Tag Archives: family

Thanksgiving: 2012

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So this past week, we had TWO Thanksgivings! One on Thursday at my uncles house for my side of the family, and then one this past Saturday at our house for my husbands side of the family. I didn’t take any pictures Thursday, I was too busy catching up with my sister and grandmother. I miss seeing them.

Like I said, Saturday was at our house and I had this huge plan to have a beautiful set table. Well, I forgot about a tablecloth, and it started to get a bit hectic before setting the table so everything was kinda just thrown together. Oh and to add to it, I had my camera set on a high ISO and my camera battery died after taking the above photos! Grrrr. So I was unable to get all the pictures I wanted. (I did also get the Instagram photo below before my phone died too!! haha!) I was told all the food tasted great, (I was only able to eat the foods that were gluten free) and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, so I’m guessing that means we did everything right as hosts!

I’m very thankful I was able to spend time with all our families, and I’m also very thankful for a reason to clean the house! It’s so clean I’m afraid to do anything to make it a mess again. CT on the other hand has no problem making messes.

The rest of this week I plan on sewing, sewing and sewing some more. I have huge plans for handmade Christmas gifts this year and I’m only halfway through finishing the first one. I also need to start putting together everything for CT’s third birthday in two week. It’s her first themed party, and were planning on a bunch of kids coming. So I need to make it all super fun!!

Oh and a friendly reminder, our Cyber Monday sale is still going on! 25% off everything in the shop, and all orders over $50 will receive a free accessory set!! It all ends tonight at midnight EST.

 

Holiday Decorating Early.

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Last week we decided we wanted to get a new Christmas tree. We have been using the same tree since our first apartment together 9 years ago. It was bought on clearance after the holidays, and was pretty much the only one we could find. It was a little short, and a little sparse, but it always looked super cute when we put all of our ornaments on it. You can see a photo of it from last year (CT is really cute and tiny in the photos too!!). The reason we decided to upgrade was because we felt it would be nice to have a bigger tree, since we have such large ceilings. Plus we found the perfect tree for us by accident and needed an excuse to buy it. Ha.

The new tree is 7.5 foot, instead of 6 foot. It has those plastic feeling branches on the outside and tinsel on the inside instead of tinsel all over. Oh and the best part… The lights are LED’s and can switch from colored lights to white lights!! That last part is what sold me and made me spend my hard earned cash on a new tree! I’m a sucker for new technology.

We apparently waited to long to buy it, and ended up with the floor model. Which bring me to why we set it up so early. Since we bought the floor model, it didn’t come with a box. So our options were to have a huge tree in pieces in the middle of the library, or set it up! We set it up, and of course I couldn’t have a naked tree standing around. So we decorated it too! CT’s decorating skills have improved greatly since last year. She put ornaments on the bottom half of the tree, and I did the top half for the most part. JC had to put the star on, I’m just too short.

I’m happy the main tree is up, along with a few other decorations. It’s been slowly lifting my spirits. Everything is so shiny and bright. I still have my white tree to put up, but I’ going to wait until after CT’s birthday in mid December. That way I have more space in our dining room for the party! Which I really need to start preparing for…

Has anyone else already set up their tree, or decorated for the holidays? Or am I the only crazy one?

 

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My Extended Weekend: Very Little Sleep and a Movie

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This past week has been pretty stressful. My husband was on call in addition to his regular work schedule. So we weren’t really able to go out, and there was the possibility he would have to go in at any minute. He luckily wasn’t called in at all during the week, but he was called in non stop the entire weekend. Middle of the night, early in the morning, seriously non stop. We were all on edge, and lacking sleep. I already wasn’t feeling like myself lately, so this just added to it…

One good thing that came out of it all was since he worked so much during the weekend, he was able to take off yesterday. We used the day to actually do some fun stuff! We went out to eat, did a teeny bit of thrifting (I found a Disneyland cookie jar and CT found loads of books), some “window shopping” and we saw a movie!! Everything was nice, but that movie was great!!

We don’t really have a way of going to the movies often, timing is just never right. If we want to go, it has to be a kids movie that all three of us want to see. It pretty much has to be cartoon and can’t be scary. We learned our lesson about scary when we saw Brave, I still haven’t seen the second half (though I did buy the dvd this past week, so I’ll know what happens soon) Anyway, we decided to check out Wreck it Ralph.

