Wow

Let's start this week by a look at my teenage daughter :) She's so adorable since she found her pockets. This is an unposed picture. She does it all the time with these particular pants.

Next we'll move to the reason for this week's title:


Jason threw me a "surprise" graduation party from my mom. The cake was from them and the girl posing next to me in the second picture did my hair. I thought it was quite cute :)
That was last week sometime. Today we just got home from the actual Business College graduation Convocation. It was very cool.

The lady was letting us go a little to fast so she made my row wait for about 5 minutes before we could get up and join the line. Once I got up there it was very cool. My name was announced and I shook the hands of people I've never met before and then the head of my department was there and all of my professors were there and then I felt like it was real. They called me by name, shook my hand and gave me warm and real congratulations before I stepped down. Jason broke the rules and was standing by the piano to get the picture of me with my diploma. I posed all pretty like and only realized afterward that I was holding the darn thing upside-down. Luckily he got another shot later and I corrected my error :)

The look on my face in the first picture is because I just took off my cap and my hair was so static-y I didn't know what to do. I spit on my hand and tried to get it back down. . . gotta love spit.

This was a great experience. The speakers talked about our role as we move forward. The need for us to remember that God helped us through and to use what we have learned to help Him in His work. They also reminded us to be humble. The whole thing was fairly quick, but it was long enough to help it sink in. I have actually graduated. I made it! I feel awed and grateful to so many people for this moment. I have had so much support from family and friends. I just wanted to thank you all. Everyone who would be reading this has contributed to my ability to succeed here. So thanks.
School, especially this school, has been an amazing experience. I am changed. I am thrilled and happy, but mostly I am humbled and grateful. Once again, thank you all for helping me.

Graduation Choir

This is what we look like . . .






Okay, maybe not, but we are singing this song, so it fit. :)

Approaching Christmas

This week is obviously a feature of Alisabeth :)

Her dad did a really cute job on her hair and she spent quite a while in front of the mirror admiring it :)

She also looked adorable while wearing her sunglasses. Granted it was dark out. . . and there was no reason to, but she was so cute!

She is mostly potty trained, of her own doing. She doesn't like going number 2 but number one is her favorite thing! Now all we have to do is break the connection between "potty" and "candy" and she'll be all set :)

Jason got a couple of pictures of the main window. The other one has 2 stars and then the lights going in every direction :) It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
Plus it's snowing again and the temperature hasn't gotten above 20 this week.


The last thing I wanted to include this week was an accomplishment :) Even though the pictures won't cooperate, I finished the last of our stocking this afternoon. Shown above is Alisabeth holding her own. She's very possessive about it and can definitely tell the difference between hers and "daddys" and "mommys."
They are super simple to do and I really loved the pattern!
The smaller things are Christmas Tree ornaments. One is for an ornament exchange that we're doing on Tuesday. The second is for us and I have one more to make that I'm going to give to another family so that they'll always remember us . . . .ahhhhh.
I might make more since they're so easy and I have plenty of material, but I don't know if anyone else would want one.
If you do. . . let me know :)

I graduate in 12 days!!!!!

The coolest thing I've seen in a long time.

One of those days

Today was a day where I wish I had taken a picture of the weather before we entered the church building. 3 hours later when we emerged there was 3 inches of snow on the ground and a heave drift coming down. It honestly looked like someone had just shaken a snow globe :)

This week was a good one. We're almost totally prepared for the concert which is really good because we have this entire week off from school but then we're playing our concert on Tuesday night!!
Classes are going well. I have two more weeks from my book of mormon classes. I'll be done with band after the concert. I have also completed all of my other on-line class except for the final. All in all not a bad haul :)

Jason is gearing up for his finals. He has a project that his group will be putting together over the break and then he's in charge of the in-class presentation portion. . . Good luck honey.
He also just got one of his car projects all put back together. . . but it doesn't work.

