Globbity Hobbs.

I just figured I would have to do a little post on all the crafty crafts I have been doing. As I mentioned in the previous blog, I have been pretty much barricaded in the guest/craft room. Thank goodness we have netflix in that room! The first major project of the year? A pretty pettiskirt for my neice, Amber. She turned three (for the 7th time) on January 29. Isn't she so pretty?!

One of my best friends daughter is amazingly responsible and academic. One day for school, they had Colonial Day, where they needed to dress up as Colonial Era people and made a day of it. Of course, she wanted to go all out! But.......where is a person going to find a colonial dress in the beginning of February?? A trip to Joanns was in store. The deal was she provides the materials, I get to keep the pattern, and some free babysitting, and I'll make the dress. It took me all of one evening and an afternoon (because I can only work when Caleb is taking a nap or in bed.....he's so destructive). I thought it turned out super awesome.



I have a few friends who are having babies, so I have been working on some sweet blankets for them. I can't post one of them yet because I haven't given it yet, but here is the one for very loyal San Diego Padres fans.

The mother to be also absolutely loves elephants, so how could I not make a sweet hat for the baby boy...

It won't be more than a few weeks before the sweet little baby will be wearing this..I am soo excited to meet the lil guy!
My most recent project was actually inspired by a trip to Walmart. True story. I wanted to get Caleb a new car seat because the only front facing strap in car seat we have is Celeste's old pink flowery one that has seen better days. Unfortunately, Walmart didn't HAVE any basic strap in car seats available. They had transfoming fancy ones, but we weren't looking for a $150 car seat. On the way home, I told Greg, 'Looks like Caleb will have to use Celeste's pink one' in hopes he would agree to search a local Target. He just mildly agreed. Frustrated, I said something along the lines of making a fitted liner for the pink one so he wouldn't have to sit in girliness. Greg heartily agreed, so I spent the afternoon researching car seat liners, and discovered a site that explained how to use the old batting from the original car seat cushion to completely transform your old car seat. The thing I liked most about the concept? The padding would be the same size, fit the same way, there would be no loose faric to pull over his head/face, it would just be a little more work. I'm down. I just need to get flame resistant spray for it, and scotch guard it too. As I suspected, he really didn't like the pink one so much.

It is old, stained, and not so manly.

And then the magic happened. I went to Joanns. I manipulated stubborn padding to form curves and shaping. The result was significant improvement.

I got a kick out of the dragon...it just screams, "IM AWESOME".

This is all for NOW, but I have several more projects in store. What's next? Finishing a baby blanket, making another pettiskirt for another niece's birthday (who is ALSO turning three again), and starting another baby blanket. Will I do more than that? Probably. Maybe not as fast soon. The company I worked for in Yuma contacted me and offered me a very part time job three days a week UP TO 20 hours (meaning more like 15hrs) a week. Is it less money than I'm making now? Yes. But it's a long term job that will be here as long as I am with a company that can employ me on any Marine Corps base. I will miss Noah Kun very much, especially when he LEAVES US in the summer. *sniff* But I have to make long term plans, and I also like how the job will get me out of the house during Gregs deployment, and keep me busy and distracted at the same time as not being too many hours away from home. I can also still pick up Celeste and have lunch with the kids and help her with her homework before going back to work, if I haven't finished for the day by the time she gets out of school. True Story. I want to thank my neighbors who are always so awesome and instantly agreed to take my monster as long as they live here. I also want to thank Noahs parents for letting me take care of their sweet baby boy, and also for understanding the situation. I won't start for another 2 weeks (as is the plan), so expect a few more crafty crafts!

Cheers!

Hello Hippo!

Hello there, 2012. Ok ok, so it's really mid-Feb. Don't judge. Lots of things happening this year! Woooo! One of the first things to happen? The haircut "incident". So the first week of January I looked at my baby girls hair and thought, "man, it's getting so long, and the ends are so snaggly...it's time for a trim for sure. Celeste is going to freak out if I tell her she needs a hair cut....*sigh*". So I tell her, "Hey CC, what do you think about getting your hair cut? It's really long, so we should just cut a little bit to make it pretty." "Weeeeeeeelll......ok Mom." "How short would you like it?" *CC puts her hand at the base of her skull, above the neck* "I want it THIS short!" "Uuuuuuh....PROBABLY not." "Aww."
A few hours goes by and I'm thinking of our conversation. I remember chopping off my hair every two years for Locks of Love, and think MAYBE I can let her chop her hair if it's for a good cause....So I measure her hair and it has at least 10 inches to cut off. Barely. But still 10 inches. And so I showed her the pictures of the sick children with no hair and explain how she can give her hair to them if she wants. Of course she was soooooOOOooOo happy to give her hair. "I want to give my hair to the kids who can't grow their hair cause they're sick!"

