Christmas 2010

We were very merry.

We spent a night in Vegas on the way to and from the motherland destination of Bountiful, UT. My first white Christmas with Jeff's family, and I loved it.

I don't know how the holidays whisk by as fast as they do, and now I'm left with that horrid depression that it's over -- FOR ANOTHER YEAR!

We relaxed, read, played with technologies, tickled kiddies, and got fat (fatter if you're talking about the person scrapping together this blog post. There will be no more belly shots, THE END.).

My nephew playing Angry Birds on my phone until the battery power ceased to exist.

My mother always taught me to never drink my calories. Woops!

My niece and her Pillow Pet. "The Perfect $20 Gift!" I think I heard about 20 times over the last month mothers lamenting the existence of the unsightly Pillow Pets.

Speaking of unsightly plush items, on Christmas Eve we had an extended family party at "Boondock's", a Chucky Cheese sort of place. We all bowled 2 games and got some arcade cash because of the large group set up. We tested the claw grabber thingy and Jeff and I stood there with dropped jaws as the claw grabbed THIS blue and neon green bear/dog stuffed animal and deposited it in the receptacle! It was a Christmas Miracle!!

Then it was time to go home to beat the threatening storm. Sigh. On the road agin....

The biggest Christmas surprise was something I wasn't expecting to discuss actually owning until about 10 years down the road:

A dream come true SLR.

I am spoiled rotten. And just as I had completely accepted the idea that our child's life would be documented completely with cell phone cameras!

Once the initial shock wore off I looked at all the dials, knobs, and menus and became very intimidated. I have been reading up ever since, and even though I still feel completely unworthy of such a piece of machinery, this has been so much fun! Christmas morning I started snapping away at different objects in the house testing out the settings. Thus the hap hazards above.

We can't wait for next Christmas. I'm going to get that baby trained young to properly obsess over what is indisputably the most wonderful time of the yeeeeaaaarrrr!!!

Baby Advice

This one takes it all, probably because it was given to me while I was fasting, working on about two hours of sleep, had been in the lab doing blood work for hours, and I was waiting for this person to stop talking and draw the third of five vials of blood from my collapsing veins:

"With my first baby, I didn't eat Almond M&Ms, and my baby didn't have eczema. With my second baby, I didn't eat Almond M&Ms, and that baby didn't have eczema. With my third baby, I went crazy for the Almond M&Ms, and my third baby has eczema! He plays volleyball now and he scratches on the court and I think, 'Oh, almond M&Ms are bad for baby.'"

Thank you so much. I'll take that into consideration.

Everyone's doing it!

This doesn't happen often, but I'd say at least every other day (lately), someone will mention how awesome one of these two things is:

1. Trader Joe's Chocolate Covered Peppermint Jo Jo's

2. Jillian Michaels' 30 Day Shred

People are talking about these 2 so much I must first eat the Jo Jos and when the baby comes, burn off the Jo Jos and more with the Shred DVD. They go hand in hand. Synergy.

P.S. I've said it before, Jillian Michaels drives me crazy (who the heck does she think she is, and where did she learn the "spiritual voice" whisper???), but I figure I only need to listen once and then mute everafter. Mint + Cookies + Christmas has never driven me crazy. Just driven me to swoon.

Minus Before and After

I really need to remember to take "Before" pictures.

Picture a scraggly, cruel looking bush that runs on a flower bed separating our house from our neighbors, that is dying in the parts and has 3 random palms growing in strange places, for some reason no one can tell. That is what we used to have. It looks like it was our neighbors' property but a couple of months after moving in we were informed that it is OUR flower bed. Maybe it's true, or maybe he just didn't want to get rid of it himself, we may never know (although I'm sure we could know if we wanted to find out badly enough).

We ripped out that thing a couple of weeks ago. Many scratches, and Jeff gets the credit for the lion's share of the work. We transplanted the random palms into huge pots in the back yard. 1 of them is not doing so well, 1 is thriving, 1 was a lost cause before we could get it to the back yard. Then we were busy and had a dirt mound for a couple of weeks. No one sent us any hate mail so I'm going to assume the neighbors still are cool with us.

