Shae Turns 11 and Other Stuff...

Shae's 11th birthday fell in the middle of a giant blizzard. But despite the storm, all 7 of the friends she invited turned up for a party at our house.
This is the "purse" cake Shae requested, along with some rather droopy divinity for her friend with celiac disease.


I can't believe how grown up she is getting. She's becoming a very mature young girl who is responsible and friendly. She cracks me up with her funny mannerisms and jokes and she's starting to develop strong interests in art and drama. She is busy rehearsing for her school Christmas play in which she has a lead role and that's been a lot of fun for her. She gets to play a Martha Stewart type character, I think it'll be pretty funny.


Shae has also decided she LOVES sock monkeys so for her birthday, I got her a sock monkey kit and I also knit her this hat:


Aside from celebrating Shae's birthday, we've also been busy around here with general Christmas busy-ness.

Here's Shae helping with the gingerbread cookies:


And the kids playing with their Grandpa on one of his work visits (Connor is on there too, behind Hudson!):

Hudson has started walking now and he's getting into all sorts of mischief/learning experiences. He loves to pull out the pot drawer, toss all the pots out onto the floor and then climb in himself. It's even funnier for me because Maira used to do the exact same thing at that age.

I've been busy over the past month or two with all kinds of sewing projects. Here are a few of the things I have made:

A pencil roll - I made one for Maira and one for my niece, Lilia.


I specifically chose the matrushka fabric for the roll because Lilia's dad, my brother, served his mission in Russia.

And this is a quilt kit I put together for my Mom (don't look Mom!) Not that she'll be surprised since she bought the kit a few years ago at the quilt store in Canmore (Sugar Pine Company), but hadn't got around to making it so she asked me if I would make it for her for a Christmas present:

Here's a hat I knit (I love cables!):And here are some pajamas I made for the kids:

This first pair is from a Michael Miller fabric called Bot Camp - it's such fun fabric because it's full of all kind of scenes of robots going camping, I love it.


And here is the first of 4 pairs of jammies I made for the kids to wear on Christmas Eve:
(Of course, the boys will be in blue, not pink!)

And speaking of jammies, Connor has decided lately that he wants to be a train robber when he goes to bed so this is the outfit he has decided he needs to wear to bed each night (the pajama bottoms even have trains on them):


And finally, a typical day with Hudson around:
Sadly, when I first found him here, he was actually inside the cupboard happily dumping cereal all over the place but when I laughed and ran for the camera, he crawled out. He gets into one mess after another - my time is spent leaving him be so I can get things done and then going to see what mischief he's been up to and cleaning up after it. And then repeat the process again. And again....

My Other Little Monkeys

We just got back from our annual trip to Banff. The hotel we stayed at was attached to a rec centre with a climbing wall and Shae was excited to go climbing there like she does every year. She has a real knack for climbing. She went climbing for the first time when she was 8 and loved it. Once again, the staff member who was belaying her commented on how fearless and agile and strong she is. It's just too bad there isn't a climbing gym closer to our house because she sure loves being up there.
























And this was the first year Connor was old enough to do more than a bit of bouldering around the bottom. He got to go in a harness for the first time and he was clambering to the top of the wall in no time. Completely fearless. He loved it too so now I've got another little monkey in the family!



































And of course Maira will be scaling those walls in no time but for now, she had to content herself with holding the rope while Connor got lowered down after a climb.
























And here we are at the top of Sulphur Mountain after riding up on the Gondola (Hudson stayed back at the hotel with Grammy and Jess was at his conference).

Halloween

This was the first year Shae decided to be something creepy instead of something pretty for her costume. And looking at these pictures, I think she ended up looking really creepy, like maybe too creepy...














































Shae's wearing my actual wedding veil, along with an old negligee of my mother's, and a bouquet of dried roses and black thorns.

Maira opted for the pretty type of costume and dressed up as a fairy:































































I got the idea for her tutu from a tutorial on Grosgrain

And Connor wavered between being a bank robber or a knight - Jess and I persuaded him to be a good guy instead of a bad guy. As long as he got to carry a weapon, he was good with that.














































I had fun playing with my new set of craft glitter to paint the dragon on the back of his cape:















The kids had fun trick-or-treating (of course) although Maira decided she was done after about half an hour because she didn't want to wait another minute to sit down and start eating all her candy. So she came home early and her bag is a lot lighter than Shae and Connor's.














