Thursday, December 20, 2012

Christmas!

 

So here I sit. One day left of work before break.  (An unpaid break mind you. Catch 22. Yes I love the time off, but the paycheck at the end of January is going to majorly sting!)  5 days before Christmas.  Am I done shopping for gifts? Nope. Am I done planning gifts for people? Not so much. 

I’ve realized that I’m a horrible gift giver.  If I had a nice amount of cash, it would be easy to lavish gifts upon people. But on a super tight budget, it’s really hard to find something that’s not cheesy, and something that’s meaningful.  Also, for someone who thrives on being a “planner”, I’ve SO waited until the last minute to do all of this! What the heck? 

 

Here is the progression of the Christmas tree…

Carnage of the boxes.  I decided to transfer all of my decorations and such from cardboard boxes, into plastic tubs. 

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Here’s the naked tree with just the lights.  It is pre-lit, but of course there are 2 strands out. One at the top, and one at the bottom, so I have to add some strands to it.

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Here she is all done up. It looks lopsided, but it’s not. The cat thinks he has ultimate rule of the Christmas tree skirt, and therefore runs at warp speed across the room, and jumps onto the skirt skidding it across the ground. Turd. For some reason he also likes to vomit on this tree skirt as well. Thanks, Sox. Let’s show a picture of the guilty party as well:

 

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I tried my hand at making sugar cookies for a cookie exchange we had at my church.  The cookies turned out fantastic, and looked amazing. But to do the six that I took a picture of, it took me a ridiculous amount of time. We’re talking like 5 hours start to finish including refrigerator time for the homemade dough. Here is the recipe I used  for the dough:

http://www.marthastewart.com/275176/sugar-cookie-recipes/@center/276956/cookie-recipes

And the frosting I got off of this amazing site:

http://www.sweetsugarbelle.com/2011/04/royal-icing-101-or-all-roads-lead-to-rome/

Here is a photo of my frosting:

It was so thick, I could shake it, and it wouldn’t fall off the beater. To loosen it for frosting the cookie, you just add a little water.

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Here is what the cookies looked like.  I’ll try them again when I’ve got a whole day with nothing else to do but make them.

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To finish up, last time I mentioned  about my labels on the bins and how I wanted to fancy it up. Well here are the labels I made for the Christmas bins. I like them so much, I’m thinking about doing this for every bin in the house and garage! Obsess much?  I think not!

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Have a fantastic Christmas all 3 of my blog followers everyone!

Lisa

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Catching up……..

Have the last two months really passed by?  How did that happen??  It seems like yesterday that it was Halloween, and I was getting ready for parent-teacher conferences. 

Let’s go back in time and re-cap what’s been going on.

Ready…..

BTTF 1

Set…….

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GO!!

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October-

Things at my work started heating up with the prep for conferences and ratings that were due. We also had to make sure we were documenting notes about the children.  We had a LOT of deadlines to meet, and it was overwhelming.  But all of us made it through.

Jeremy got some part time work at Rachel’s Challenge doing  IT things. We are hoping and praying that he will be asked on full time soon. But if not we’ll keep the faith that something fantastic will come.  What a great place to work, though! They have the BEST employee morale boosting events that I’ve EVER heard of!  Since he’s been there, they have had gift cards to Starbucks for the employees, costume contest, pumpkin decorating contest, pot luck, Thanksgiving lunch out to a restaurant, and so much more.

Here is Jeremy’s pumpkin.  We used a drill and went old school with the design. He couldn’t really cut well because his back was  tweaked that weekend.

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And finally…

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He didn’t win.

There were pumpkins with way more character there, but it was fun to use the drill!  (And his work even supplied the pumpkin!)

Thus ends October.   

Enter November:

November was nice and busy with church commitments and business at work.  Thanksgiving was lovely, and a whole week off was AWESOME!!!  (Wish I got paid for the whole week though.)  While prepping for Christmas set up, I found this in one of my boxes:

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Hetty had made this sign a looooong time ago when we were still fascinated by New Kids On The Block. This was a nickname we had for them. Can’t even believe I found this!  Just for old time’s sake, here is one of my favorite songs by them.  Just the beginning notes of it take me back to 1989.

Horrible quality….hello 80’s. :)

Okay. On we go.  The day after Thanksgiving we always go to the Littleton Tree lighting ceremony, and I start to set up my Christmas decorations.  (I say start to, because it took me about a week and a half to finish, and we still have the humongous train sitting in their boxes in my living room.)  I had a couple of projects in mind for Christmas. One being a Christmas tree made out of  a tomato cage. I actually made 2 of them with lights.  I also wanted to re-label my Christmas boxes with something cuter than this:

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I’m going to do a full on December/Christmas post soon.  Stay tuned. 

Happy December! 

Lisa