We're headed out to Boise on Wednesday afternoon. Hopefully the snow won't be too bad. We're planning on driving for most of the day and we have no time constraints so we shouldn't have any problems. When we get back on Saturday I will be putting up all of my Christmas decorations and I have decided to start my next sewing project now that I'm done with the halloween costumes and the upcoming baby blankets. I'm going to start my festive table clothes. I plan on getting one of those large pieces of plastic to go over it and I'm going to make at least two festive table clothes. Hopefully I can still find a few good deals on Thanksgiving ones :)

Other than that, life is pretty bland. On Friday night we finally had a D&D game. It was a blast. We've been gearing up to this event for almost 2 months. The prince sent us on an errand to bring back a guy who used to be in cahoots (spelling sry) with a bad guy so that the prince could get some information. We tried a couple different ways to get to him but none of them worked and we didn't think that he was a good guy so we devised a plan and captured him and transported him out of an extremely magical city back to the prince without alerting anyone. . . . I shape-shifted to look like his girlfriend and then while I was holding his head in my hands Jason turned him into a snake. I then ran to the nearest tree and being the druid that I am I used a spell to transport myself along with my little snake companion to the princes castle. Meanwhile the rest of the team tried to use the portal which the wizards from the princes city created for them and it ended up taking them into a cave with a bunch of undead stuff and they battled it out for a while. All in all it was nice. They ended up getting 12K experience for their fight and for single-handedly accomplishing the mission I received 18K :) I didn't expect that much so it was a pleasant surprise.

The other cool thing for the week was that Aimee and I went on a girl's night out to the opening show of "New Moon" this week. At 10:00 pm we drove to Idaho Falls and ended up getting home at about the time that Jason's alarm went off for work. It was a blast though. We caught up with a couple other girls from our ward and made fun of all the people who were WAY to excited about Jacob taking off his shirt. I did it again with Jason last night. We went to a 10:00 showing here in Rexburg. Both times I really enjoyed it. The second time I was less critical too so I ended up enjoying it more. :) It's a keeper.

I love you

She finally said it. The other night we were sitting on the couch watching "aliens" and she turned and gave me a kiss for no reason and then she turned again and said "iwuvu mommy"
I almost died. I love my little girl.
"Can you tell Daddy too?"
"Iwuvu daddy"

Oh man, it is so true. It is the terrible twos. If they're not ripping your hair out, or throwing a tantrum for no apparent reason or hitting the neighbor's kids just because you gasped when she did it the first time, they're giving you giant hugs, kisses and telling you they love you. She also asks me if she can help, or pulls my hand so I'll come and play with her. It is truly a divine time in her life. I love the joy as much as I hate the frustration.
Oh moms everywhere, how great thou art!

Wow, has it really been two weeks?

Before:

After:

What do you think, did we do it justice? I cut the skirt shorter to show off the boots, and his wings didn't turn out very well, but . . .




The spider queen reigneth.

We had a lot of fun on Haloween. Alisabeth gathered quite a bit of candy. She listened to me tell her to say "trick or treat" watched a few others do it and get candy dropped into their pumpkins and she was off. The trick was to get her to say "Thank you" afterward.
She did really well and had a lot of fun. (Course, now all I hear is "Candy?!")

This week also marked my yearly attempt at chicken noodle soup. I enjoy making it but last year it was just a soppy mess. This year I had to call it stew. The noodles were quick cooking and I didn't realize it so I gave them a whole 15 minutes to cook. They were REALLY tender.

I also have to add a plug for the terrible twos. Alisabeth and I walked into the grocery store this week and she made a b-line for the toddler carts that this store has just for little ones her size. I was trying to make this a quick visit so I forestalled her and dragged her screaming into the store. (She won't sit in the cart).
So we are walking through the produce section and a lady from the bakery comes running over with a chocolate-chip cookie. Pleased as a peach she sits in the cart and eats to her little heart's content. I get about half-way through the list this way and then she's done and wants out again. I let her out and she spends about 10 minutes doing really well at staying close.
Finally she got bored with that and took off in every direction. I quickly wrapped up the end of my list. and headed for the check-out stand. She quickly headed for the balloons by the help desk.
I unloaded the groceries as fast as I could. She tangled herself up in the balloon strings.
I headed around the side and she began to whine so I went to go and get her. I was then informed that they were getting her a balloon they promised.
I told them that was unnecessary as the store manager handed it to her over the counter.
I tried to tie it to her wrist only to have her tell me she wanted to hold it. Instead I tied it to my wrist, swiped my card and walked out of the store trailing a balloon and a daughter.
I guess it worked out better than last week when I forgot to lock her inside the car before I unloaded the groceries into the back and she took off into the parking lot. (The entire lot turned to look at me with big eyes when I yelled and took off after her. It scared the dickens out of me!)
Luckily I had the wits not to yell at her, I just told her she had scared me as I locked her inside her car-seat and then went back to the groceries.)

