Christmas with the Healds

Between Christmas plays, parties and get togethers I have lots of pictures to get on the blog. The weekend before Christmas we got together with Jared’s side of the family at his parent's house.

Jared and his sister sat on these rugs to open gifts when they were little. I think seeing the girls on them is a fun tradition for Jared.


There was a time this year after J’s dad had a heart attack that we didn’t know if he’d be here for Christmas. As the year ends we have found ourselves at several unexpected funerals and have seen lots of loss among our friends. We are thankful for another year together for our family.

This is what happens when the girls have their picture taken. HK does some crazy face and Matney hides or eats her hair.

These are some pictures I snapped from my pregnant girl recline on the couch! Jared was in charge of all floor activities this year!


Christmas is more fun when you spread it out over lots of days! We had a time with Jared's family!

BOYS!!!

The girls have been very into playing weddings/family role play recently. Matney is always the girl and HK is always in charge of the boy getting married. This means that M always has a princess in her hands. That poor princess is normally marrying pizza guy, a robot or a boy stuffed animal because we don’t have any other boy choices. When we were waiting to see Santa we went into the Disney store and HK was beside herself when she saw a “support characters” display WITH ALL THE BOY DOLLS. Normally the Disney store is all princesses and glitter. Before we were even paying attention she’d grabbed several of the princes and was on the ground all excited. So funny! I have a feeling that on Christmas day there will be some human male toys getting married in this house!

Christmas tree

Getting a tree and decorating this year was very low key. Between getting the built-ins done so that we could rearrange furniture for the tree, Christmas activities, being pregnant, everyone in the house getting sick, a weekend of rain and knowing there is a baby coming soon that we have to finish getting ready for we didn’t buy a tree until about 10 days before Christmas. In fact, the first place we went only had 2 very sad brown trees left and we worried we’d be decorating a Christmas Ficus before it was over! Luckily we found a (dead but green) and got it up. The girls had a great time going through all their old ornaments.

And see above the fireplace? The girls and I tied red and green tulle on a strand of white lights. It was a GIANT pain but cute and something different this year.




Each year the girls get to pick one ornament. I forgot to take a picture but Matney picked a Merida princess ball and HK got Jake from the Neverland Pirates show. Great choices since we went to Disney this year!

Christmas program

The preschool normally doesn’t do a Christmas program or does one during the day but they changed it this year and made it bigger. The 4 and 5 year old classes sang a few songs and they had a Santa, train ride and cookies….and they charged each family $10 to come. Totally smarter for them than something free during the day. ha!
Sometime after I snapped these first few pictures a setting on the camera got changed and every other picture is blurry mess. Sad.

Matney was shy but excited. After her lack of participation in the Thanksgiving program we talked for the last month about being brave and doing your best….and this time Matney sang every word and was AWESOME!!!

HK clearly donned her best Christmas attire. That was my Mickey Mouse shirt 30+ years ago and HK loves to wear it.

Matney and Daddy on the train ride in the parking lot.

Jared met us at the school after work because I had to leave from the school and go to a funeral home to see friends of ours who had just lost their 11 year old daughter/niece after a 3 year cancer fight. I admit that I had a moment of panic and almost couldn't catch my breath before the Christmas program started. Seeing Matney on the stage, looking at her name printed in the program I had to really talk myself out of flipping out (which would have looked very strange in that gym full of parents!). It is so easy to take our health for granted but it would also be so very easy to live life in fear that something will happen to one of my girls or Jared/myself.
2013 is going to be a wild year adding another girl to the house but I pray that I will be better at finding balance between enjoying the moment and living in fear of what I can't control/don't know.

Ellie

Ellie the Elf has been back at the house every morning and we have all enjoyed seeing what she is up to. Some of our favorite things have been roasting marshmallows on Mommy’s candle, writing messages encouraging them to clean up and playing in our sprinkles. Sometimes Ellie makes a big mess at night and sometimes we find her just hanging out waiting for us to wake up. Matney wakes up and races downstairs to find Ellie.  HK doesn’t really care about finding the elf probably because she doesn’t want to be reminded that she is supposed to be nice!






This last picture makes me laugh. See that baby head down at the bottom? Halle Kate wouldn’t sit down until Baby Funch (again, we have no idea where she comes up with these names!) was at the table too. Get ready, Evelyn! These girls are ready for a little sister!

And thanks to Ellie all our Christmas gifts were wrapped this year. So glad she was in charge of this task because I did not want to stay up really late doing them!

Christmas starts early

Darla and Terry came up and surprised the girls with fun Christmas gifts. They had a bed made for Matney that is the perfect size for her princess/American Girl dolls (assuming Santa brings the knock off McKenna doll). I haven’t posted the pictures from the girls’ room but they had the princess bed and bedding made to match their room.

Halle Kate got the loudest coolest walking, talking robot. HK and Jared were very excited to open the box. Later in the day I might have told HK that the robot fell and hit is head and needed a “robot bandaid”, ie – a giant piece of electrical tape right over the speaker that significantly reduces his volume!

The girls settled down and played well for a while but once HK tried to put the robot in the princess bed we had some serious issues!

Thank you Dar-dar and Mr. Terry for loving on our girls and for the perfect gifts.

Seat belts!

The girls were playing last week and came to find me because they needed a seat belt. They were satisfied with a pool noodle. At least I know they are listening and know the safety rules in the car.

