December Happenings

Here are some highlights for the month.

Graham playing in the imported snow at our very own Power Ranch Park!! Notice the green grass in the background. :)

Making gingerbread men with Mama.

Eating our gingerbread men. Yum!

My sister Gabrielle is a ballet dancer (now on point) and she got to be Clara in the Nutcracker this year. It was her dream come true. I was so glad I was able to go to Tucson to see her. My brother Matthew (right) was Fritz (Clara's brother in the ballet). He's not a dancer, but they needed kids to fill in the different parts of the "party scene". My brother Joseph also joined us (back), along with lots of other family members. Gabrielle and Matthew, you were fabulous!!

Playing with cousins (I guess second cousins?) in Tucson. Graham is very musical.

Styling Aunt "Wivia's" hair.

Playing in the "real" snow up near Strawberry.

Sledding with Daddy.



Snow Family


Hugging Snowman. Graham really, really wanted to make a snowman, which surprised me because I wasn't sure how he figured out that snowmen are made of snow, since he's only seen pictures. Anyway....the snow wasn't packing very well, so Eric and Uncle Adam used large balls of ice the snow plower had left behind and put together a "snowman". This is Graham hugging the masterpiece. I guess it met his standards.

Another Update

This last Tuesday was another follow-up ultrasound for Baby Boy #2. We were again hoping and praying for better news, but they have confirmed that he has a heart defect (a "hole in the heart" and another part of the heart is concerning to them as well). Another concern is baby boy's growth, although he is definitely growing. He about doubled his estimated weight from last time....so that is very good. He just has his own rate of growth, we say. :) They have referred us to a pediatric cardiologist to also take a look at his heart, and we should be going to him within the next couple weeks. We feel we have very good care and for that we are thankful. Thanks for your continued prayers. We are very excited to meet this little one come the end of April. We'll keep you all posted.

Christmas Tree Hunting

Today we went hunting for a Christmas tree up on the rim around Payson.

Graham had his first encounter with snow. He really liked it, even though it was pretty much ice because it was a week old. He kept calling it "crunchies" because of how it sounded when he walked on it.

We hunted through the thicket until we spied one that would look nice in our living room, and we found a good one.

I "coaxed" it out of the forest with the saw, and Graham helped me with his saw too.

Then we got family pictures with my mom and dad, their tree and my sister, her husband and their tree too. It was a fun hunting trip!

The end is near

I've been thinking about my obituary lately.

Now, before you get all worked up, no, I'm not terminally ill. I haven't been in some horrific accident that has me on my death bead. Nobody I know is dying. I've just been hanging Christmas lights the past 2 Saturdays, and that got me thinking about my death. Falling to my death....

To truly understand why I started thinking about this you have to picture this scene:
Its a balmy 82 degree November Saturday in suburban Phoenix. Young man walks out of garage of 2 story house.
"I should put up the lights" he thinks to himself.

"Hmmm, tall eaves, good thing I have that tall ladder"

22 foot eaves. 16 foot ladder.

Man on top of ladder- 2 feet short of eaves.

"Just one more rung, I can lean against this window frame to steady myself....."

Thinking

"Wait a sec..."

Window popouts made of styrofoam covered in stucco....

"Yeah, that will work."

Leaning....

Lights up on eaves.....

"Ok, just move the ladder and repeat 10 more times."

-End of scene-


Sometimes it's amazing that I'm still around and not fully incapacitated in a hospital somewhere.
While we're on this topic- How many warning labels to Christmas lights really need? As I was putting up the mini lights yesterday I started taking the labels off so they wouldn't show up and look tacky. There were 4 labels on each string, and each string came with a pamphlet full of directions, warnings and threats.

Risk of electric shock- fair enough, we do plug them in.

The State of California has determined that the contents of this............cancer......warning...- Are we consuming these, or hanging them on our houses?

Do not attach more than 3 strands end to end, unless your home is in a latitude between 25N and 32N, in which case subtract your height, weight and age from your address, multiply by the square root of the most acute angle you intend to hang the lights from (in relation to the horizon). Take the absolute value of this number. That's how many light strands you can attach end to end.- Glad I read this while on the ladder.

Ok, so let's get this straight: The Declaration of Independence was 2,662 words. It declared that we were no longer subject to the tyrranical rule of a king across an ocean and that we were a sovereign nation. My Christmas lights need 4 warning labels and a PAMPHLET for me to hang them correctly? Can anyone say l-i-t-i-g-a-t-i-o-n ? No wonder things are so hard to do anymore, you need to have your hand held for fear of getting sued. Here's my proposed instruction guide for hanging lights.
1. plug in
2. hang on house
3. if sparks fly, unplug

Got it? Jeeze.

By the way, I got through the entire afternoon last week hanging onto the side of my house like Sly Stallone in Cliffhangar before anyone said anything to kinx my good fortune (to Natalie's credit, she was taking a nap in the house) before the neighbor across the street came home and said "Don't fall!" Great, thanks! I'll keep that in mind! Should have thought of that earlier! (It didn't help a whole lot that I was in the safest place I had been all day, behind the railing on our fake porch outside our bedroom window. If THAT looked dangerous, I can only imagine what my earlier stunts looked like).

So, back to the obit, anything not involving "dangling off the house hangin Christmas lights" is a success this week.