Jason had an uneventful week. He simply took a few mid-terms, worked on a couple of cars and played around. . . slacker. He also went shooting with a couple in our complex and had a blast. They did clay pigeons as well as targets.
Thursday he also took two more of the ASE certification tests. He felt more confident about the AC one this time around. We'll get the results in about 6 weeks.
That's about it.

Halloween beginneth

This is birthday fun. She just finished her cupcake. It was a pretty informal party this year. I didn't send out invitations I just invited by word of mouth. It was unfortunate that one of her best friends was sick so she wasn't able to come, but we went over later and brought cupcakes and wished her well.

These next shots are the queen of the spiders. Check out the spider tats and the ones crawling in her hair. I tried to get the hair to stand up on end but she moved too much. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. Once we got in the car she smoshed her head all around and would have destroyed it anyway.


And finally a look at the final versions of all three of us.
Yes my ears really are pointy. I loved that part. They looked great.

You may be wondering why I post this a week before the real halloween. . . we went to a party. By next week I hope to have a few more minor details. I'm going to try to use all of the scraps from J's and my costumes to put together a cloak for me. Alisabeth needs more arms and we definitely need to improve it enough so that she can go outside for several hours after dark (about 30-40 degree weather).
Other than that they're pretty well done. I'm going to shorten the overtunic on mine a bit and add another hook and eye to Jason's cloak because he wants it to close more.

After Halloween is over I'm going to work on my next project. I'm going to make Alisabeth's Christmas gift. She loves the neighbor's oversized beanbag chair, so I'm going to make her a smaller Bitsy version. I'm trying for "large enough to last till she's ten, small enough to fit in her room comfortably with everything else." We'll see how it goes. So far I haven't been able to find a solid pattern and the stuffing beads are impossible to find out here in the boon-docks, but I have found them online. Any suggestions, please let me know.

What she got for #2

These are the gifts from grandparents. They aren't very good because our camera battery was dead so we had to take them with the computer webcam, but it's the best we could do.

I couldn't resist.

This is for all of the grandparents. The video won't work through the email though, so make sure you actually go to the website to watch it.
www.jtflannery.blogspot.com

Chagrinned

So one of our CD's came due this last weekend which means shopping spree right?
Just kidding, but we did need a few things. About a week ago I noticed that I was having a hard time getting Alisabeth's size 6 shoes on her feet, so I needed that, plus with winter coming I needed some long-sleeved shirts (because I have none that still fit her).
So I headed off to Walmart and Payless Shoes.
Walmart went swimmingly.
I got into the kids section and Alisabeth was running happily back and forth between the "giant" mini-mouse dolls and the other stuffed animals so I took the opportunity to call my mom and see if she wanted to get in on the shopping spree and buy some of Alisa's birthday and Christmas presents. As we talked I noticed that Alisabeth wasn't running around anymore so I start walking toward her last known location and hear "Where's your mom?" I hurry my steps and find a woman hurridly trying to untie some baloons. She tells me that my daughter had climbed on top of the clothing rack to reach the baloons and since she didn't know where I was she thought it safer to get them for her. I thanked her politely and tried to show that I wasn't one of "those" moms.
So we head off and continue getting a new coat for daddy and thermals for mommy and chalk, a new learning toy, new clothes, thermals, tights and a halloween basket for Alisabeth. Then we headed to payless.
I looked at the size sevens but I just had this nagging feeling that I should actually measure her feet before buying new shoes. (plus they had a buy one get one half-off sale). So I find a scale, put her foot down and think "No, I must be seeing this wrong"
The sales lady confirmed it. Alisabeth's feet are now officially a toddler size 8!! AHHHH!
I put the new tenni shoes on her feet and stood her up. You should have seen this kid happy as a lark "Bitsy's shoes, Bitsy's shoes" It was cool. I felt horrible and then we went home, trailing our baloons after us.
My other great event this week was again a shopping incident.
I actually printed off coupons, planned my budget and looked at the adds. Albertson's had some great deals so I headed their way. I bought a junk load of stuff.
As the lady was finishing up with me, they usually tell you how much money you saved . . . she said "You saved se. . . " then she stopped and double checked shook her head a little, raised her eyebrows and finished, "You saved $70.17." I was way excited. I'm getting better at shopping so that we're saving money and so that I'm aware of the price fluctuations. . . Hopefully one of these days we'll spend less than $250 a month :)

