Happy 2010!

Countdown to Noon at the Indianapolis Children's Museum, three hours at Gameworks (who knew that two little girls who adore dinosaurs more than anything else in this world would also adore so much a game entitled Primeval Hunt, the goal of which is to realistically kill realistic dinosaurs using a real orange plastic shotgun?), swimming, pizza, champagne, hotel breakfast, and the prospect of more swimming in a few moments, followed by late check-out and the Goodwill Outlet Store:

An auspicious beginning to the new decade, don't you think?

Dressing in Pink

Christmas dinner did not exactly go off without a hitch this year.

Papa always makes cornbread dressing. It is always delicious. It is also, apparently, always dyed with food coloring. Cornbread is already yellow, of course, but there are other ingredients, and I guess Papa likes the end product to remain as yellow as fresh-from-the-oven cornbread?

However, for whatever reason this year--it was busy, and it was hectic, and there were two little girls screeching around underfoot in a house that's normally only peopled by the voices of Fox News--Papa reached for the little bottle of yellow food coloring and picked up the red instead.

And so the dressing was pink this year:
Now, by the time the rest of our family arrived for Christmas dinner, Papa had put a spin on the story so that now it read that he decided to dye the dressing red this year, in order to be "Christmas-y." And it certainly didn't hurt the taste any, and it did look rather festive on the plate:

However, I was there, and I know the real story. And now, so do you.

Tiny Little Cricut Cut-outs

Can you guess what project I need these teeny-tiny little Cricut cut-outs for?
Hint #1: They're all from the Paper Doll Dress-Up cartridge, and they're all cut at 3/4".

Hint #2: Here's what they look like using selective focus:

Hint #3: If you know me on Facebook, you might have seen me update about a corollary to this project today.

Hint #4: They're for my five friends.

If you're the first one to guess it, I'll give you one, too!

A Wreath for Every Soldier

I have the feeling that I am capable of becoming VERY tiresome on the subject of my new selective focus lens, but what can I say? I love my Lensbaby.

Today's series of photos was taken at the Fort Smith National Cemetery--yep, we have an awesome old fort, a gallows where a noose is hung on the anniversary of its executions (yes, seriously--ask me sometime and I'll tell you a really funny story about that), and a gorgeous national cemetery that holds not only the judge who ordered all those hangings, but also an uncle or two.

Yes, the military does indeed love itself some uniformity, but I think it's also a beautiful illustration of the way in which a generous repetition of one simple element can add meaning and impact to a scene.

Cookies for Santa

A sweet cousin gave the girls some cookie baking kits for an early Christmas present--perfect for the obligatory, last-minute, "Crap, I've got to help the girls bake cookies for Santa" Christmas Eve revelation:

This is the second cookie kit we've used in recent memory that has come with paints made from food coloring. There's never enough paint in the kit, and the brushes are all really small and cheap, but the paint itself does work quite well: Of course this means that I've added food coloring paint to my list of projects to figure out. If it's just food coloring and some sort of applicator, that seems a bit pricey for the kinds of large-scale artworks that we usually do. Must look into bulk pricing for food coloring?

Anyway, I'll stop cutting through the non-craft for a moment--Santa's cookies are thusly left out for Santa (with a carrot for the reindeer, of course):The added sugar and fiber sitting conveniently on a low table nearby are extremely important, because while Matt stays up half the night doing this--

--and this--

SOMEBODY has to stay awake with him to drink beer and eat cookies and watch Get Smart on Netflix:

It's hard work being a parent, let me tell you.

The Best Christmas Present Ever

The girls favorite Christmas present, made all the more special because we're celebrating not at home up north, but waaaay down south in Arkansas:
Trickier question--can you guess my favorite Christmas present, the brain child of my most-awesome Matt?

Selective focus, baby!

Season's Greetings

Each little place has its own beautiful holiday traditions. Traveling halfway across the country (top to bottom, at least, not right to left!) is a taxing way to spend Christmas for a vast myriad of reasons, but one of the happiest things about it is that we get to fit ourselves into the festivities of both our own hometown and that of my parents.

For Bloomington, of course, there was the lighting ceremony on the courthouse square the day after Thanksgiving, and this year we'll be back in time for the big New Year's Eve countdown to noon at the Children's Museum. Holiday Trainland at the zoo was inexplicably absent this year, which is a big boo, since it was my favorite thing to do, hands down.

Ft. Smith, Arkansas, on the other hand, with half its residents NOT composed of university students, has WAY more and more elaborate Christmas lights, with the snowflakes down Garrison being especially nice, and it has the huge light display and Christmas train at Creekmore park.

Yep, an honest-to-god train!

Creekmore Park has one of those old-school ride-on trains, complete with conducter and bridges and lights and whistle, that runs around a large section of the park. For Christmas, this section of the park is also decorated to high heaven with various scenes chock-full of twinkle lights, The Twelve Days of Christmas and Santa on an Airplane and Dinosaurs in Santa Hats, etc. Every night in the lead-up to Christmas you can stand in a really long line in the dark and then ride the train and enjoy the lights:

Unfortunately, the night was too dark and the train moving too fast for any of my photos to come out well. But even though this one is blurry, I still think you get the idea:Of course, today is Christmas Eve. But don't worry--it's 11:00 am local time, and we've already been to Wal-mart (it's an unwritten rule that when you live in Arkansas, you pretty much end up going to Wal-mart every single day), where I bought a small set of acrylic paints to use with a kit the girls received for Christmas last night (yes, I upgraded the art supplies that came with the kit--those paints were already half-dried out!), and my mother bought a Playstation 3 for Matt and a bunch of crap for the girls; and Harp's, where Matt bought an orange for each of the girl's stockings and my mother bought three dozen rolls for Christmas dinner.

Future plans for the day include: vacuuming; sneaking out to watch Avatar without the little lichens; painting the craft kit; baking cookies for Santa (who wants gingerbread, and also sugar cookies with crushed Butterfingers); re-reading 'Twas the Night Before Christmas for the billionth time this month, but with extra emphasis; putting the girls to bed with a chapter from some interminably long Magic Schoolbus dinosaur chapter book; and then watching Get Smart from Netflix while Matt assembles the two bicycles that my mother bought for the girls.

And also he'll probably swear a lot.

P.S. It turns out that Papa has been secretly dyeing his dressing yellow with food coloring each year. We only know this because Papa just finished mixing up said dressing, and he's very upset because it seems that he accidentally chose the wrong color from the box this year--pink.