Microwave

About two days ago our microwave just decided to stop working.  I had something heating in it and it sparked and made some popping sounds and then just stopped. What the heck? It was the original microwave in the house, which is only 7 years old. Of course something like this happens right after the holidays and extra spending that we were doing. Ugh!  And, it is an over the oven type, so very annoying (for Dustin) to put in. 

Here is the old one.....for some reason they put in a stainless fridge, but black microwave and oven.

 Handyman hubby working on the install....

And TA-DA! Our new one.  Not gonna lie, I am kinda glad the other one broke so that I get a shiny new one :-)

Now I just need the same thing to happen to the oven so that we can have a matching set. :-)  OK well maybe it can wait a few months so that Dustin's head doesn't pop off from all the money being spent, ha!

Christmas Day

I LOVED Christmas morning with my wonderful family (Dustin and Leah) this year.  We got the downstairs all set up with the fireplace going, Christmas music playing, toys all set out and then videotaped Leah coming down. She was so excited and ran over to her gifts and didn't know what to look at/play with first! 

Santa was good to Leah this year!

Checking out the stuff in her stocking first.

Bouncy donkey!

She is a pro at opening presents now!

One of my gifts from Dustin, Toms! Love them!

Some of Leah's presents from Mommy and Daddy

Leah's main gift from Santa. She LOVES it!

Breakfast - orange rolls and turkey bacon

Worn out from the excitement. Watching Toy Story.

As I said before, such a great day. Now that Leah is becoming a little girl who is walking and talking and has a hilarious personality, holidays (and every day!) are going to be that much more fun!

Christmas Eve

I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas!!

We had so much fun with Leah this year. She really got into it and was so excited ripping open presents.

Christmas Eve we hosted at our house.  And this year we had my dad, his wife, my brother, his wife, my grandpa, and Dustin's mom.  Luckily everyone brought something to add to dinner so that I didn't have to prepare a whole meal by myself. :-)  My family has a tradition of having our homemade mac&cheese on Christmas Eve, and Dustin and his mom have a tradition to have crab, so we combined the two. It was kind of random, but I made a few appetizers and desserts (plus drinks of course!) and it was a good meal!  My favorite holiday drink is sparkling poinsettias, which is champagne and cranberry juice, garnished with fresh cranberries. Yum!

We were actually able to get Leah to bed at her normal time that night which was great.  So after our guests left, "Santa" got to work assembling and arranging all the gifts for Miss Leah! :-)

Wrapping

I got all my wrapping done last night. And I just have to say that I am the world's worst gift wrapper.  Seriously, even worse than most men or kids probably. I usually put stuff in nice gift bags, but Leah needs her presents wrapped so that she can rip them open!!  But, ugh, I don't know what it is but I just hate wrapping. I have no patience for it. So anyway, I tried to get it all done as quickly as possible last night. :-)
Tiger wanted to help......or maybe just attack the ribbon. :-)

So here they all are (well not including gifts from Santa!). Hopefully nobody notices the crappy wrapping job. :-)  Now I just need to put them all under the tree!

And I might as well take this opportunity now to show the goodies that will be in Leah's stocking! 
New sippy cups with straws (because she is obsessed with drinking from straws!), Dora toothbrushes, hair clips, a pink plastic harmonica (since she loves playing with Daddy's real one), Elmo books, sparkly toy bracelets, kitty hand puppet, Mickey "magic" washcloth, Hello Kitty mango marshmallows, animal crackers. I have a feeling it is not all going to fit into her stocking. ;-)

I can't wait to share what Santa is getting for Leah. We did go a little overboard on her this year.  But she is really in need of new bigger kid toys. We don't regularly buy her things so we are stocking up now. :-)  She is the easiest person to shop for EVER. I can't wait for Christmas morning!

Tuesday

I couldn't think of any clever titles for this post since it is just random things :-)

Today we went to the mall with Sheri and Ashlyn. Wow it was so busy there. Luckily I am pretty much done shopping so we didn't need to fight the crowds of the stores too much. We walked around, let the girls play and ate lunch.

They had fun on the riding toys -

I think that is one of the only pictures I have where they are both looking at the camera!

Last night I tried another recipe that I kept seeing all over Pinterest. Poppyseed chicken. I had the wrong size casserole dish and not as much chicken as the recipe calls for, so I improvised a bit and it turned out super yummy!  I served it with brown rice and green beans. Original recipe here.

Leah is getting more and more "kid-like" every day. This morning I gave her half a bagel for breakfast. She is currently obsessed with raisins (thinks they are candy, hehe), so I told her if she eats her bagel she can have some raisins. I heard her say "all done bagel" and this is what was on her tray -

She tried to hide it under her milk!!  Sneaky girl!

Leah is starting to talk a lot more and string 4 or 5 words together now. Not proper grammar of course but she will say something like "Please Mama more raisins" or "Dada at work make money" or "Car go by outside". 
She is also so polite and almost always says please, thank you, and her new one - excuse me (scuuzmee) :-)

Today is Dustin's last day of work until January!  Woohoo! We are planning some fun family activities and also need to get our house ready to host Christmas Eve!

Last Week Recap

Wow I haven't blogged in a week! I guess we have just been busy getting things ready for Christmas. Also, I have been sucked in to the Hunger Games trilogy. I read the first two books last week and now I am reading the third. I like it a lot more than I thought I would.  But all of my free time I want to spend reading!

Here's a little of what we have been up to...