Jason also had a good week. He's been learning some great stuff in his parenting class and right now they're putting together case studies of "disfunctional families" that another group can analyze and see if they can determine the best way to fix it.
Jason's group is working on a family where the father is working about 60 hours a week so that they can living in a large house. The oldest son is beginning to look toward other sources of male models and so the first thing their group is going to talk about is the need to get the father figure back in the home. Whether that means they need to downsize on house size or on other spending so that he can work less and be available more. It sounds like a pretty interesting project and class.

Alisabeth is doing really well. She counted from 5 to 10 the other day with absolutely no prompting. I was overly proud of her. She is also using possessives and 3-4 word sentances. We're still working on using words instead of whining or grunting, but she's amazing. She recognizes over 100 different animals and objects (based on books and blocks and driving down the road) it's just so cool to watch her go.
Now if only the potty training were going as smoothly.

Winter cometh. . .

I woke up this morning at 6 so that I could go baby-sit for a friend of mine (the wife was out of town for the weekend and the husband had class this morning). I happily open the door to go and set up Alisabeth's stroller before I wake her up and there's an inch of snow on the ground. . . Ewww!!
Granted I was expecting it sometime soon because it's been strangely cold the last few days, but still. . . it's one thing to know doom is coming and another to see it before your face.

So new things this week? Alisabeth can parrot quite a bit. In fact she's gotten good enough to parrot a prayer over lunch and dinner. It's really neat. We say "Dear" and she says "Heavenly Father" and then repeats the prayer, but when we get to "Jesus Christ" she doesn't say Christ she says Amen. . .we're still working on that part.

Jason got ahead on homework and has been working on the same project all week. I guess no matter what they've tried the water pump is still leaking. (It might not be a water pump) They've replaced all of the seals a couple of times and tried everything he can think of and the problem persists so today the teacher said he was going to work with him to try something different. I hope it works out. . .

As for me, I worked on Halloween costumes all week. Alisabeth's is mostly put together. I still need to figure out the hair part, but everything else is done. It looks pretty cute.
Jason's cloak is done except for the detail work. I have to put edging on and the hood. It looks pretty good. After that I'll need to fit it to his height and then deal with the bottom detailing.
I also finished the inner part of my dress. I just need the elastic for the empire waist. It looks pretty good. I need to get the right material for the top part now.

That's our excitement. We watched General Conference this weekend which is where the prophet and other leaders of our church get up and share messages and important ideas. It happens every six months and gives me a good idea of what I need to work on for the next half of a year. As I listen I feel that little nagging voice telling me how the messages apply to me. It's such a cool experience every six months! This year the focus of all the speakers seemed to be around service, love and not only finding out the Will of God, but also doing it. I appreciated that.

Success

For those of you who wanted an update, here's my finger as of a few seconds ago. It's much better but you can still see the welling around the nail, and there's a lot of discoloration that the camera just couldn't get. Also you can't really see the gaping hole. :) The nail and the flesh separated because of the swelling and it is still actually two separate pieces although the dried goop usually keeps it closed up :)

Next on the list of cool things is that I was able to kill Jason off this last D&D game. Thus the name of this week's entry. . .
Now, before you judge me too harshly just imagine a dwarf who doesn't care about money. Instead said dwarf has become a sorcerer. Secondly because he's still a dwarf he has a strange desire to run into battle, but because he's a sorcerer he has no ability to take a hit, therefore, the little squishy was near death too many times to count.
Now in Jason's defense he was learning to do quite well at staying out of battle and letting the fighters do it all, but when I tell you how he died you'll understand why death was necessary.
We get to a little town, the miners are all drinking in the pub. . . in the middle of the day. We ask what's up and they say they were happily digging away in the salt mine when suddenly something came out and anyone he touched got very dehydrated and sick.
We go to investigate and find 3 salt mummies trying to dig something out of the rocks. After dispatching them we open up the door that they were trying to uncover and find a burial chamber. There are runes written on all of the statues and junk so I say "We need to read them. Jason you know how to read that go for it."
Without thinking about it he just runs straight in the room, passes by three or four statues and heads straight for the sarcophagus to read what's written on it. Needless to say the magic mummy that was off to the side didn't give him any warning and suddenly he was struck with continuous lightening for a minute or so. Thus he brought his death upon himself. . . with my egging.
But, in my defense I also had a spell ready. I reincarnated him into another body.
this is my hubby now:

