I’ve been spending a lot of time at my dentist this month. I broke a tooth, effectively turning me into a hick-yokel any time someone watched me talk. Jon only laughed at me a little bit. I went in a couple of weeks ago for that and now have a temporary tooth, front and center, until the permanent tooth can be completed. This last week I had two cavities filled, and my jaw still hurts from the shot on one side. My dentist is awesome, and all the assistants there are adorable. It’s actually called, “A Kids Place Dentistry” so I feel right at home with the Nemo stickers on the ceiling and Zethura playing in the waiting room. Dr. Dentist must have just gone a little too deep with the syringe on this one though, so a little Ibuprofen does wonders for the bruise on my jaw. I go back this Friday for my permanent front tooth and then only have one other appointment for the last cavity on the top and then my whole mouth should be sparkling and done for the year. We’ll see if I get around to any implants next year.

Hannah turns TWO this week! ACK! How in the world did that slip me by?! Sheesh. She really is getting so big and I get sad when I think that she’s not my baby anymore! Throwing out my back a few weeks ago just lifting her in and out of bed and in and our of her highchair adds to the realization that she isn’t my tiny little girl….and that was adding injury to insult. We sent out an invite to the family and a couple of her friends for a party to be held on her big day. We phrased it as the roll-out of Hannah 2.0. Lots of geek references with Jon on that one, and compliments from his brother Scot (as a techno-guy himself) on releasing the upgrade on time! He he he. It should be a pretty casual and fun night. I’m going to start cooking tomorrow, and there will be lots of good food for any guests that arrive. I think I might try my hand at a Mickey Mouse cake too…or at least maybe a Toodles cake. (Same shape, less facial expression.) Hannah will love that!

The biggest holiday of the year is in two weeks! ACK! LESS than two weeks! Yikes! I still have quite a bit of sewing to do, and we still haven’t decided on what to get a couple of the people on our list. I feel very accomplished though in that our tree is up and decorated, the beautiful white ceramic nativity is on the mantle (out of reach of little hands that like to throw things), and I do have several presents already wrapped and under the tree. It’s just a matter of time now while I finish the rest of my assignments. It also helps that the play is finally over! YAY!

The fantastic Sister Edwards in my ward caught me in the hall at church one week and asked if Jon and I wouldn’t mind taking a small part in a very small production she was putting together for her assignment on the Activities Committee for the ward Christmas Party. Small part?…sure. I got the script with my character’s name highlighted on the front page and got just a little bit nervous when I saw the number of lines. But, most of it was from off-stage, and I could probably do that. She called the next week and switched our parts with another couple and my lines doubled and all of them were on stage. Ugh. We only had practices once a week, we had costuming issues and illness as well as throwing my back out, as previously stated, so the practices were difficult for me. Jon was good to run lines at night, and I think we held our own. I liked getting to know the other cast members too, but aside from that, I’m just fine to never act again. Jon just laughs at me though when I say that it was my first and last performance. He loves the adreneline and excitement of performing. Me…not so much. We ran rehersals through three times on Saturday, we even wore body microphones and had a huge sound-system set up, thanks to Sister Edwards connections as the drama teacher at her school. She had three students there running the sound board and sound effects that night. We got a lot of laughs, and lots of compliments post-performance, so I’m happy about that, but really, I’m glad to have my days back without worrying about my lines so that I can finish up the REST of my Christmas lists in peace!

Okay…so, to begin…

plus the shavings of cause major problems!!!

Yes. Rookie mistake. I know. I’m sorry. My bad. Silly me. I ALWAYS wrap shavings up in a plastic store bag and throw them the trash, so I have no idea why this time was different. I thought my awesome little disposal would take care of it all. Not so much.

After a week of no access to my sink/disposal, draining the backup with a cup every time I had to run my dishwasher, and picking up $12 worth of pvc plumbing accessories, Jon and I were able to replace the old rusting pipe and blocked u-bend under the sink. Yes…I used a hack-saw. Yes, I used an auger. We measured, and I cut while Jon glued the pieces into place, and only an hour or so later, my sink is draining! My disposal is disposing! My U-bend is…clear. Ahhh. Hannah was also an awesome helper. Even though she kept trying to touch the rusty pieces, at least she only gave the bottles of cleaning supplies names and sat them all next to her in a row calling them her friends. (She needs more play-dates.) The funniest moment though was when we had dry-fit all our connections and tested the water to make sure nothing backed up. All’s well, time to glue and make it permanent. Water turned off, Jon pulled off the U-bend, and carefully lifted it up to the sink to dump out the water still sitting in the bend. Yes. He dumped it right down the drain that was missing the very piece he held in his hand. He he he. At least this water was clean and there wasn’t that much of it. The things that man does to make me giggle.

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.