Happy New Year....without a clean house

Here is an update on the last post. I did not accomplish all my tasks. We decided to take the kids to the zoo, they have a spectacular light display and it was the last night and it was free. I will post pictures later. Then we came home and played games with the girls until 10:00 (kidnight aka midnight for kids). So needless to say I did not get everything I wanted to done. I did get all my dishes clean, save the two bowls that the girls ate dinner in. And I did get MOST of my wash done. I have one load left but I for sure didn't get it folded and put away. I did get most of it put away though so that is progress. And I definately did not get to my carpets. Oh well I had a much better time with my kids and husband! Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you all started off with cleaner houses than mine.

New Year Goals

Okay for some reason I feel this obsessive compulsion to have everything in order for the new year. Maybe it is because the girls go back to school on Wednesday or something but I HAVE to have a clean house by tomorrow. So my goal today is to have every single stitch of dirty clothes washed, folded, and put away by midnight (that last part about actually getting them all put away is really the key). That is including every sheet on every bed and every pillow case, every towel, every blanket, every dirty coat. It is probably going to take me all day, because just as I think I am getting down to the last load I seem to find more and more laundry. As I was going through Josey's drawers pulling out some stuff that didn't fit or was not appropriate for winter I found like four pairs of dirty pants and three shirts! I don't know what is worse. Josey putting her dirty clothes back in her drawers or Maddy putting her clean clothes that were left on the floor in her dirty clothes. Either way it needs to stop! I also don't want to get up in 2008 with any dish dirty either. I also want to shampoo my carpets before I go to bed tonight. I can't clean them though until the girls go to sleep so I have to wait until 8. Can you tell we have no big plans. I will miss the our friends the Johnson's annual New Year's Eve party. We had a lot of fun last year. Maybe it is something I will have to start here! But as for this year I will be spending the day cleaning and getting things ready for 2008 and Dustin will be spending the day working to make his billables for 2007! Hope everyone else is having fun! I will let you know if I actually accomplished all my tasks. Oh...... and I have to get this little monster clean.

wierd news of 2007!

I don't know who else read MSNBC's top ten wierdest news stories of 2007 but I thought they were pretty wierd and funny! I had to leave a few off due to innapropriate content for my blog or links that wouldn't work. But here they are, some of THEE wierdest news stories of the year!

Shot Duck Survives Two Days in Refrigerator

Potty Mouth! Woman Cited for Cursing at Toilet

Weelchair User Taken on a 50 MPH Ride

Judge: Cleaner Owes Me 65 Million for Pants

Elephants Electrocuted in Druken Rage

Beheaded Rattlesnake Sends Man to Hospital

Man Brings Donkey to Testify in His Own Behalf

Silly Lilly

Just thought I would add pictures to the text. (Lilly's hair is SUPER curly....in the back. Up top it is curly but not as much so I tried curlers the other day. She ripped them out shortly.)
(making gingerbread houses)
(wearing gingerbread houses)

I know I have used that title before for a post but I can't help it I think it's funny. I just had a quick funny story about Lilly today. She woke up this morning WAY to early but wasn't going back to bed so I got her up and brought her into our bed in hopes that she would go back to sleep. Unfortunately that didn't quite work. As soon as I brought her into the bed she looked at me and said, "Ah stahveen" (I'm starving). I started laughing so hard that she would use that word. Then she proceeded to say any word that might get me to feed her. So she said, "ah stahveen, food, eat....and I even think there was a peeese in there somwhere. I obviously at that point had to go down and feed her. When your twenty month old tells she is starving what are you supposed to do? Then tonight as she was eating dinner she actually said, "ees dewishus.....delicioso" (its delicious......delicioso) Again laughter ensued. I think maybe either I should turn off Dora more often or embrace the learning curve it might give my daughter.

Christmas Day

This was the tree before the girls came down in the morning. What you don't see is the hamster cage that was on the end table and the hamster running around on the floor in the little hamster ball. They were SO excited! I didn't get many pictures of the morning we were to busy and I didn't think about it. Dustin snapped a few but unfortunately I am in all them and given that it is REALLY early in the morning I am choosing not to share those with the world. Aftermath......

This is our newest addition to the family. This is blackbeary or BB as Maddy and Josey call her. Lilly just calls her fuzzy bunny. Lilly wants to hold her all the time. Everyone loves the hamster.
To make it a perfect Christmas it actually started snowing at about 11:00 after breakfast and everyone was starting to just settle down. It was so exciting for the girls and they were so excited to go outside. We put everyones snow clothes on and ran down to the high school fields and built a snowman and tried to go sledding on the little hills they have. It was really fun!

Their proud creation.

Josey was obsessed with making snowmen and probably would have stayed outside makeing more snowmen if it had continued to snow enough. This is her very own little snowman she built all by herself.
I asked her if she put that leaf on there and she didn't........ so please excuse the leaf.
Is this a happy child or what?

Daddy looks pretty happy as well! Seriously! blow up the picture and you will see how pleased Dustin looks! So funny.