Considering the fact that I'm an elf I think it's a good change :) Plus he is now half-dragon which means he'll be able to fight and fly and cast spells all over the place. Go my hubby!!!
That was our D&D fun this week :)

Lastly I have started a new project: Halloween costumes
Here's mine:
Remember I'm going to become my character from D&D
Thus here is the dress but the material will be darker and closer to the brown's of nature.

This is the ribbon I've chosen for the belt.


And here is Jason, who will now be a Niomus instead of a dwarf. . . much easier I might add.

We'll have to bulk up the back just a little bit to make it look like he's hiding wings under there, but that shouldn't be too hard.

Wish me luck. Alisabeth's is mostly done. I just need to get finishing touches. We'll take pictures of the various parts as soon as we get them done. . . you have to pretend you think they look awesome for my confidences sake :)

Updated!!

I've been trying to load a video for several weeks. . . let's see if we have success this time.

Nope, that means you get pictures instead. See the tomato plant. Poor thing is trying so hard to grow it's tomatoes before it dies.
The corn came out fairly well. We actually ate it mixed with other stuff so I can't tell you if it was awesome, but it didn't taste bad :)
There are still more ears to go. . .I'll let you know.

So our garden was hit with the first frost of the year and then the second. The first didn't seem to have any effect, but the second got the tomatoes and the squash plants. . . We'll have to see what today's frost did when we go visit tomorrow.

On a D&D level our DM has been trying to kill us off with incredibly hard enemies and lots of them. This last group was about 20 zombies of various sizes and two gigantic stone golems which basically trampled through us. I have 69 hit points and he did 36 damage on the first pass, just to give you an idea of their abilities.
Luckily I have leveled up hugely in the last few games (because a side effect of trying to kill us is that he's sending higher level characters and when we beat them we gain a lot of experience and ability). So I was able to summon two gi-hugic earth elementals which suddenly pounded the two things into the ground like they were toy dolls :)
As for the 20 zombies. . . I turned the floor into mud and then once they had sunk down about chest deep I turned it back into stone :) Thus they were completely taken care of with no issues at all. Jason had also greased the stairwell so that they couldn't get at us.
We also went up against a guy who had magical cards that could cause random types of damage, but I was putting Alisabeth to bed during that so apparently I encased him in wood so that he couldn't throw any more cards and Jason levitated the mass and bumped him into the ceiling a couple of times to knock him out.
The other bad-guy for the night, as if all that wasn't enough was a creature under illusion which cast magic to paralyze us. Luckily only one person in our group was not suceptible and was able to free all of us every time. If it hadn't been for his ability to roll high on the save throw we would have all died a couple of times.

School also started a week and a half ago. It's good.

Alisabeth is speaking more clearly now. She's got a couple of sentences and a demanding personality! The one thing we're working on is whining. We can't quite figure out why she does it because we won't respond to it and instead make her tell us in words, but maybe it's just a never ending phase.

I think this is the cutest picture. She sat her little doll down next to her and comenced to have a conversation and play with her. She got very upset when her baby would not "baby sit!"

Jason is doing well. He is enjoying his parenting classes and his automotive classes.
Last summer he tried to fix a car and ended up breaking it beyond repair when he messed up the timing chain. So guess what his first assignment was in his automotive class? (I guess the first five students that came in had timing chain issues) so he'll be perfecting his abilities :)
He learned more about the roles and influence of mother and father this week too. I'm enjoying hearing about what he's learning.

