Last night I purchased some yarn to use in my ‘knifty Knitter". Last night I sat down and figure out how to use it, I nearly called Suz to ask how I find the end of the yarn in the ball- I’m a complete novice. I know what some of you (All of you) are saying "Why don’t you just knit with needles??" well, I’ll tell you. I’m not coordinated enough, and my carpal tunnel acted up whille I was using the knifty knitter so i don’t even want to entertain the thought of using needles. I’m just not coordinated enough, and i’m totally serious. I can’t do aerobics and I can’t knit. Since being reintroduced to ‘corking’ by my neighbor, Laurie’s daughter, this just seemed like a fun and easy alternative. In a little less than 3hours I completed my first scarf!!! I used Patons ‘Cha Cha’ yarn in "Jazz" and these are all of my favorite colors together. This knifty knitter is so much fun, I liken it to tetris, once you start- you just can’t stop…"Only one more row and I’ll go to bed, okay, just one more row…"
It was fun, and I’m going to knit another one today once I’m finished doing a thourough deep clean of the house. Tomorrow I’m sorting through Paige’s toys to make room for the new ones she acquired over the holidays… I’m taking advantage of this time!! If I finish the cleaning soon enough, I may even start a couple paintings!! I have one I need to finish… that shouldn’t take long. I’ll feature it on here when I’m done, before I send it off.
Nolan is having a ball in his playpen right now- I LOVE it! He got a total of 35 ‘Roll arounds" for christmas and to keep them from all rolling under the couch we decided to get out the play pen. This has two great positives, it keeps the roll arounds in one area and it keeps NOLAN- the crawling destructo- in the same area. Gotta love it.
Well, I should get to it,
Hugs and Roll arounds,
~jen
And for those of you that wanted to see Nolan crawl… this is as close as i have captured so far, Him playing in the dog bowl.
Archive for December, 2005
I have been meaning to do this for a few weeks but with holidays cramping my style it’s a little bit late. Nolan has been a busy boy this December! First of all, he has been working all month on learning to crawl and would you know, he saved the grand finale for Christmas day. He started motoring around like the little trouble maker he was born to be. Minutes after we laid out some presents under the tree he had the paper on two of them ‘damaged’… much to Paige’s glee. The sound of his little palms slapping on the floor as he scuttles over to see what i’m doing is like heavenly music to my ears. I’m so proud I want to burst. We’ve had to move the magnets on the refrigerator 2 feet higher not to mention the extra protein he’s been picking out of the dog’s bowl…gross but true.
As if this milestone wasn’t monumental enough, on the evening of our Christmas party (Dec. 17th) Nolan decided to push through FOUR new teeth. The top four. At the same bloody time. You can see by the picture on the right that his cheeks are telling the whole story, and somehow the little guy is still smiling… go figure. I’m not sure what the kid wanted for christmas (my mind is thinking, more magnets on the bottom of the fridge or perhaps several barbie shoes on the carpet for him to chew on) but if it happened to be front teeth- Santa came through big time on that request.
Anyhoo, I should be going- Paige just headed off to Washington to see her cousins and Nolan and i are here by ourselves today. it’s going ot be a nice little break methinks. I know that my inlaws will take extra loving care of her, but i still pray for an angel or two to protect her since I can’t be there.
It’s a mom thing.
Well, good day all-
talk to you soon!
~jen
I can’t beleive I’ve remembered it was Wednesday today… All you guys are probably still busy with family and holidays but I’m posting it anyway, i haven’t missed a week yet.
I don’t remember where the heck i got this quote from since I’ve loved it for so long, I hope you do too.
Everyone in this household must have been VERY good this year because Santa brought a LOT of stuff!! Our stockings were filled to the brim and there was no place to move around in our living room. It was a fabulous sight. Paige woke up this morning and was very upset that she didn’t hear any sleigh bells last night and thought Santa may have forgotten to come. She was pleasantly suprised this morning to find He in fact did visit and he ate the oranges she left out as well as the hot chocolate and he also took the carrots we left out for the reindeer. She patiently waited for her grandparents to arrive before she opened her gifts. I did let her go through her stocking which contained a lot of ‘barbie" products. She made a very large Barbie haul this year, I can’t even believe it myself. 
The biggest hit was the ‘Scooter’ that she recieved from her Grandparents, it was No.1 on her christmas list and she is sure that santa brought it, not her grandparents. She is really good on it and has been scooting around the house all morning.