Christmas Eve

I guess these pictures should have gone at the end, but here are the girls on Christmas Eve. The first one is of the girls acting out the nativity. We put Lilly to bed after we opened presents and then we did our little nativity thing. Josey only wanted to be the baby Jesus. So this is Maddy being Mary and Josey being the baby Jesus and daddy was Joseph. I was any part that anyone didn't want to be. The bottom one is of the girls with their Christmas eve jammies and the presents they picked out for each other from the dollar store. They were SO excited, especially Maddy, that I thought they were going to explode! Oddly enough they actually ended up falling alseep by 9:00 or so. We were amazed. Unfortunately for Maddy though she woke up to use the bathroom at about 10:30 and it was all over from there. She had the HARDEST time falling asleep. We would check in on her and her eyes were forced shut and her little feet just couldn't stop moving under her blanket. She was trying so hard. It was really cute. But they were up at 6:30 and ready to see if Santa came. Maddy asked me later on in the day what my favorite part of Christmas was and I told her that it was when we were waiting at the top of the stairs to go down to see all the presents. The looks on their faces and the excitement they felt just made Christmas so special for me. We decided that we would spend Christmas Eve on the Oregon beach. We left in the early afternoon and headed for Mo's (if you want the catchiest/cheesiest jingle ever to NEVER get out of your head click on Mo's) for some yummy clam chowder. We hadn'e been to the one we were headed to so we were really excited when we got there and it had the most spectacular view. The entire thing practically was windows and the tables are just right along the windows so you can look out at the ocean while you eat. The girls were mesmerized!

Lilly wanted to carry the shell bucket around and was obsessed with the presents under the tree. We had to keep stopping her from trying to open them.


Then we headed over to Seaside to walk along the boardwalk. We were going to try to go the aquarium because I guess you can feed the seals there but it was closed unfortunately. It reminded me a lot of Santa Cruz with the quiant little shops and the stuff. It wasn't nearly as nice and a little rundown but it made me feel a little like I was home again.

It turned out to be a beautiful day as well. It wasn't very cold and the sun would pop in and out of the clouds and it was such a fun time at the beach. How odd is it that the only time we have been to the beach here when the sun was out, was on Christmas eve?

We love the Oregon coast. It is SO beautiful. Dustin has a couple of his friends that don't refer to Oregon as Oregon anymore but as God's country as Dustin like to call it.

We stopped at a little gallery and got some hot chocolate. And yes Lilly had to have her own to carry as always.

Maddy found some dog tracks and was investigating them.
Lilly just loved to run and run on the sand. She was so cute. Her favorite was to run away from the water.
Josey just walked around collecting any remnant of a shell and begging daddy to put it in his pocket, which like a good daddy he did. She of course couldn't part with one tiny crack of a shell.
This was Maddy's pose..........I just don't understand.

Maddy being a starfish.
Josey didn't get into it quite as much.
Maddy really wanted a picture with this statue. I guess this part of the Oregon coast is where Lewis and Clark ended their journey.

This is a video of the girls trying to entertain themselves on the hour and a half drive over to the coast. If you listen carefully you can hear Lilly chiming into the song. Pretty cute.

oregon storms

Recently as many of you know there were some terrible storms that were whipping through the Oregon coast. We thought we would snap a few pictures of some of the incredible destruction that happened along our drive. You really have to blow up these pictures to get the full picture but there were whole mountainsides with big trees just snapped in half. It was really incredible.

I can't believe that a tree this big could be uprooted like this. The roots were enormous.
These roots as well.

Make a scrapbook - it's easy!

How wierd is this?

I have two things that are kinda wierd in this post.
1: The girls and I were showing Lilly the presents that they wrapped the other day. We were sitting by the tree and I was trying to get Lilly to not rip them open. Wishful thinking! The girls had put them in the tree to keep them out of reach of Lilly. So as Maddy is taking one out of the tree she stops and says, "Hey there is a bird nest in our tree!" We hop up and I spread the branches apart and sure enough there is in fact a bird nest in our tree! How wierd is that?! Without touching the nest I tried to peer in and see if there were any eggs in the nest and luckily there weren't. I think if there were any in there they probably were thrown violently out when we chopped it down, drug it over to our car, thrust it on top of the car and drove it home. I don't think any eggs could have stayed in the nest. Honestly I am surprised that the nest even stayed in the tree! I guess that is what you get when you cut your own tree out in the wild, a bunch of little spiders living on top and a birds nest in the middle. I just hope we can make it till Christmas before we find out that there have been a whole family of chipmunks living in the trunk.
2: The other night I helped the girls write letters to Santa Claus. They were so cute and Josey even wrote hers herself sounding out the words as best she could. I dated them and wrote how old they were and then they put them into envelopes and we went to mail them. I told them that you don't need a stamp to send a letter to the Santa because the mail people will just deliver it. They thought that was really cool! So we went out to the mailbox and I told them as well, that you don't put letters to Santa in the regular part where we usually send our letter out. I told them that we stick it in the part where we get our mail because that is where the mail man wants them. So we put them in and my intention was to go back out later that night and get them and stick them in their little scrapbooks to keep because they were so cute! Well I forgot. Today Maddy went out to get the mail and all of a sudden I remembered that their letters were in there. I started thinking about what to tell them about why the letters weren't taken by the mailman. She came in and gave me the mail and there were NO letters to Santa in there. The mail man actually took them! How wierd is that?! Don't you think he would have just left them in there!? They had no stamp on them and they said to Santa Claus at the North Pole. I am honestly kinda mad because I wanted those letters! What did he do with the letters anyway? Do you think he opened them up and read them and then threw them away? I am really disappointed that I forgot to go get them and that he took them. Maybe we will have to write more letters to Santa or something. My only other problem is now they keep checking the mailbox waiting for their letter back from Santa. So I think that I am going to have to write a letter back from Santa. My mom had a good idea though. She said I should write them and tell them that he sent an elf to the house and that the elf noticed that their rooms weren't clean and that they need to keep them clean till Christmas. I thought that was a good idea. I hope it works!