A few Christmas pictures

Here are a fewew fun pictures from Christmas Eve. I of course, wasn't paying attention and left the camera at a really high ISO setting, so all the pictures were a little grainy : (

Thanks to her friend Annie for the cool headgear!

Here she is wearing a box skirt. She just wandered in wearing that!

In the last photo, Megan actually informed us that she was posing like her cousin Lauren (as she saw a picture that Nana and Papa had of Lauren on the stairs). She is so funny.

Megan is posing with Baby Mandy (we finally named a baby!)
We have lots of dolls named "baby", a pair named"brother and sister" and one named "Baby Lily" after her cousin. This is the first semi original name!! Progress......

Something silly -- the Thudguard

I found this in a kids magazine I was reading. I found it almost comically silly. Sorry if I offend one of you who owns this item!

Christmas at School, 2008

Megan Christmas School 2008
Originally uploaded by homanhouse

Another stab at a scrapbook page, this time using some templates and papers, and a few elements I created myself. I am getting a bit faster as I practice, so in a few years I might have this down! Chris is getting into photoshop too (not scrap layouts but he can design all sorts of fonts that now blaze with flames!) so we are having fun with this!


Credit
papers -- Mandy Mystiques, Homanhouse
brushes -- obsidian dawn
template -- made by Kate and by SugarplumPaperie, HomanHouse

Another update to our oven adventure....

So when we got home from Sears, the "door locked" light that was stuck on the old oven (part of the bad computer) suddenly turned off. Then the lock made a few noises, and even moved. And wouldn't you know it, the darn oven works. I mean I was sad that it broke. But then we were sad that it "un-broke" because, you know, we had just bought our really cool oven.

I must say that we have "Returned" the new oven (cancelled the order) and will be cooking some more in this one. I dare say we won't be braving the self clean feature any time soon.

Just what we always wanted....

First, I have to say that today is Chris's birthday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHRIS!!!).

Today, the oven repairman came, and basically broke into our oven -- you should have seen it. It looked like a jimmy that you break into a car with and it took 15 or 20 minutes. Then he determined that we needed a new lock and also the oven computer, because the relay was fried and thinks that the door is still locked, so the oven won't cook. $600 for all this.....

We choked because, first of all, it is about a 10 year old oven (it was the original from when our house was built) and it isn't a particularly nice model, so it only costs $700 or so to get a new one that is similar (but doesn't look like it has been broken into to!). So we told the repairman "Thanks, but no thanks", and then headed off to Sears.

Ok, well we are better shoppers than that, so first we checked consumer reports for the best wall ovens (we LOVE the consumer reports online subscription where you just login and look up stuff!), and then we decided (in an effort to avoid the mall on the last shopping Saturday before Christmas) to check out this new Sears Appliance Store that we have in Mansfield.

And since this now became part of our Christmas present and Chris's birthday, we upgraded from our old oven and got the model we really liked online (and consumer reports top pick!) so we are looking forward to playing with the new features, including the convection oven option!

It won't be delivered for a few weeks, but that is ok. At least we can make Santa some cookies in Amarillo!

No Christmas Cookies here

It is a good thing Santa will be visiting us in Amarillo, as we are short on Christmas cookies. You see, yesterday, I got industrious and decided to clean the oven. And by clean, I mean "self clean" so all you really do is press "Start" wait for the door to lock, wait five hours, and then wait for the door to unlock....and wait for the door to unlock....and I am STILL LOCKED OUT of my oven. This is insane. We have cycled power, and recleaned the oven, and still a no-go. The mechanism must be jammed because you can hear it desperately trying to open (this woke me from a dead slumber after last nights "re-clean") but it is no use.

I was annoyed and a bit irritated. So I got on the internet to do a search for how to fix it. And while I didn't find many good ideas, I wound up laughing and laughing and giggling so much that Chris came to check on me. Seems I am not the only person locked out of my oven -- there are hundreds of other people (at least on this one site) who all have similar stories. Some people claim they took the top of their stove/oven off to get the cookies out, and one poor woman still hasn't retrieved her cookies days later. Then there is the guy whose cookies won't bake right because his oven door won't SHUT (the lock stuck out while the door was open). These three are people who weren't even trying to clean their ovens, and the renegade thing just locked. Maybe it isn't all that funny to you, but after you have argued with an inanimate oven for a day, you WOULD find the humor in it!

