Ahh. I love turkey.

Jon and Hannah and I all got dressed up on Thursday and pulled together a yummy pasta salad to add to the huge meal at the Woodbury house at 2. All of Mom’s side of the family were invited, and most of them showed up! I’d say we had nearly 60 people in the house at once, and the announcement at the beginning of the meal included instructions about the tables down the hall, in the basement, and around the corner downstairs in a couple of the bedrooms! He he he. Room for everyone…just not in the SAME rooom. Awesome food, great conversations with the cousins, and a little nap after the meal with Hannah on the couch. Ahh. Does it get any better?

Yes!

Once the family started to filter out, Jon and I packed up and headed out to my family to spend some time with them too. SO many jokes and laughs. Hannah walked in the door and I didn’t see her again for an hour because she was playing with her cousins. New games were introduced, and the classic tournament of Scrabble again commenced. The official Scrabble trophy was passed to Dave, after a short amount of gloating, and then the food was split out and everyone took treats home. We have been LOVING the Lindsay rolls from Annette. Mm.

The only down-side to the day was that we didn’t end up with any turkey. Hmm. Someday when we host the shindig ourselves, we’ll keep the leftovers and love the bird for days. Ahh.

What a fantastic holiday! I love that there’s an entire day dedicated to family, gratitude and food! I am certainly grateful for all of it!

Yes, I had it programmed into my tivo before the premiere. Most of you know that at any given time, if you were to walk in on us watching tv, it would be about a 50/50 chance that you’d see wedding dresses, flowers, or wedding cakes on the screen. We really do live weddings in our house! My new favorite thing, thanks to the TLC station, is Jeff Leatham and his team. They create the most amazing flower designs for events in New York City. He’s worked all over the world, and I now have a huge case of flower envy for the events at Verssaille as well as the MoMA…who gets to do flowers for an event sitting at tables surrounded by original Monet’s?! After the first episode, I wanted to work for him. After the third, I realized that he needed to come up with a couple of new ideas because some of the arrangements are the same from event to event…but it made me smile to see that he re-uses vases. I do that too! I just love the flowers so much, that I keep watching.

I am so much of a flower geek at this point, that it made me giggle to see how many times he used hydrangea (I recommend it all the time as a money saver…and here he is using it as a major design piece in every single event!) as well as that he hired someone else to come in and build bouquets and boutonnieres for him on a wedding. He does events…locations…full rooms of flowers…not personal bouquets. Hmm. Maybe I can call and suggest myself. The final smile is that Jeff is actually from Ogden, Utah! Yes, you heard me! This funny man in cut-off tees, leather pants, with the mouth of a sailor when riled, and who sports a questionable accent because of all the locations he’s lived, is a home-town boy made famous! How fun is that?!

Ahh…share the flower love and joy with me, people! Thank you TLC for combining so many of the things that I love most! New York…flowers…weddings…and tv. How great that I can have the first three while sitting on my couch.

Hannah playing peekaboo in the bathroom with her towels. He he h. She’s just so happy to make us smile.

Hannah has been obsessed lately with babies. She’s turned not only her stuffed animals into babies, but random toys, and even her sippie cup! She wraps them up in blankets, pats them and puts them down for naps. But, the funniest thing is when she wipes and diapers them!

We had a few minutes during our trip up to Jackson Hole this week to do some family photos with our fantastic Andrea there to snap the shots. Hannah got tired of smiling and posing, so the most fun happened when Andrea played up to Hannah’s little monster tricks of scaring everyone with a big boo and a rar!

Yes, I want to be like Britta when I grow up. I’ve totally stolen some ideas from the rooms she designed for her daughters and interpreted them for Hannah’s room. Ella liked hedgehogs, for some reason, so Britta created a little family of “hedgedogs” on Ella’s wall with some fun decorative papers and adhesive spray glue. I did some elephants for Hannah’s room. Hannah likes elephants for some reason, and I have happy memories of when she learned to throw her hand up in the air like a trunk while sputtering a “PHFFF!” Once I got the elephants on the wall, Hannah sat there looking at them, pointing at each one in turn saying, “Mommy. Baby. Baby. Baby.” Yup. Mommy and her baby elephants.

Next, I used the same pink and brown papers left over from the elephants to cut out some letters. I hung them in some cheap frames from Walmart, spelling out “Hannah” on the wall, which finally gave me a space to hang the sparkly little star that my sister gave us too! Hannah is certainly the star of our house!

Finally, with the last of the left over paper, I covered a box and added polka dots in several sizes, and put a butterfly on the front so that we could have a fun and cute place to keep diapers. It also makes for an easy-access spot that Hannah can reach when we need her to grab one for us.

Hannah's room

Yay! for finishing some decorative touches I’ve been wanted to get to for some time!

Hannah loves Toodles on Mickey’s Playhouse. She shouts out the “roll call” at the top of her lungs and then does the hot-dog dance at the end. She’ll go for pretty much any other Playhouse Disney show in the a.m. hours too…The Jungle Junction theme song gets stuck in my head some days, Charlie and Lola are adorable, and we endure Special Agent Oso if only for the Bond references in the assignment names…but Mickey is her absolute favorite, and it’s the one she asks for at night as her treat show before getting into jammies and reading books before bed. We have dozens of Mickey’s Playhouse episodes saved on our tivo for just such occasions. The silly thing is that we probably have twice that many Handy Manny episodes also saved on tivo, just because I have a toon crush on Manny and the tools, and I make Hannah watch it now and then.