CT has been asking to go see this movie for months now! It’s been hard explaining that movies come out at different times, sometimes in theaters, sometimes on DVD. She’s starting to catch on. We didn’t tell her we were seeing Wreck it Ralph until we bought the tickets, just in case. She was excited once we got in. We all were, ha. Truthfully we’ve all been looking forward to seeing this movie, and I’m so glad we did.

It was seriously one of the best Disney movies I’ve seen in a long time. The characters were all done so well, and the story kept your attention the entire time. They were able to make you feel something for the bad guy, the main character Ralph. You wanted him to be the hero! CT loved Venelope the best, of course. She was adorable!! I won’t get into the full story line here, because I really feel that anyone reading this should see this movie! It has a nice retro feel, it has loads of video game references from different decades, it has a little love story and a hero’s quest! Perfect! I loved it so much I MAY try and convince the family to go see it again. Maybe when it’s at the $2 theatre.

Now it’s Tuesday and my week is about to get crazy. We are headed to my uncles for thanksgiving on Thursday, and I said I’d make a pie and some macarons. Then we are hosting our own Thanksgiving for my husband’s side of the family on Saturday, which involves a lot of cleaning, prepping, baby proofing and baking too. I’m also hoping to get some antique shopping in on Friday during a huge sale at one of our favorite shops. It will be my only plan for Black Friday. Hopefully.

I hope everyone else is having a calmer week than me, and a great time with family!!

(the above two photos were courtesy of disney.com)

 

Our Disney Vacation: Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party

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Our original plan was to do the Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party the second night we were there, just in case any of got sick or something else happened. Kinda get it over with before everyone was exhausted. Well, it rained that night, so we were able to switch our tickets over to the next party, which was the night before we left. So it was basically a party to celebrate the end of our vacation!

You may be asking what the difference is between the party and any other night at the Magic Kingdom? well, a lot! They have these events a few times a week starting in September and ending right after Halloween. It cost additional and tickets should be purchased before heading to Disney, and if you go on Halloween (like we did for our anniversary in 2008) you have to get those tickets months ahead of time. It’s a great time to have your entire family all dressed up in costume, because everyone else was! (CT was snow white, us parents ran out of time to make costumes)

They close the park to anyone who didn’t purchase the party tickets around 7pm, which is when they start all the fun stuff. The first thing they do is hand everyone trick or treat bags, this year they were paper bags with Wreck It Ralph and Frankenweenie on them. These are used for trick or treating all over the park! Sometimes its just a Disney employee handing out the candy, but other times its actual characters. Though this time I didn’t see actual characters doing it, maybe its just a Halloween day thing? Soon after all that they start the first of two special Halloween Parades…

We figured we’d just watch the second parade, since they’re exactly the same, and go ride some rides during since they’d be empty. But we got sucked in and had horrible spots, so sorry for the crappy photos. If there’s a next time, we’ll prepare better and wait it out in a good seat. The parade was all about the villains. The whole night was pretty much all about them. Everything was so neat looking and all the costumes were amazing. It really set the mood for the whole night.

After the parade we went to ride the teacups again. As you can see above, the teacups really were her favorite thing at the parks. When you ask her what the best things at Disney were, her first reply is the pool at the resort and her second thing was the teacups!

The Happy HalloWishes fireworks were amazing! Again, they were all Disney villain themed. During the fireworks show they would cast weird lights on the leftover smoke to make it all creepy looking, and they would also project images of different villains onto the castle. As you can see in the green colored photo above, one of them was Oogie Boogie from the Nightmare Before Christmas. There were many others, but I can’t remember them all. Wow, does Disney do fireworks right! They were basically all around, complete 360. As my husband says, what’s considered a grand finale for our local fireworks is just the beginning at Disney. It was all so pretty!

After the fireworks we went to go have dinner before the next parade started. CT had been up a little late every night we were at Disney, so we figured she’d be able to stay awake. We headed down to the beginning of the parade hoping to get a better seat. We had no such luck. Good thing for CT, her dad is tall and she was able to sit on his shoulder to watch some of the parade… She started to get drowsy halfway through and ended up falling asleep in her stroller. We figured we’d seen the parade before, so we would just slowly head out of the park. I took a bunch of pictures on the way out of course, always take advantage of the quiet and calm time you have when your child is asleep! (like me writing this blog post right now) We actually caught the parade at the entrance and ended up being trapped in the middle circle of main street! That’s where that photo on the right above came from. Luckily they let people through inbetween parade floats, so we were able to beat the rush to the bus. which was great, because carrying a passed out toddler, a stroller, backpacks, camera, etc on a crowded bus sucks!! (we know, we had to do it a few nights before)

As you can see, our little snow white was seriously exhausted. I know she had a great time though, because she has excitedly talked about it all nonstop since we got home!!