All of this because I cleaned the oven. See if I try that again........(repairman coming tomorrow!)

The glitter escapade remembered

A start to my scrapbook procrastinating!

So here is a quick page from last Thanksgiving in Amarillo. I keep saying I will get Megan's scrapbook done soon, so one page down, many more to go!

The Carriage Ride

Here is a photo from our group outing last week to see the Christmas lights. Megan had fun, and the weather was remarkably nice for this time of year -- we didn't even need hot chocolate to warm up! Thanks Melissa for arranging all the fun!

Lots to catch up on!

Wow! What a week. We are still recovering, so I will catch up this week.

The last week has been a blur. Last Saturday, we went with our friends Dave, Melissa and Annie on a great Christmas Light viewing carriage ride in Highland Park. Many of the houses were already decorated spectacularly, and then many other houses were just spectacular in themselves. We had fun, although Megan seemed the most interested in the horses. Since we were in the carriage, we really didn't have the *best* view of the horses if you know what I mean, but Megan didn't know or mind. She had a blast, and has since been wearing the cool jingle bell headband that her friend Annie gave her that night -- thanks Annie! I promise to find pictures soon!

And then Monday we started feeling badly, and Megan and I got sick. By Friday, her doctor diagnosed the poor kid with pneumonia, so we are just getting back around to feeling a little better, although with the bouts of coughing, we do sound a little like death warmed over.

As sick as she was, she did manage to get into my craft stuff and get glitter EVERYWHERE. Despite my best attempts to clean it, our whole house sort of sparkles right now. It would be kind of festive if I hadn't already tried to clean it up twice!

In part of the downtime, we have gotten back into photoshop trying to learn a little. I built this blog background among a few other experiments, although I can't tell how it looks on smaller monitors. So if anyone is interested in being my guinea pig, let me know as I am having a little fun experimenting with ideas.

I have a few fun pictures from the week, that I will sort through this week. Me and my prescription cough medicine (yea for drugs!) are now headed off to bed...

: ) AL

Rejoining the wired (or wireless) world!

Wow. I feel so disconnected. We just recovered from a 4 day service issue that made me realize just how addicted we are to some sort of connectivity.

Last Friday, we made the exciting switch from Charter cable to AT&T Uverse. We were excited and everything worked great Friday, so we called Charter to disconnect. Saturday we finished hooking everything else up and then everything went out. No internet, no wireless, no cable so no TV.

Sunday we couldn't figure out what to wear -- what was the weather going to be like???? Didn't there used to be phone numbers for time and temperature or something? Oh yeah, we DO have an antenna hooked up to one of our TVs. Phew, crisis averted.

I have a long four or five page letter detailing the saga. It started kind of average, got really bad in the middle, and then ended in something a bit stupid on our end, which slowed down my five page saga! Basically we had everything working, then apparently had an ethernet connection issue, but this all happened at the same time as AT&T had some crazy flood in the basement of a hub in St. Louis and they lost their ability to fix stuff. Literally. One whole day, they couldn't accept incoming calls -- AT&T, a PHONE COMPANY, lost PHONE SERVICE. Then they couldn't dispatch repairs. The whole time, there was some outage in the software that wouldn't allow them to switch out my modem, and once that was all finally fixed and I switched out my own modem at midnight on Monday night (I was the official field tech after getting a replacement modem from a tech who couldn't switch it while the software was down) it ended in a bad connection found today in a ethernet cable. Hmmmm - not sure which was the root cause of the really bad first weekend of Uverse. The ethernet cable was our issue, but the others some combination of bad luck (Modem zapped or something), a flood, service outage, and an install where not quite everything got hooked up by the tech (she installed one of our computers, but we have a few more than that. It is embarressing to say just how many).