Jon and I have joked about a lot of things in the show, (I’m a hammer!, when Squeeze will get a voice coach to help with the lisp, Turner’s racism against Filipe, on and on and on) but the most common joke has been that the owner of the hardware store, Kelly, is in love with Manny, and there are sparks and catfights in the works whenever some new girl shows up in Sheetrock Hills to vie for his attention. We laugh so hard at our own silly flights of fancy about the show…fan fiction at its best…and it’s really entertaining. The questionable bit about Kelly we’ve found is that she ALWAYS has what is needed for a repair for that day. Hmm. No matter what it is…no kidding…she ALWAYS has it!…and sometimes she has it in her purse when she ‘happens’ to stop by a location where Manny has a repair after her hardware store has closed for the night. Hmm. We started to wonder if Kelly weren’t taking some time at night to sabotage things around town after having already ordered just the right part, to secure her place in Manny’s heart…even if it’s just as his supply-supplier. The romantic/stalkerish undertones in our house when WE watch the show keep us giggling through every episode.

Recently, they played a ‘video’ of a song about Kelly’s Hardware Store, and we both roared!

I’ll give YOU the guided tour. She has EVERYTHING you need. Kelly’s got the make and model that your heart desires. If you move through the store nice and slow…

You get the picture.

I wonder whose house key she’s flinging at the camera with such bedroom eyes!?

I love that Manny rocks out Santana style on the guitar too.

Heck…Jon and I nearly scrapped Hannahs’ cow costume for Halloween this year to dress our family up in a Handy Manny combination. I think I could pull off the Kelly outfit pretty easily. Maybe we’ll try it next year.

I was shivering yesterday. I made Jon promise to warm up the bed before I got into the cold sheets. He loves that part and agreed easily. We had curled up on the couch to watch some tv for a minute…myself covered in blankets, Jon in only his underwear and totally comfortable with the temperature of the house. As Conan ended, Jon agreed to hit the sheets, but he had to run downstairs for his phone charger first….be right back. Okay. I curled up on the couch alone, fetal position under the blankets in my sweatshirt and thick socks…and promptly passed out. I woke up an hour later. The tv was off which meant Jon had been through that way again, but where was he now? I wandered to my room, and there was Jon snoring softly on my side of the bed. Ahh. Thanks honey. Now shove over!

This is what I am looking out on while I do my dishes today. Ahh. I love Fridays.

“Ah do it.”
“Ah yike it.”
“Ah Cooking!”
“Ah Mixing.”
“Yuv Yuuu!”
“Keeses.”
“Com on!”
“Taint tu.”

While watching a cartoon…
Hannah: “Funny!”
Mommy: “Is that a funny baby on the show?”
Hannah: “Funny baby.”
After a momentary pause and while brightening a bit and placing her open hand on her chest…
Hannah: “HANNAH funny!”
Mommy: “He he he he he. Yes. Hannah is very funny!”

I love that kid.

We had so much fun on Monday night up at the Parent’s house. There are lots of conflicts to schedules on Saturday for the Halloween holiday, so the family decided to take Monday night to get together for dinner and then a parade of trick-or-treating kids in costume.

Coordinating schedules with the Musketeers this week has made me a bit nostalgic. I was thinking about the old days…and not just the good old days…the good old Days! Days of Our Lives! I remember walking home from Junior Highschool with the girls, anticipation for the upcoming show at a high, and talking about Bo and Hope and Steve and Kayla….being a sucker for an accent, my candy couple-of-choice was Shane and Kimberly. That Brittish boy is still a good looking man, even if he gave up steamier rolls for playing opposite the likes of Fran Drescher. Still, as much as I crushed on Steve at 11 and 12 years old, sitting here at my computer 25 years later I couldn’t remember much about their lives really. We watched these people daily for so long, and now I had no idea what happened to those fictional families. It’s not a great loss, I’m sure, but it is odd to realize that I can tell you all about the people I’ve read about in books, and even those movies that I somehow find a stolen weekend to watch…I can give you all kinds of details about those short-lived character encounters, but what about the Days of my youth? Nope. Sort of lost in the fogs of time.

As I was listening to my Playlist while doing data entry, a memory sparked. Sitting on the bus with the girls on our way to, I have no idea where, and the love song came over the radio. Aww. All of us melted! It was true love. The real forever love represented in lyrics and melody. Remember that we were 10 years old at the time, and I’m sure the fact that we probably weren’t supposed to be watching shows like that on top of the fact that we were love crazy pre-teens with random misfires of hormones who all fell in love with nearly every decent looking boy on the block, and you might understand why upon hearing that testiment to eros we got excited shivers.

Hmm…headphones on, data entry pauses…what was that song again?

I had to do a google search. After 25 years, I was a little fuzzy, remember?! AH! Friends and Lovers! Right!

I added the song to my playlist with a smile and then thought…I wonder if there’s a video? YouTube, here I come! No true video on file, per se, but so many fans of the show and the couples have created their own cliptastic videos from their favorite episodes. (Some people have way too much time on their hands!) I clicked on one and couldn’t believe the sheer volume of makeup and hair, for BOTH characters, but laughed at the memories again. Ahh…L-shaped sheets. As a marrid woman of a certain age, I’m still surprised that I don’t remember more of these scenes! If tv has only gotton worse morally over the last 25 years, I’m pretty glad that my watching is restricted to Disney and the History channel!

Why the telescope Shane? And why did Kimberly always so confused or trapped?

Another quick detour to Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_and_Kimberly

WHOAH NELLY! Murder, abuse, betrayal, intrigue, marriage, children with questionable paternity…How do I not remember any of this hooey?! He he he. Well, I guess I can see why the show has been on the air since 1965, but, MAN! I can also see how much better my life is for not continuing the teenage crushes on Steve and Patch into the new century! I’m quite happy to have glazed over the strange bits and will move on with a partial memory that cracks me up and makes me smile at the silly me of 1983.

Ahhh…the good old Days!