Of course the video camera had dead batteries and i was so busy undoing twist ties in Barbie boxes that we didn’t get alot of photos or videos but I managed a couple clips on my camera. i know you’ve been hanging on the edge of your seat waiting for these clips LOL!!
I got everything on my list (even though we weren’t officially supposed to get ourselves anything) Ken and i are both sporting new sleepwear and I’ve got new slippers galore. It’s been a great Christmas but i wish my family was closer, i would have loved to see them all again and watch them open their gifts.
Maybe next year…
I hope you all had a wonderful day and you enjoy having lots of good food and great family around for the rest of the holiday.
holiday Love and pine boughs,
~jen
Enjoy this clip, Paige opening Nolan’s presents for him and Nolan enjoying a peice of cardboard.
We spent a lovely Christmas eve morning at White Spot with my in laws. That place was packed with families with small children. I know it was the best Christmas present a family could give a Mom of small children- a breakfast of being served and without having to clean up. I know i enjoyed that part the best ::grin::
for those of you that also have littl’uns, you may want to track Santa on line tonight. Check out NORAD’s Santa tracker, it’s cool.
I’ll be on later with a few pictures… but right now we have to clean the house before the in laws return for some festivities tonight.
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!
And for those of you who don’t celebrate Christmas perhaps you could try ‘The Festivus for the Rest of Us."
Enjoy, eat- drink and be Merry!!
~jen
**Evening Update**
Ken and I just enjoyed our Christmas eve feast of Hot wings with veggies and dip. YUMM. We promised Paige she could open any gift of her choosing tonight after supper. She’s been bouncing off the walls all day waiting for us to finish dinner so of course it makes perfect sense that she FELL asleep. The child hasn’t napped for at least a week and she picked today. This also means I’m going ot have a bitch of a time trying to get her to go to bed tonight so Santa can drop by… You know what i’m saying.
Oh well, We are waiting for my inlaws to drop buy so i have already cracked open the nuts, and chocolate almonds. Gotta have snacks for the guests… ahem.
I’m sure feeling jolly and getting pretty excited for tomorrow… i’ll take some video clips and even though they will be sound free, I’ll post some here when i have a chance.
Once again,
Have a merry one,
~Jen
Today wasn’t the best day, nor was it the worst. While trying to catch a shot of the large mass of birds outside my kitchen window, I managed to break my new favorite coffee mug. No worries, i still know where I can buy another one. I scoured the computer for some nasty viruses that could only be removed while the operating system was in ’safe mode’. It took a better part of the day to complete and i never would have known about it if the power hadn’t gone out. When the power came back on the computer popped up a warning about this virus (it turned out to be 4). I hope that’s the end of the spontaneous reboots that have been happening.
I’m also proud to announce that I nearly completed my christmas shopping tonight. I didn’t have much to do, just some odds and ends for the kids (and Suz’s present!!). The mall was a mad house (big shocker) so i didn’t have time to buy Ken’s gift… I think the kids and i can manage that tomorrow. Ken and i weren’t supposed to get each other gifts but everytime we agree on that, he buys me one anyway and i feel like a LARGE ASS. But not this year!!
Now, all i have left to do is wrap my little ass off!! i haven’t wrapped a blessed thing yet and there are a lot of little things that require decorating with paper products. It’s a good thing I LOVE wrapping. I’ve got a thing for wrapping paper and bows and ribbons, I’m sure there is a name for the obsession i have for paper products (stationary included) but I don’t know what it is. Scotch tape even gets me excited. I purchased 9 rolls of wrapping paper at Liquidation World for 5$. It’s not cheap stuff either, half of it was foil and one LARGE roll of strawberry shortcake!! Talk about excited, I can’t wait to crack open a roll and match it with the perfect ribbon and bows… I know, I’m a sick puppy and I need to get out more.
Not much new on the home front, my ensuite is still a mess and they are going to be tearing it apart further after christmas. Since they tore the linoleum out, it stinks like a dog’s butt in there, seriously. They came and picked up the fans and industrial de-humidifier, thank the Lord for small blessings. Tonight should be a little bit of restful sleep at least. I did beg them to leave the fans and the de- humidifier in the garage however, because it’s still terribly damp. I want it to be as dry as a popcorn fart in there- since it’s monsoon season here on the island, we need all the help we can get. Wish us luck. Since it IS W.W.W., I have been constantly running this old one through my mind- it really has helped put my situation in perspective. Getting mad and stressed isn’t going to change it, so i won’t let those kind of thoughts rent space in my head. Not for a second.
on to the matter of the day… I cut it close this time, 5 minutes to midnight. Oh well, you guys can give me one days grace this time. **update** I did some rewording on my original quote since it was a tad ambiguous… now it isn’t, thanks Lynne.