As you might imagine, I wiped away a few tears during the process.

 She kept making scared funny faces...she wanted to do it, but actually DOING it can be scary..even for a 5yr old.

And then all her hair was on the counter!

And the real work began, Miss Sarah is so awesome and made sure that every day Celeste's hair would be the easiest hair EVER. Just spray with water and brush it out.

In the end, I'm not entirely sure why I was so scared. She sure can pull off a bob, and it makes her look so much older. I kept having to wipe away those pesky tears though.

Celeste got to mail her hair to the sick children all by herself. What a sweet girl I have.



As for the Monster, he is all sorts of silliness. Hes been helping me clean the house. Seriously. If I'm sorting dirty clothes into piles of lights and darks, he will start putting them back in the clothes hamper. If I'm cooking, he will take all the measuring spoons and cups out and play on the floor. He will even hold the bottle for Noah occasionally (and closely supervised)! He throws trash away...he will throw away dirty diapers if I ask him to (his and Noahs), he will walk around with a bag of fruit snacks, eat the snacks and throw away the wrapper when he's done without being asked.

 He will put random dishes in the dishwasher for me. He will even clean up his toys if I ask! Once he was walking around with the guitar hero guitar and I told him to clean up....

Yup. My silly sweetest baby boy. Mommys joy.

This month seems to be going by in a flurry of projects. I'm constantly sewing, crocheting, knitting, gluing, and banging my head against the wall. True Story. A few weeks ago, what I like to refer to as "black Monday" occured. First of all....Greg will be deploying this year. He has had a few opportunities to volunteer to not go, and every time I urged him to go. I know he wants to deploy, get his new medals and go somewhere new, and I have seriously the best neighbors EVER, who make up the best support system I could have ever asked for. On "Black Monday", I was informed that my friend Sara was moving far far away in a few months. I'm STILL trying to persuade her not to leave....I don't think it's working. A few hours later, Rachel let me know they got orders to move far far away.....in a few months, within weeks of Sara moving. She also informed me that my other neighbor was moving during the summer. LAAAME!! So there I was...facing a 'support system vacuum'. All I had left was my one last neighbor and a friend who occasionally stops by. Aaaaaand my last neighbor made a super fast decision to move far far away while her hubs is gone, and packed up this week and is already gone. Even Noah's parents, whom we've been friends with for YEARS are moving to JAPAN in the summer! And so begins the mass exodus of our neighborhood. Everyone is moving or deploying, and it's going very fast. By the time Greg comes home, only one person he knows here will still be here. We will have completely new neighbors, and I'm just hoping Celeste will get a friend, and maybe Caleb will find someone his age too. I also hope I make friends with them, and that they're at least half as awesome as my super awesome neighbors now.
Here's an example of awesome neighbor-ness. Sara invited us to the tide pools.....and it was super awesome.

I had to tell my daughter that her best friend is moving. But at least I got some sweet pics of them together.

We sure will miss all these kids running around here. But I'm grateful for the good times we had together, and look forward to the next few months we still have.

Of course....there WERE actual tide pools involved..

..........and then my camera got dropped in a pool and ceased working. Bah. So now I will be doing some new camera research. Yay! And that is all for now.

Ending the Year

Ok....So it's been like six months since I blogged. I WANT to be better at this, I really do. So I'm going to just post about the last three months of 2011, then make a new post about 2012.
So here we go.
OCTOBER!!
On the 2nd of October (the day before my little baby girl turned FIVE), we woke up to the house being FLOODED. True Story. My CAT flooded the house. We had a mouse in the cabinet where his food was, so we put his food in the laundry room sink while we dealt with that problem. The cat finished his food and went looking for more, and turned on the sink (cause it has a long handle) and it flooded. In the middle of the night.

Thanks Maxx cat. For the next month, people were in and out of our house, tearing out the floorboards, huge fans in the house, dehumidifiers, ripping up carpet, drilling holes in the wall to air them out, fixing the holes, new floorboards, taking out the ruined hutch...not so awesome.

Needless to say, poor Celeste's birthday was not the GREATEST one, but we went to a neighbors house and had a very small celebration.

So Celestes Aunt Lissa made her a beautiful Repunzel dress...