Before I forget

I am trying to post from my new phone so we'll see how it goes. Wanted to write this down before I forget because it was so funny. The girls were playing and I heard matney get upset. Then I listened to HK...she was telling matney that Santa couldn't come this year because he died. Matney asked why and HK said that the "bad guys" got him. Matney then asked who the bad guys are and HK quickly responded "Mary and Joseph". Ha! This same conversation repeated itself many more times during the afternoon. Kids are so darn funny!

Printing the Blog

I have had lots of people ask me about this recently and promised to post the info. See those 4 folders on shelf? I finally got the blog printed! There are several online sites that will print and bind your blog into a book but I never found one I liked due to formatting issues (and cost!). We started blogging at the end of 2007 so there was a lot of blog to print!
After looking at all the options I ended up using blog2print. Uploading your blog will take just a few minutes and then you’ll see several printing options. I chose to pay $7.95 per year and have the blog emailed to me as a PDF file instead of having it printed by their company. Again, personal preference but if they print it, and your blog is like ours with specific text under specific pictures, the formatting changes so your pictures don’t line up with your text (ie – all the photos upload in one column and the text is in another column. If you had more pictures or text than the other then the longer portion continues on to the next page. Does that make sense?) I didn’t want to go back and delete/rearrange 4+ years of blog so I chose the PDF and the emailed file looks exactly like the blog does online.
We researched printing options and a friend was able to print at her office and we just paid her per page. Talk about a good friend! I selected and shipped her paper (this one is a thicker and better for photos than regular paper), then gave her a flash drive with the files. She printed everything and I handed her a check. So easy (well, maybe not for her! Thanks again a TON, Erin!)
Total cost, based on how many books/pages we needed (4 books, approx. 1200 pages), was over $800 on the cheapest blog printing website I found. Ouch! If you printed each year it wouldn’t be as painful as doing 4 years at a time. However, if $200+ per year still didn’t get you what you wanted then that seems like a REALLY REALLY expensive option. I ordered enough paper to print this year’s blog too. So, when it is all said and done we will have spent $215 to order PDFs and paper, printed and purchased binders for 5+ years of blog books….compared to the $1000+ it would have been to have an online company print and bind the same thing.
What else? I took all the pages to Office Depot and punched holes for free and am making my own cover for the front of each binder. You could print the pages yourself and then have an office supply store bind them into a book for you if you don’t like the binder idea.  I ended up thinking that if they were in a binder and the girls ever grow up and want their own copy then I can just run it through a copier as many times as I need (of course, who knows if copiers and paper will exist in 20 years?!?!?).
Obviously it took years to get this done, partly because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to do it. It was expensive and what happens when there is 1 printed book and 3 kids? And, let’s be honest, I type these entries at night – I started this post at 4:30am – there are lots of grammar/spelling issues that spell check doesn’t catch and I don’t have time to go back and proof every entry (don’t we think Jared should do that?!?!). If there were more hours in the day I’d ideally write a post, save it and edit it later…but we way too quickly run out of hours around here!
Lots of times I beat myself up because (before I was a parent) I just knew my kids would have awesome scrapbooks every year and fabulous photo albums to document their lives. After being a mom for about 2 months I decided that if we all survived to adulthood/old age without starving or being overcome by dust in the house then life was going to be great! Just kidding…sort of! Now, as I put the printed blog into binders and looked at them all together I ended up giving myself a pat on the back. Sure, there are misspelled words, grammar mistakes and events left out, there are unflattering pictures of all of us and sometimes too much unnecessary information. However, blogging is a lot of work and those 1200 pages represent a LOT of missed sleep while documenting our lives. We may not have perfect baby scrapbooks, and maybe the girls won’t ever care to look back through these posts again. However, I can close my eyes and imagine that, if nothing else, Jared and I will sit 30 years from now flipping through the pages, laughing and crying looking back through these years. So, here’s to more years of blogging - spelling mistakes, ugly pictures and all! Now go get yours printed, if you wait until it is perfect you’ll never get it done!

Built-ins Update

What a difference 2 weeks can make….of course, that is two weeks with lots of super late nights spend nailing, sanding and painting. The built-ins are installed and almost finished. Whoo hoo! Aren’t you so very impressed? Jared built the entire thing in 2 weeks, while working his usual bazillion hours…you’re jealous aren’t you girls?!?!?! Once he finished installing I painted. Here are some pictures from the past 2 weeks.


Whooo hooo! Aren't they awesome? And don't even think about trying to steal the man on the ladder. He's mine! Although, after all this he probably would like someone to come take him away and let him rest for a while. Sassy, I should probably send him to you. Some good TX food and being a "punkin" for a week would probably do him good!

The doors still have to go on the bottom and we’ll move the TV this weekend but I started putting stuff on the upper bookcase shelves playing around yesterday. That is a LOT of space. I stole things from all over the house (with the help of a few cans of spray paint)  and, thanks to some birthday Target giftcards, will be on the hunt to fill the rest of the space today. I am not a knick knack person and want it to look full but not cluttered.

Most of the above pictures were taken at night when the girls were in bed. What it really looks like during the day is the picture below. Each girl has claimed a cubby as a bed and the spaces with shelves are “bunk beds” for their dolls. As I blog there is a Tiger cuddling with a toy car currently bunking on the bottom and a fairy Barbie on the top. It will be a sad day when the doors go on!

Now that most of the construction is over and the tools are out of the house it is time to put this place back together! Between moving everything upstairs, which reminds me that I need to do a post on the girls sharing a room, and the downstairs being a construction zone this place has been a mess! There is a THICK layer of dust on every surface of this house. Sanding inside is necessary but messy! Time to get things cleaned up so we can settle in and wait for Evelyn to arrive!