Here's a picture of our neighbour's front yard without the snow and with all the decorations in place.














A couple weeks ago, their yard was vandalized and someone stole all their tombstones. Although they were upset, I love that they decided to make new even funnier tombstones. Here's Connor having a sword fight with the dad/zombie who lives in there...























And finally, here's the black light alley that one neighbour created in their front walkway with some appliance boxes, and a bunch of glow in the dark paint:

My Little Monkey

So, Maira really likes to look at books. And for the past few months, whenever I go into her room in the morning or after she was supposed to be taking a nap, I usually find her sitting in her bed, surrounded by books. So many books that it must have taken her numerous trips from her bed to her bookshelf and back. Often I can tell she didn't sleep at all because she was too busy hauling books into her bed and then sitting there looking at them. She often tells me that she's playing school with her books when I ask her about it.
This is what her bed usually looks like in the morning: she was sitting on her pillow, surrounded by books.

Well, I'm really happy she loves her books but I'm not happy with her lack of sleep. I do read her several bedtime stories, it's not like she's book deprived. I keep telling her, please go to sleep, don't look at books. And she agrees and then proceeds to climb out of bed as soon as I leave. Well, the other day, I went into her room and found the entire contents of her lowest shelf spread all over her floor, you literally couldn't see her floor. And that was the last straw. I pulled all of the books from her lowest three shelves out of her room, figuring that she couldn't reach the top two shelves. Then I took the stool and the laundry basket that I've seen her turn upside and use as a stool, out of her room so she wouldn't be able to reach those upper two shelves. Thinking I had outsmarted her.

Well, I went into her room the next morning and here is what I saw:


Those are the books from her 2nd highest shelf, the one I didn't think she could reach, in a pile on the floor, with a yellow bag of doll clothes added to the pile, in an effort to make a tower high enough that she could reach the very highest shelf on her bookshelf! I was mystified - how did she reach those books to build the tower in the first place?? A few hours later, I heard her crying from her room because she was stuck in her doll crib: The doll crib that is right beside her bookshelf:

So, I moved the doll crib and a few minutes later, I heard a crash from her room: She had taken her flimsy plastic Barbie airplane and placed it on top of her little book tower and tried climbing her tower. Of course, the whole tower had come tumbling down. So, the airplane is gone too and I think maybe, just maybe, she'll stay in bed tonight.

Snowy Halloween?

Our neighboorhood has a few houses that go all out when it's time to decorate for Halloween. Here are a couple of my favourites that are on the same street as us:



Unfortunately, the snow kind of takes away from the Halloween effect! But the weather forecast is for the snow to melt by tomorrow and be fairly warm in the afternoon so it sounds like it will be nice trick-or-treating weather after all.

But, in the attitude of making lemonade when life throws you lemons, I took Maira outside this morning and we decided to make a snowman/snowghost to add to our own Halloween decorations. I told Maira to pretend she was scared of the snowghost when I took this picture but she thought I was crazy.

"School" Pictures

So, every year, I send Shae off to school dressed her best for school picture day, and every time, she brings home the proof of the shot they got and I wonder why the photographer took a picture of her half-smiling or with a bunch of hair out of place, etc.

So, I decided this year that instead of ordering school pictures for Shae and Connor, I would take all 4 kids to WalMart and get matching portraits of each of them while I'm there to make sure I get the shot I want (OK, so I have control issues...). Turns out that even though it's $10 for 50+ pictures of the first kid, getting portraits of the other kids at the same time brings the total cost closer to $80. I thought that with all of Jess' fancy lighting and photography equipment, we should try doing our own pictures at home. That way, besides saving money, I could photoshop the pictures to my heart's content, which I enjoy doing. I had a hard time narrowing down all of Jess's pictures down to just one of each kid so here's what I ended up doing:


...and wouldn't you know it, this is the one year that Shae's school pictures turned out really cute and I didn't order any! Oh, well.

Soggy Ghosts

So, I saw the idea to use cheesecloth soaked in watered down glue and then draped over a mold to make really cool ghosts on the Martha Stewart website. And I made them and they looked great:And then I never got around to moving them further under the roof overhang to protect them from the rain...and then it rained:
My poor soggy ghosts...