Celeste raced in a 1K race (with me) while Daddy ran in a 10K...

We carved pumpkins with our friends....

Greg made a spartan costume for himself while I made Caleb into a doctor, and Celeste into a pirate.

And now....we get to NOVEMBER.

I started taking care of a baby boy named Noah in November (well, I actually started on Halloween). To start out the month, Greg and I got to go to the Marine Corps Ball!

We got to visit my mommy for Thanksgiving!! It was AWESOME.....except I wanted to go see amazing national trasures like Jamestown, Williamsburg, DC, or something, and all Greg wanted to do was go fishing in the lake and go to work (true story....we traveld cross country so Greg could go work). Other than that, we got to play with baby turtles, fish, go to Smithfield, fish, eat Thanksgiving dinner, fish, play in leaves, fish, see my brother, fish, go black friday shopping at 10pm Thanksgiving night, fish....you get my point. heehee

Did I mention the pillow pets from Uncle Chris saved the day on the plane ride home??
Anyways, when we got home, it was time DECORATE the TREE!!

Then we taught Celeste how to ride her bike with no training wheels. She's so awesome and picked it up so fast....she even started jumping ramps with boys under her.

And that brings us to...DECEMBER!

Grandma Di-di (Greg's mom) came down for a visit. There was much spoiling going on, including awesome Christmas gifts, date night, even going to Legoland. It was only a few days, but we sure did do a lot! Of course....first we had some fun seeing Santa at Trees for Troops...

Did I mention our new table came? You know....to replace the ruined set Maxx cat left us with a few months ago? I looooOOOooove it!!

And just in case you needed some holiday spirit....

Yes. My son is super silly. Anyways, moving on. Gregs brother Uncle Matt came down for a visit a few days after Grandma Di-di left. Celeste LOVED playing with her uncle!! Our surogate family, the Ivanovs, also came down and took us all to Disneyland!! We had such an amazing time! We got to take Celeste on all the super fast rides and she LOVED them! Her favorite was Space Mountain cause it was "so so FAST!" while Came got to go on all the slow rides with Aunt Nanny and Baba (because they don't like the fast rides). It was a perfect arrangement. We also got to watch the parade while sitting on Main Street. It was so fun because all the performers were very interactive! There were funny snowmen who wiggled at us, reindeer who actually gave Caleb high fives and tickled him, many characters on floats who waved........and Mickey Mouse himself was ice skating, and STOPPED when he saw my baby boy wearing Mickey ears, POINTED at Caleb, waved, blew a kiss, and giggled all at him. Even if it wasn't quite the magical experience for Caleb yet, I had to wipe away a tear or two. At the end of the evening, Baba and Diado took the babies to the hotel so Greg, Matt and I could run around like wild children at California Adventures. We stayed out till the last shuttle left at midnight. What a great time!! Thank you Ivanovs!!

We decided to spend Christmas with our Phoenix family. Before we left, we opened a few of our gifts, just the big ones.

We packed up and headed to the Ivanovs first, and I got to meet my new 'sister in law' Brittany! We spent Christmas Eve with my sister, and headed to Jami's house for Christmas. My sister had her baby on the 26th, and while she was having a c-section, I put the older girls to work cleaning the house. We had to leave before I could meet my newest niece, which was utterly heartbreaking to me. I was so sad they wouldn't let anyone see my sister for a few hours after the delivery. But it was a seven hour drive and I had to work at 5am the next day. It was a pleasant trip besides that.

Of course....Santa ALSO made a special trip to our house and gave us a WAGON!! He must have known we were out of town and didn't have room in the car for a wagon. What a saint!



Our New Years was exceptionally fun. Every year, military families get a free day at usch Gardens and Sea World. Our friends the Farmers really love going, but hadn't used their free day for the year yet, and neither did we, so we went together. On New Years Eve. It was awesome!! We saw a few shows, went to most of the exibits, played in snow, and even rode Atlantis, the water ride!! Seriously...we rode the water ride in December.

We rang in the new year with our friends on the street. We played games and gave the kids sparklers. We passed out champaign with only 10seconds left before midnight. I spilled my champaign (NO, I was NOT drunk, thank you) and promptly said goodnight and went to bed. Thus ended our year. What does 2012 bring? Gregs deployment, ALL of my friends moving away DURING the deployment, and the apocolypse. True story. OK, maybe not the apocolypse. But everyone IS leaving. Aah well. That just means I'll have to take trips to Arizona.

Cheers and congrats for making it to the end of this post.