’s Annabel’s homemade dress for Christmas Eve dinner. Fig Tree & Co provided this party dress pattern.
So, we hope we’ve inspired you to make a few things of your own this Christmas!
When it was just me, mom tried to get really creative with the Christmas cards. This is her favorite year.
Here is the set up – notice the nicely decorate Christmas cookies I made?
It is very tricky to get a 2 year old and a dog to make a nice face and look at the camera a the same time.
When you get one looking good, you can’t get the other:
Moose had a hard time staying put. It’s impossible for a large dog to back up and sit down in such a small place. How did my mom do this? I’ll take the secret to my last day.
My mom had to stand on a chair to get a good angle – she tried jumping up and down to get us to smile or pay attention. To this day, my mom jumping up and down and screaming, just makes us look at her like she’s crazy.
We just got bored
To keep us going, I licked the icing spoon and Moose got to lick a spoon of peanut butter.
Luckily, Christmas cards only happen once a year
As you know, I take a jazz/hip hop class once a week. You may wonder, “why does Ben need a dance class if he is such an amazing dancer already?”
Well, you are right, of course, but taking a class helps me with fundamental moves and body control.
We spend the beginning of class on stretching and basic moves:
Then we do some floor work. Kicking our legs according to the teacher’s counting is tricky.
One of the most important things we learn is about choreography and how to follow the music with counts and steps. For holiday season we learned a dance to one of the grinch’s favorite songs.
Here we show you the process of practicing without the music and then we put it all together.
