A Long Overdue Update

So it's been awhile since I've made a blog post. Our life has been a bit hectic, having moved twice in 3 months time. It was not fun. I think most everyone who reads this blog knows already that after 4 weeks of working at his new job, Gary got fired without any warning, or in our minds, reason. It was sad, and dumb, and really heartbreaking for our family. So after only three months living in a place we were beginning to love, we had to move back in with our family. Which is especially disheartening to a family who have been out on their own more or less.

However we refuse to be too discouraged, as this change has been a blessing too. It has pushed Gary to really pursue one of the other courses of action we were considering: going back to school. At first (before he got a job) Gary was just going to get a masters in mechanical engineering, or perhaps slide on over to civil engineering, but after thinking about it for a while, we decided that if he were going to go back to school, he was going to go back for something that he could truly love, and that, he decided, was furniture design.

This is going to be a bit of a switch, since Gary has never had any art classes (why don't they make engineers take art classes? It would only make sense if they want engineers to be able to think creatively), so he'll have a lot of first and second year classes to complete. But he'll get to skip all those lame history and literature and feelings classes that they make you take at university. I get the desire for a well-rounded education, but we go to college to specialize, so why do they waste so much time making us take classes that we don't need for our specializations and end up forgetting all about anyway. The whole thing is silly and makes higher education much more expensive than it needs to be. Okay end rant.

Back to Gary. Gary is going to apply to school for furniture design, and he's been working very hard making some art to submit with his application. I've been helping him a bit by giving him art exercises to do to get the creative juices flowing. So far he's doing pretty good. Peri and I are both very proud of him.

Meanwhile, he's also working on doing a bit of renovation to our family basement. It's really beginning to take shape and one room is very close to being done! Just a few more steps to go and then we have a nice updated room to sleep in! yay! Doing the second room is going to be very complicated though, but hopefully it can be done very quickly so we can have two rooms to sleep in instead of one! It is very cramped with all three of us in one room.

Otherwise it's been great being with family. Peri adores her cousins and is so happy to get to play with them. I think that will be another post though, as this one is pretty long all ready.

Going Through a Cache of Photos

I found the camera's SD card and there is a big backlog of photos and events to talk about. We went over Christmas pretty well a few weeks ago, but there are some other things to talk about. Naomi had a birthday close to Christmas, and decided to make a mustache cake.

It's probably the best scratch-made cake we've ever made. The cake was German Chocolate, with store-bought coconut pecan frosting as filling, then a chocolate butter-cream frosting layer. Naomi and her sister Katrina had a great time with it. Katrina has a birthday on 24 December, so I can just imagine how short the short end of the stick was growing up. I think a mustache cake is the very least we could do.

We also pieced together a great snowsuit for Peri for sledding with us. The resulting view is one of the most adorable I've ever seen.

She is wearing just her tenni-runners here, but she also has a great pair of boots that go with and really complete the ensemble.

She's also learning maybe four new words or phrases every day. She usually wakes up before us, and comes to cuddle with us in the mornings. This will lead to playing peek-a-boo with us, only we say "there she is!" Peri now beats us to it. She'll pop out from under the blankets and shout "the-sh-iss", and it's getting better all the time. She learned both "cat" and "meow" yesterday, and figured out that a cat says "meow," which is pretty cool.

We went to visit my mom last week, which worked out to be pretty fun. We took the ferry to Anderson Island, which I haven't done in 23 years, and ended up hiking a couple of miles with a regional walking club. Peri was kind of bored in her stroller, and it did get pretty cold, so we didn't do the entire planned hike and turned back to the ferry dock.

Something that made me really happy, was how Peri fell in love with Grandma's piano. She was really calm and gentle about it, and didn't just pound the keys like we thought she would. I'm really very proud of her and found that we had to tear her away from it.

Christmas and After

Well, it's been a very busy couple weeks. We were fortunate enough to have my family come visit us in Yakima for Christmas. We had a lot fun baking, cooking, playing games, and just playing around. Peri got to play with her cousins, whom she adores. She followed them around and was generally a pest, wanting to do everything they did. Deep down I think the cousins actually loved the attention. Peri gave Jeilyn an extra long hug when she left; it was so cute.

We made a ton of food for dinner, which everyone enjoyed to the fullest. My brother said it was the fanciest holiday dinner he ever had. So there's something. We got out the apple plates that both of Gary's grandmothers collected, as they are especially suited for Christmas meals. We actually used the bronzeware we inherited from Gary's grandma as well. It was a lot of fun! Though not so much when it came time to clean up. But you do what you gotta do I guess.

Peri got a lot of cool gifts for Christmas, and she loves every single one of them. We totally forgot to take any sort of pictures during the family's visit, but we did get a few videos of Peri playing with a couple of her toys today.

Grandpa Jackson gave her and her other cousins a rocking horse for Christmas, and she just loves it. She likes that when the tail moves it tickles her feet, and that she can put her fingers in the pony's mouth when it moves too. She also does some trick riding on it, though I didn't quite get a video of her doing it this time. She half-stands on the saddle and rocks for a bit, until her feet slide off. She's listening to My Little Pony Songs in the background, in case anyone is curious.

Gary also made sleds for all the children this year too. We took Peri's sled out today, and she loved it!

The only other video we caught of my family's visit is one where my sister Katrina and brother Benjamin are playing fruit ninja together. Katrina is so cute because she plays like a little kitty cat. It's so funny!

So we're all enjoying all of our gifts, and we're very happy to have had everyone over for Christmas! For New Year's we don't have much going on, and I don't think we really want to after all the Christmas chaos.We bought some sparkling grape juice which we will drink at midnight tomorrow. Sounds like a fun evening doesn't it? 

Happy New Year everyone!

I like Papercraft.

I finished my first picture frame that isn't a sonogram today. I think it's cute.

 

Gary says he'd buy it.

I wanted to put some snowflakes in there, but I don't have a punch or any snowflake embellishments, and there's no way I could cut out something that small and intricate. A giant intricate snowflake, that's no problem, but I don't think it would fit. I think my favorite part of this picture are the poofballs on her boots. It is in my etsy shop!

I'm also working on another silhouette project, and it's a big one. It's just for me, not to sell, but it's still pretty awesome. I'm working on a nativity. Each element of the nativity gets it's own frame, so it takes up a nice portion of my wall. So far I have the star, two angels and the three wise men with a camel. I'm going to do the shepherds next, then the animals, and then Mary, Joseph and the Baby Jesus in the stable. I can't wait until it is finished! Gary is very excited for it too.

In other news, Peri just heaved her guts all up all over Gary and I at dinner today. I didn't know she could have that much food in her stomach. Good times.