In the middle of all my AT&T visits, charter came by to disconnect my STILL WORKING cable service. Some kind of cruel universal humor or kharma for breaking away from the cable company.

And I managed to reach out in the middle of this via a visit to McDonalds to use their WiFi hotspot! Megan didn't complain about this at all on Sunday. She got to play - a good reason to take your laptop to McDonalds to pass the sliding time!

It is a much longer story than this even, but for now I just want to say "Yeah! We are back!" and "We know what to wear tomorrow! It'll be chilly!"

Decorating the tree

decorating_NEW
Originally uploaded by homanhouse

Megan was just adorable! Every time she hung an ornament, she threw her hands in the air and proclaimed "ta-daa" Every time until I got a camera to capture the cuteness. Here she pretends to eat one ornament. The other was a bow I mistakenly gave her to hang. She spent a long long while trying to retie it, without any help of course.

Did I mention she cleans?

swiffer_NEW
Originally uploaded by homanhouse

Ok, well she makes as many messes as she ever cleans, but this was a cute swiffering kid, who was of course immediately more interested in seeing the camera

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas....

So today we tackled Christmas decorating. We still have more to do, including most of the outside stuff, but we did get the tree up and several indoor things accomplished. Megan was very excited about the Christmas decorating. After Daddy got the tree put together, she did the first attempt on decorating. We giggled a bit because of how she put on the ornaments. I rather expected them to all be low on the tree (at her height) which they were, but she also put most of them on the same branches, creating this densely decorated area (bottom left)

A close up of the decorating

Then Daddy helped her spread them out a little. Megan used the step ladder to put some higher, and then she and Daddy put the angel on the tree. After they finished, she stopped me and told me to go get the camera and take this picture (of her behind Daddy on the stool). I thought it was really funny as I didn't even have the camera at that time! So here is Megan's pose.

A few views of the mostly finished project in the living room

And "...the stockings were hung by the chimney with care..."

And just a quick view of our bar project, which I never posted. Last year (maybe 1-1/2 years ago!) we bought a flat screen TV with the goal of moving it out of the TV area and converting that area to a bar. It took about 10 months to get the TV mounted on the wall, and then several more months before we got the shelves out, and the stemware holders painted and installed. We put the wine refrigerator from my Dad there, and got all of the liquor moved out of the kitchen freeing up some much needed kitchen cabinets. We also installed a hanging pot rack in the kitchen and we have more kitchen cabinet space than we have had in a while (but area already managing to fill it)

With the new bar, it seems like Santa could stop off for a sip after his cookies and milk.........

Happy Thanksgiving!

Oh I am almost TOO full to type and it isn't even Thanksgiving anymore!

So Megan had a great Thanksgiving. It began with a trip to Corpus, along with 3.3 million other people who were all driving south towards Austin on I-35. That was frustrating, annoying and maddening. We were in stop and go traffic and the drive took about 2 hours longer than it should have, but at 11PM, we finally made it to Corpus.

Megan was so excited to get to see her cousin Lauren -- they are only 3 months apart, and have such fun together. She was a little disappointed to see that Lauren fell asleep while waiting for Megan. Apparently, Lauren was excited to see her cousin too, but just couldn't make it all the way to the late hour.

Lauren, however, is a morning girl, and so she woke up extra early on Thanksgiving morning -- and consequently, so did the rest of us. So we started the day of cooking and eating and playing early, and finished it late after a big meal.

The girls playing piano


The little turkey and her mama (the big turkey?)

Daddy's girl

There was a stuffed turkey, oyster dressing, oyster dressing w/out the oysters (for the two non seafood eaters who married into the family of seafood lovers), squash casserole, loaded mash potatoes, cranberry sorbet (a new trial this year) and dessert: pecan pie, pumpkin pie, and banana pudding.

The cranberry sorbet was a recipe that I saw on one of Blogger's "Blogs of Note" and I stumbled upon a blog that I really like with lots of good recipes. It is called sidewalk shoes and she makes some great food, and takes equally great photos of her creations. We don't have a food mill, so I just pressed the cooked cranberries through a sieve for awhile and used that in the sorbet (does that make ME the food mill?)