The dirt here in Ladera Land is more like clay. Maybe instead of flowers we could invest in a kiln and a potter's wheel and display our urns and paper clip holders (all I learned to make in 9th grade ceramics class) about our front yard, instead of buying flowers and watching them die in the crap dirt. To save ourselves the anguish of more failed flowers we bought:

nice dirt

and

manure.

Manure costs 99 cents per bag, in case you are in the market.

We also brought home gardenia bushes (I've decided these are an unexpected favorite!), geraniums, and english daisies for this flower bed.

If they fail, I will throw my hands up in the air and declare myself a gardening drop out. I will also get our money back from Home Depot, because they wrote their return policy, not me. But since we put manure in the dirt, I'm betting they'll grow. What more did they want? And I keep thinking me working with manure is a once in a blue moon type of thing, and then I remember I'm about to be in charge of diapers.

It needs to fill in, but here is the after shot:

Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it!

Merry Christmas, to our street!

Love,

The Hayes Family

It's time for your favorite thing: a pregnancy update.

- For the next 5 days I'll be stationed on Planet 30 Weeks. That means Baby could come in 7 weeks. And I would give to him an early welcome!

- I don't think I'll be posting a belly shot from here on out. Maybe if I'm feeling very daring, it could happen. Just picture my head on a body with a large watermelon protruding from my mid-section, and there you have it. One thing is for sure, I can't remember how I was ever this size -- and I'm even eating a bazillion calorie cupcake! Seeing cute babies gets me to quit fretting about it.

- Have you passed "nesting" and moved on to "psycho" if you vacuum your garage floor with a shop vac? No? Ok, good.

- He kicks like he's getting paid for it. If I have an open book or my purse resting on my belly, he can make the item jump off me. It startled my friend sitting next to me in Sunday School yesterday.

- Comical acts: putting on tights, getting up, sitting down, cooking at the stove (I stand slightly sideways so I don't crisp my tummy), changing sleeping positions.

- Watching anything on tv involving a woman in labor makes me extremely uncomfortable. When they showed Claire in labor (twice!) on LOST I felt half manipulated and half freaked out. My mom has always told us it's a big crock and there's nowhere near that much screaming, if any at all, so I'll just cling to that. I am willing, however, to make a fuss if it means getting me an epidural when I want one from a weird "holding out on me" nurse.

We're so curious and excited to meet him. A Hayes baby for us!

Feliz Navidad.

Saturday, my lover and I ventured out for the 3rd annual Jeffedith Christmas Shopping Trip. The weird thing: we needed nothing at South Coast Plaza, so we didn't go. I have, all my life, Christmas shopped at this particular mall, and one of our major family traditions was birthed and played out there, so the mecca of materialism found at 3333 Bristol in Costa Mesa just will have to remain one of the season ringer-inners, and I'll find a reason to go there another day.

As it was, we were such strategic planners and some things were more cost-effectively bought on the world wide web, so we just needed to drop in at the Spectrum. Done and done. And still, by the end, with Jeff in his recovery-mode from sick state, and me in my there's-a-baby-in-my-tummy-absorbing-all-my-energy state, we were pooped and bee-lined home to crash on the couch.

Christmas shopping, home decorating, and present wrapping under our belts, we have only to finish our debate over whether or not we're doing a Christmas card this year (only time will tell!), I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong with the candy I'm attempting without losing my patience and confidence as a Woman of the Kitchen (I've won the Fudge battle but there's something funky going on with my English Toffee and Vanilla Nut Fudge), and we need to know when we're going to be able to escape up to the Highlands of Utah for my first white Christmas.

As the Beatles sang, Christmas time is here again (repeat 20 times).

Hmmm

Does anyone have a recipe for something tasty that involves about 20 lemons?




Our tree decided to ripen it's fruits this week. More in the back.


-- Post From My iPhone