My week was fun, I decided to give myself some sort of blood poisoning or serious infection in my finger so it is currently swollen to about twice the size of a normal index finger. It makes life a bit hard.
I've been taking meds and soaking it in Epsom salt a couple times a day but so far there have been no result. Basically, this means that Tuesday they're going to slice my finger open and get all the "crud" out of there.

I wanted to include this shot. This is my practice time with the french horn. . . they play very well. :)

It's been a while for some reason, so I'll just post everything I haven't covered yet :)
We had a barbeque and invited everyone we talked to. Some people didn't hear about it, but as usual we cooked way too much food so we invited anyone still outside that afternoon :)

The next one is the self-styled artistry of our daughter. She learned how to use the camera last week and took about 20 shots of the ceiling and about 10 of herself, all similar to this. She got one or two of me or Jason and another couple of the floor. All in all it was a pretty good photo shoot and we're pretty sure the client will find something to their liking.

Alisabeth practiced her artistry in another way this week. She did this, and then after I took it all down she came back through and did it again. . . I love her.


Isn't she cute. We have about three more of similar shots.

She also found my sandals this week and began the process of learning to walk in high heels.

Look mom!! I finished it!!

Completion.

This is the picture I hadn't taken yet from Tucson:


Then we left Tucson for San Diego. We stopped to unload most of our stuff at the Jimenez house where it would remain for the week so that we wouldn't have to worry about it while we were on the boat.

The ones with the pooh bear are a special shout out for Alena.

Then we headed for the shelter of a great hotel near the beaches to wait out the weekend:

This is the view from the loft area where Jason and I slept. My mom and Al had a private room below us. Alisabeth spent the first night on a makeshift bed and the next one in a crib. She didn't enjoy that part :) The best part about the hotel was that it had a full kitchen, barely visible in the above picture. So Sunday we were able to cook a frozen lasagna and ate a great homemade meal while we were over 1000 miles from home :)

San Diego also boasted quite a few nice beaches. They were Alisabeth's first experience with the ocean. She loved it. She was apprehensive at first, but after about five minutes she was all about the incoming waves. We built a little fort to "protect" us from the water and had a blast. . . Notice I'm wearing a new shirt. . . why? . . . I have no idea.

We decided to enjoy the trip. We spent a little too much, but we just couldn't pass up the cartride across the street from the parking to the ship, or the $15 coconut cup.

I tried to get a complete shot of the ship so you could see it all, but I messed up a bit. You should be able to put it all together at least.

The ship was gorgeous. We had a private balcony, a wonderful woman who would make sure that our room was straightened three times a day, and all of the comforts of a luxury hotel plus a lot more. Everyone loved Alisabeth. We were known as "with Alisabeth" whenever we went anywhere. (Like being seated in the dining room).

The first stop was Catalina Island where Alisabeth again got to play on the beaches and we got to walk around the tourist trap and admire the price tags. We got there by boat. . . from our boat. . .


If you wonder why she's wearing a lifevest it's not because we were near deep water. . . it's because Jason felt we should. . . since we had taken the time to bring it along. . . wierdo.

The next stop was Ensenada. It was a very cute town. We were again led to the tourist trap and were again left to admire the price tags, however thsi time we were caught a few times and walked away with a silver bracelet, a couple of bead necklaces for Alisa and a shirt for Jason.
Jason enjoyed his first authentic Mexican tacos in a little cafe. They were good. I asked for Carne and the man said "Cual tipo de carne?" I looked confused so he opened five different containers each containing a different form of beef and again asked which type I wanted. It was great.
The tourist trap horseback ride was nice too. The owner accompanied our group and told us a little about herself and the area. We basically travelled the highest mountains closest to Ensenada all the way around a circuit which showed off the city and the landscape. It was beautiful. I didn't take many pictures because it was mighty rocky and I was a little worried about my big black's footing. He kept slipping on me. Nothing deadly, just a little unsettling.

After that it was smooth sailing home. Jason and Alisabeth spent a lot of time outdoors and I was able to enjoy myself inside watching way to many movies for a four day trip. I think the total was something around 10. They were all free, and only one was seen completely through from beginning to end the first time. ;)

All in all the vacation was amazing. We had a blast. Unlike last time I didn't feel burned out at all when we got home. I was very glad to be with family and friends. I am excited to go back to Arizona in about 6 months!!!!!!