Then on Friday, I got to eat my favorite leftover breakfast -- Thanksgiving banana pudding (my mom's recipe). I will share it here because it is SOOOO yummy.

1 pkg vanilla pudding, prepared as directed on the box
1 cup of whipping cream, whipped and lightly sweetened (~1/2 cup sugar)
1 container of cool whip
1 can of Eagle Brand Sweetened condensed milk
bananas
nilla wafers

Prepare the pudding as directed, and also whip the whipping cream. Mix together and add the cool whip and Eagle Brand, and mix together. Layer Nilla Wafers on the bottom of a casserole dish, add a layer of the dairy mix, and slice some banana pieces into the mix. REPEAT with a second layer, and then top with Nilla wafers. It is even better the second day.


Note: It doesn't really matter if you use a large or small box of pudding, a large or small container of cool whip -- I have done both -- the proportions are similar, and it just changes the total volume that you make (so hmmm - maybe the big ones are best!)

Megan invited her cousin to stay an extra day, and so Chris and I along with Nana and Papa, set out for the aquarium to help entertain the girls. They had a blast, and were just hysterical in the car with all the games and things that they made up in the backseat. Megan is just growing up amazingly right before our eyes! We had dinner at Snoopy's on the water, and the girls had a great time, and began to look quite sleepy, so we rushed them home!

Watching the dolphin show on Papa and Daddy's shoulders

Petting the stingrays (well Lauren tried, Megan didn't want any part of actually touching them)

Watching the birds at dinner

Megan really liked the idea of feeding the birds (a big NO NO) and tormented several seagulls. You see, there is thin fishing line strewn all around and overhead to keep the birds away and they could just see Megan's offering, but not quite reach it. Megan and Lauren somehow decided to SHARE a chair at dinner, so here they are eating.

In the back of Nana and Papa's minivan having great fun

Watching "Go Diego Go" on the couch afterwards

On their matching cots at bedtime that Nana and Papa bought them

Saturday, we drove Lauren home to Houston to her Mommy and Daddy and sister who missed her. Then drove ourselves home afterwards, and now we are recovering from a fun holiday!

Sunday will be for putting up the Christmas tree and some Christmas decorating, and Megan is excited!

Megan Lauralee turns THREE!!!

Megan Lauralee turns three

Santa Claus did what?!?

Greetings!

First, I must say that the three-year old birthday party went well. Megan had a blast, and talked about until she fell asleep. Pictures will be posted after her "actual" birthday on Tuesday. She liked the birthday so much that she suggested that we have another one next week. Maybe next YEAR, but next week seems a little quick, as we are still recovering from getting everything ready and then cleaning (MOST) everything up! To those of you who joined us, thanks for sharing Megan's special day with us! She went through the guest list for weeks, and then went over who all attended for the last day. So she was appreciative in her own special way!

Tonight though, Megan just cracked us up at dinner. I got out a can of coke and was drinking some. Megan asked me why it was different. I had just bought a new 12-pack, and sure enough, these were now the "Holiday Coca Cola" cans with Santa Claus. I hadn't even noticed yet.

I was a bit impressed that she noticed this detail so readily. Again she asked "why is it different?". I told her that since Christmas was coming, they had the new holiday cans. Then she asked "Why is Santa drinking a BEER?" ......."Huh?" ......"Why is Santa drinking a Beer?"....."Oh, that is a coke"...."No -- that is a beer!" I suppose that all of Megan's life, she has never seen coke in a bottle -- it is always in a can! BUT we DO have beverages at our house that come in bottles, so it was an honest thought process! After a few more bits of discussion, we convinced her that it was a bottle of Coke, but Chris and I both thought it was REALLY FUNNY!

Maybe I should pitch this as a new ad campaign somewhere?