Enjoy,
~jen
What an exciting week at the McEachern house. Good luck and bad luck all around. We woke up on Sunday morning to a very wet carpet in our bedroom and later discovered our garage was also quite damp (soaked). 
We isolated the water leak to our master ensuite- first we thought it was the shower, then perhaps the toilet but the insurance people found the leak in the sink area. So yesterday they were trucking through the house all evening tearing apart the walls and pulling up carpet and lino. They also set up several heavy duty fans and an industrial sized dehumidifier in our bedroom to help dry the carpets and floors. Ken didn’t feel it but the room felt like giant sauna to me last night- a giant and very LOUD sauna.
You can see in the photo, the insurance guy pulling out some soaking wet insulation and if you look closely you can see three streams of water pouring out of the hole in the gyprock. Beautiful.
First it was our van, the waterpump went and it cost us a few pretty pennies to fix a couple of weeks ago. Then our microwave fizzled and died on saturday morning. And number three was the water leak… it’s always nice to go out with a bang, isn’t it?? Fingers crossed that this is all fixed and over with before christmas, but I’m not really holding my breath for that. They say that bad things happen in threes, so i guess we are looking at the end of this. ::sigh::
On the brighter side, i did get a new microwave yesterday and it’s tres cool- stainless steel!! it has all the same features as my old one and it was HALF the price, I love that.
I should scoot, someone has filled his pants and is in dire need of attention… ::cough::!!
take it easy peeps,
~jen
Okay, it appears that i’m not going to get photo access on my blog today (being Saturday) so I’m just going to blog about the events and include a link to Suz’s flickr slideshow. On Wednesday i was invited to a ‘ladies night’ christmas event. It was so nice to meet all these new people and eat a dinner and exchange some very charming gifts. It’s amazing what you can get for 20.00 if you put your mind to it. Suz stole my first gift choice, it’s okay, I still love her!!
Thursday morning was my peak ‘head cold’ day, all i thought about all day was resting my head. Conentrating on anything just seemed like an enormous effort. Nolan and i laid down for a nap and Paige played in her bedroom, it was muchly needed.
Friday was prep day for the big Christmas party!! We cleaned the house and stocked the place with many types of food and bevies. A few people showed up for a drink and went on their merry way but most of us toughed it out until long into the evening. Much fun was had by all, well, I think so- speaking from my point of view. The cookie/craft exchange didn’t work out as planned since some of the ladies brought all their wares on one plate, i wasn’t able to hand them out. Of course this meant we probably ate a little too much sweets last night and this morning. I’m packaging them up into bags and handing them out to the rightful owners!! You wil have to check out Suzanne’s slide show since she was the only one taking pictures… i didn’t even get batteries into my camera before the night ended. Thanks to everyone for helping make the night a memorable one. Now, i’m really into the christmas spirit!
Today has been a day of rest and cleaning. I’m amazed that it didn’t take that long to tidy the place back up. Of course most of the chaos was isolated to the kitchen and once that was clean everything looked a lot cleaner. Tonight is the guys big Poker night. The winner gets a big purse to take home for Christmas, my hubby is wearing his kilt for the festivities- let us hope it brings him luck.
Anyway, I’m suffering a major sugar overload attack right now and I feel tres gross. I’m going to guzzle a litre of water in hopes of flushing my system and watch "it’s a wonderful life" for the second time this week. Merry Christmas everyone!
Hugs and gooey Poppycock,
~jen
p.s. Mom, the poppycock recipe you gave me turned out PERFECT, it was a real hit. actually, Too perfect.
I’ve had so much to blog about over the last few days but my blog host has been having some issues (why did i pay for this again???)… anyway, it’s coming around so I will attempt to blog some time later today about all the fun things that have been going on. Thanks for hanging in there with me!!
Merry Christmas!
~jen
okay, I’m making this one short and sweet…
I heard this on TV after Julia Child passed away (last year?) It stuck, and it’s perfect for the holiday season… full of cookie exchanges.
Thanks to Kelly Mize for the ‘Mojo’ digi scrapbooking paper I used above.