I’m really happy we were able to take her to Disney World, and even happier we could do the Halloween party. It’s one of my favorite things to do at Disney! It makes me wonder if the next time we go should it be for Halloween, or maybe mix it up and do the Mickeys Very Merry Christmas Party? Has anyone ever done both? If so, which was more fun for little ones?

Well, this is the last post I’ll be writing about our actual trip. If you’re interested in seeing all the photos from this our Disney vacation, just head on over to my Flickr page, I uploaded everything finally!!

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Our Disney Vacation: Magic Kingdom

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So, as you may be able to tell from how many photos I took at Magic Kingdom, that it is absolutely our favorite park out of the four! I bet it’s everyone’s favorite! It’s the most recognized park, and what people think of when they hear “Disney World”. There’s such a wide variety of rides, and attractions. Everyone can find something they’ll enjoy here. We found loads to do, and ended up spending a least two days total there (broken up in pieces of course)

CT loved the tea cups the most, as you can see above. We rode that one more than once! She also really enjoyed the Peoplemover, “it’s a small world”, Peter Pan’s Flight, Prince Charming Regal Carrousel, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and Dumbo the Flying Elephant (which has an awesome waiting area now, fully air conditioned!!). she DID NOT enjoy Pirates of the Caribbean! that was a bad choice on our part. It was too dark and she didn’t like that first drop. She could have fooled us, because afterward she wouldn’t stop singing “yo ho, yo ho, a pirates life for me…”. Ha!

We stumbled on something really cool one of the days we were there. Disney is building a whole new section of the park, all the way in the back. It’s going to house a few new restaurants, rides, shows, and two new castles!! The Beast’s castle and Eric’s Castle, I believe. Most of it is already built and a little bit is open (like the new, double, Dumbo ride with that air conditioning I talked about). We were being really nosy while trying to take pictures of one of the castles (pictured above), when we found a hidden door to the new section. The “cast member“ guarding the entrance told us we could come in and test drive one of their new attractions! It’s called Enchanted Tales with Belle and is an interactive play. It takes places in Maurice’s house (her dad), which I have pictured right above. They take you in and choose different kids to be part of their interactive play, CT was chosen to be an enchanted frame. We were a little weary she’d freak out, but she seemed happy she was chosen. The play is a shortened story about how Beauty met the Beast. It was really cute! halfway through it was CT’s turn to get up and be part of the play, but instead of getting up she freaked out and started screaming. I guess she has a little bit of stage fright. It was really neat being able to see everything they’re building behind those hedges, and it really makes me want to visit again after its all finished, which should be in about a month and a half!

As with the other parks, we put aside a lot of time to meet all the characters we could. CT was able to meet Alice, Minnie, Buzz Lightyear, Tiana, Rapunzel, Flynn Rider and Cinderella with her Prince. She was also able to meet Snow White again, which as you can see from the photo above, she loved!! She filled up almost every page of her autograph book, which made her very happy. I’m thinking of scanning all the autographs in and making a little Blurb book for her. She loves books, so I bet she’d love a book with pictures of her in it! Have anyone of you used Blurb? How was the quality?

So, I have more photos to share from Magic Kingdom, but they’re all from the Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party, which really deserves its own post. Oh and as I’ve said before, if you’re interested in seeing more photos from our trip, you can find all of them in my Flickr account.

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My Weekend: The Pumpkin Patch

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This past weekend we headed to Larriland Farms, in Woodbine, MD with my mom and little brother. Going has kinda been a family tradition for most of my life. It’s a great place where you can choose a pumpkin from a pile or pick your own in a huge field. They also have fresh Kettle Corn, Apple Fritters, and Cider. There’s also some farm animals to see, a hay/corn maze, hay rides and much more. If you live anywhere near this place, I suggest visiting!!

As you can see, it was a beautiful day and we had a lot of fun. We got a few pumpkins (and a squash) to carve this upcoming week too. It’ll actually be our first time carving a pumpkin as the three of us. Hopefully CT enjoys it, and if it goes well, I’ll share some photos!

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