December daily

Hey, I am back!  The computer is working a little better, but still not 100% yet.  Joe is working on it as he has time.  YEAH!

So I have a LOT of catching up to do.  So here is how our December has gone...

Chippy (our elf on the shelf) made his appearance on December 1st!

He found a few new places to hang out each night.  

Hope asked why our elf wasn't naughty like some of the other elves.  My answer, because you are naughty enough for the both of them.  LOL!  She didn't like that answer very much.

He tried to get sneaky this time and hide in her box of legos, kind of like Where's Waldo.

Hope sent Stichard to Mrs. Claus to be fixed.  It took several nights, but she finally sent him back with Chippy.

Welcome to the jungle....we got fun and games!

Conversations with an elf...Hope carried him around in her boot all day long and had a lot of chats with him.

This one has a funny story.  This is how chippy originally landed, but later in the day he was holding on by the snowman nose.  So the next morning as Hope and I were waking up (yep, she ended up in bed with us that night) she says "Mom, now that it is morning and I know Chippy came back I can tell you what happened yesterday"  She had pushed the button to make the snowman sing and Chippy had slipped off the back.  So her and grandma Deloris used a towel (careful not to touch him so he wouldn't lose any of his flying powers) and put him back on the snowman.  :)  I t hunk she was pretty worried he wouldn't make it back.

We hosted my family Christmas, so Chippy watched over the dessert table.

Of course he had to visit baby Jesus too.

And had a date with the Christmas Fairy.

And his finally spot, on the Christmas tree, so he his ready to head back to the North Pole with Santa tonight on his sleigh.

Hope had her first Social Studies project due in early December.  It was an immigration project.  There were multiple options given for the project, but she wanted to create a monument (other than the Statue of Liberty) to welcome immigrants to America.  She chose to make a rainbow so they would know the America was a happy place.

She made a lot of tents.

Sometimes Taylor was allowed to come in too.

She had a LOT of fun building with Legos.  Check out this triple decker train car.

We visited Santa.  She asked for a new phone.

So Santa called me over and told Hope that Mrs. Claus had reminded him of the meeting the other day about kids asking for phones.  The new rule was that they had to be 16 unless their parents said they could get one sooner.  Thanks Santa for getting me out of that one!  :)  I felt like I needed to tip him.  LOL!

Hope and Taylor love to play together and I found her in a storage bin on one such occasion.

Hope and I made cookies and other goodies for friends and neighbors...

Today we finished the Santa workshop Lego set she got from Grandma Deloris this past weekend.

And I cleaned up the "NO MESS" sand.  If you believe the statement on this can of sand...DON'T!  They LIED!  :)  Ok, maybe with 1% of kids they may play with it and not make a mess, but with hurricane Hope there was never any chance she wouldn't find a way to make it messy.

Tonight, we will be attending the candlelight service.  It is always one of my favorite services when all the candles are lit and we sing Silent Night.  

So, in honor of Christmas Eve, here are a few of my favorite cards I created this year.  

This one I had to "fix".  I was using a part of the packaging and it was a glossy finish.  I tried to stamp on it and them heat emboss the sentiment, but it didn't dry enough and still smudged.  So I ended up stamping on the same kind of paper and put it over the smudged stamped sentiment.

I LOVED this elf paper line Bo Bunny had last year, so I knew it would make some great cards after I used it for a layout.  I will share some of the recent Christmas layouts I have finished (from last year and other years too).

And with that, have yourself a Merry little Christmas.

Darla

Halloween update and beyond...

Well since Halloween our computer crashed and we are finally back halfway working again.  We restored a lot of stuff from our external drive and still trying to clean out a lot of stuff we don't need.  No need to worry, no pictures were lost!  :)

So onto a Halloween update...

We carved our pumpkin the night before trick or treat night.  She found a kitty face pattern on the internet, so that is what we went with.

We poked a glow stick through it to light it up.

Hope dressed up as the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland and Taylor was a minion from the Despicable Me movies.

And of course, when Hope got home she took inventory of all the candy she got.  She came home with 255 pieces of candy.  Good grief!  We have limited it to 3-4 pieces a day, so we have plenty of stock for a while.  LOL!

It was a great Halloween and we were lucky the weather held out and it wasn't too cold.

Harvest time always makes me think of dad and in our new neighborhood I drive past a lot of fields where the crops are being harvested.  I love seeing the combines and tractors working.  I remember many memories of harvest time growing up.  Taking meals out to the fields, etc.  I even had to stop along the side of the road to take this picture.

This was a very familiar childhood scene.  Miss you dad! 

Well, now that the weather is getting cooler, Hope has already started talking about snow and Christmas.  Her list from Santa is a MILE long.  Oh my!  I am actually hoping that this is the YEAR (if you know what I mean) where the meaning of believing changes.  :)  We will see.

Actually right now she is watching videos on you-tube about domino "tricks" (not sure what it is technically called-where you line up dominos and then push them over to cause a chain reaction).  She has now added the request for 500,000 dominos so she can work toward breaking the world record.  WOW!  Talk about ambitious goals.  LOL!  So if anyone has any dominos they would like to part with let me know.  It does seem like something she would like to get into, but maybe on a smaller scale to make it realistic (for now).

Well, speaking of Christmas, the December issue of Paper Crafts and Scrapbooking recently came out and I have 4 cards in this issue.  The call was for a set of 4 cards using just a 6x6 paper pad and one stamp set and minimal other embellishments.  I can only show one card here, but you can check out the issue HERE, if you have a subscription.  It is on pages 46-47.  Stay tuned because I have cards coming in the February issue, March issue, May issue, which are all digital magazines and then a special print issue later this year.

This was my favorite one out of the four cards...

I used the Pink Paislee Winter Village 6x6 paper pad and a Christmas stamp set from Stampin Up.  For this card, all I added was a few random sequins and a twine bow to the deer, which was part of the pattern paper collage.  Super easy.

I don't want to skip completely over November and Thanksgiving, so I will share a few cards to show my gratitude for you visiting my blog. 

Have a great night!  Hopefully Joe will be able to get the computer going at full power again and it won't be so long between posts.  Later!

Darla