Last week I took Leah to the indoor playground that we have been to once before. They had Santa visiting and I thought that maybe if Leah saw her cousin Dallas sitting with him that she would too. Well nope, she wanted nothing to do with him. Oh well, maybe next year!
Leah LOVES bouncy houses!

Then one night last week we went to the Bellevue Botanical Garden light show. It was really neat.

One night me and Leah made pizza. She ate half the can of olives and a couple of handfuls of cheese in the process :-)

During the weekend we did a lot of Christmas shopping. I think we are mostly done now! This week we have a few playdates and parties. We are so excited to give Leah her presents and see her get excited for everything this year!!

Reindeer Food

I remember when I was a kid I thought this was so cool!  I have never made it before but Leah and I decided to give it a try this morning.

This is one of those projects where you can really use whatever you want.  Main ingredient - oats.  And then I just used what I already had so I didn't have to go out and buy anything - glitter, red & green sprinkles, confetti.

Not sure what I was thinking letting my one year old have at it with glitter and tiny sprinkles, yikes! My kitchen counter and floor were COVERED and even though I cleaned it up, I have a feeling I will be finding red and green sprinkles around for weeks!   

I wish you could tell from the picture how pretty and glittery it looks! I think next time I will add even MORE glitter! :-)

Then I just bagged it up and put on the cute tags!

All set to go deliver to friends!

All Bundled Up

This weekend seemed really long, in a good way. We didn't do anything too exciting. Mostly errands and tried to get some Christmas shopping done.  Friday night I finally went to see Breaking Dawn with my friend Kim. I have to say I was thoroughly entertained by it!  Can't wait for the final movie! 

Dustin, Leah and I had lots of good quality family time the rest of the weekend.   
Tonight we went on a walk around our neighborhood to look at Christmas lights.

Leah looked so little and cute all bundled up :-)
It has been so cold but not cold or wet enough to snow, boooo! I hope it snows this winter at least once!

Santa Pictures

Oh my goodness Santa picture day was somewhat of a disaster this year!  Dustin planned to take the morning off and we were going to do our tradition of going downtown Seattle to Macy's to have Leah's picture with Santa.  I had absolutely no idea how she would react this year. She knows who Santa is now, she sees him in books and stuff and seemed excited about it when we talked about going to see him. OK so first of all, we are getting ready to head out this morning and Leah decided to randomly yank on her stocking which made the heavy holder fall down right on her FACE :-(  She was screaming and I started having a panic attack. Her eye was watering and there were cuts above and below her eye that were bleeding a little. It took her a long time to calm down and trying to put her boo boo ice pack on it only made her more upset.  We eventually decided she was fine and that we would go along with our plans for the day and hoped her eye wouldn't start swelling up on our way :-/. 

SO, we got downtown and there were only a few people in "Santaland" so we didn't have to wait in line which was great.  Leah pointed and smiled when she saw Santa.  When it was her turn, I carried her over to Santa. She immediately clung on to me tight.  This Santa was SO GREAT at talking to Leah and trying to make her not scared. He was showing her his bells and his soft coat and giving her baby doll hugs. He finally got her to smile when he tickled her so I thought, OK, great I will try to set her down next to him. RIGHT when I did that her lip pouted out and big tears started welling up in her eyes and she reached out and grasped on to me. It was so sad. I could tell that Santa didn't want to hold a screaming and flailing toddler and he told me to sit down too and be in the picture. And while I did not want Leah to be terrorized and be screaming on Santa's lap, I am kind of bummed that I ended up being in the picture. I was NOT ready for pictures, I didn't look cute at all and I feel like I ruin the picture. So anyway, here it is......

I guess we will at least always have this story about the year she refused to sit on Santa's lap......

After pictures, we went to ride on the carousel outside of the mall. It is part of our tradition. Usually Leah loves it but I think she was still not recovered from scary Santa :-)

Plus, it was freezing outside!

After that we had lunch with my dad who works a few blocks away.

My dad bought us cookies and Leah wanted an m&m cookie, but she ate off all the m&ms and then gave me back the cookie, haha!

Wow what a morning! We all came home and took a nap! 

Randoms

The last few days have been pretty mellow.  A few of our plans got cancelled so Leah and I just hung around at home and ran errands. 

Leah has been obsessed with doing projects ever since we made ornaments with our friends a few weeks ago.
She asks to do "paint" or "chalk" .  I found this cute paint set in the dollar section at Target. Fun project for just a dollar!

Obviously Leah didn't paint by the numbers :-) but she had fun with it anyway.

She threw a fit when she was a mess and I finally took the paints and brush away! 

Then we made yummy rice krispie treats! I tried to make them red with green sprinkles but they ended up looking kind of pink.

And then when they were cooling I stuck them in the oven (turned off!) so that our cats wouldn't get into them. Then later in the evening I was preheating the oven for dinner and OOPS I forgot to take the treats out first and they were hot and melted. But in the end they were still tasty :-)

I decided our banister needed some decorating. I thought about garland but went with simple red bows.

Leah has been pretty good about not messing with the tree. But she likes to take the ornaments down and play with them like they are toys.  Luckily she is pretty gentle with them.  Today she took down the angel and said "Hi Angel" and gave it a kiss. It was so cute.

Also, has anyone seen this app for kids??

It is awesome. Leah loves playing with my phone. This makes her feel like she is playing with a real phone but all the buttons have learning games, like colors, numbers, animals, etc. There is one that sounds like a little kid saying "Hello" and it was cracking Leah up!

Hope everyone is having a good week :-)