High expectations

I have to say that I am getting a bit nervous about Megan's birthday celebration. Her expectations seem to be growing and growing. She has spent days talking about nothing but the party, and of course the guest list. She stops to ask about several of her friends and their "Attending status" throughout each day!

Grandma came this week, and Megan has had lots of fun helping get ready for the party. But mostly, she has really enjoyed watching TV with grandma. You see, Nick Jr, one of her favorite channels, does have advertising, and it is really in full force now that it is the Christmas season. Today, as I walked by Megan "taking a rest" with Grandma (laying on the couch and watching a little TV) I heard this at EVERY commercial.... "Grandma! Grandma! I want THAT for my birthday!"

Of course, when you ASK her what she WANTS for her birthday, her answer is usually "A DORA CAKE" occasionally the answer is "A PRINCESS CAKE" and every now and then it is just "A BLUE CAKE -- A BIG ONE!" SO we will see how the cake goes over when I finish making it tomorrow. I only bought the Dora cake pan, so it will be a Dora cake. I hope it looks like one when I am done!

More updates after the party with lots of party pictures of Megan as she approaches THREE YEARS OLD!

Photoshop fun

So I have been playing around in photoshop some, as I try to learn it better! Here are a few of today's projects

It's just so Megan

Where's the Crab Tree?

Megan's quote for the night: "Where's the Crab Tree?" She kept hearing the TV announcers say it, and she just didn't see it.

So yes, this is round two of Saturday night football in the Homan House. #2 ranked Texas Tech Red Raiders [guns up!] take on #9 Oklahoma State.

With a great team including wide receiver Michael Crabtree, and Heisman contender and favorite Graham Harrell, Megan is getting a quick induction into football!

As I said last week, "How about them Red Raiders?!?!?!"

Megan meets cousin Martin

A cute video of Megan and Baby Martin last August

You're Invited...

A funny sign we saw in Hawaii

Looks like a wet forecast between here and California!

How 'bout them RED RAIDERS!?!

YIIPPPPPEEEEE!!

Number 7 Texas Tech OUTPLAYS Number 1 University of Texas and WINS in a huge game (just over!) Despite several stupid events of fans and students who rushed the field and tore the goal post partially over before the clock went to zero! So when you have penalties because of your fans, that isn't pretty.

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It was today's ESPN feature. They actually broadcasted all of the gameday show from LUBBOCK, TX. Camping for good seats started on Wednesday. Having such a big game in such a smaller city is hard. They fed everyone camping at Raiderville for 3 days, and apparently camping was a good option, because hotel rooms were no where to be found!

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Here is the game day video link where today's special guest, BOB KNIGHT, made predictions on all the games this one! Of COURSE he predicted a Texas Tech win...! Guns up!

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And here is the ESPN roadtrip to Lubbock. I think they captured a lot of great traditions and things that I almost forgot about gameday. Here is the link to the roadtrip video!

Those of you who know us, know that we are not a sports or football household. Even Megan watched the first half, bedtime was at half time, and our household hollered and jumped up and down watching a game tonight! Yippppeeee! If you missed it and want to see it, check out the replay here on ESPN

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PS -- for those of you who might not have figured it out, we are both Red Raiders / Tech Alumni!

Happy Halloween

Here's a few photos of our little ladybug. We went trick or treating with about four families on the block. Megan was the youngest and a bit slow, so I had to carry her more than I would like. Chris stayed at our house to man the candy bowl.

When Megan got home, she kept asking me "why are you wearing pumpkin earrings?" she asked this about 8 times as I guess my answer ("It's Halloween") never satisfied her.

At almost EVERY SINGLE house we went to she would say "trick or treat" and then when all the other kids were leaving, ask every homeowner "Why do you have a pumpkin?" At about the 10th time, all of the parents in our group were laughing at Megan. Apparently the pumpkins were odd. She found a few of them SCARY and didn't like them.

At the house where I thought she would be scared (it was decorated creepy and the guy at the door had on the full costume like the movie "Scream") She walked right up to the man and asked him "What's your name?" He was a good sport, took off his mask and said "Mike!"

Pumpkin at the Pumpkin Patch