First Day of School

Today Harris started preschool at Learning Dynamics. I don't know how I feel about this. You see he is my baby, my last one, and if he is going to school I must be getting old! What am I going to do?! He will be gone 3 days a week for two and a half hours! I guess it will be good. I'll be able to do something without being interrupted by Harris wanting me to play with him. ("but I like to play with him", I say to myself.) I know that it will be a good break for him. Despite my efforts, he is growing up, and needs to have some extracurricular activities. So I will suck it up and watch him go.

Harris, however, was fine. He was a little shy, but his teacher took his hand and shooed us out the door. You should have seen his face when we got there to pick him up! It was priceless! Total relief that we were back. He said to us "my school is a long time, huh mommy?". I hope that he loves school like Olivia does. Loving to learn now will help him all through out his school years.

By-the-way, there aren't any pictures because Chet said it was weird to take pictures because he started school in the middle of the year. So I posted one of my favorite baby pictures of him.

Yule Blog

Christmas came to me and Chet at 3:30 this morning! Our poor son was whimpering in the hallway with a temperature of 104.2! We did all the standards to help bring the fever down,(Motrin, cooler jammies, blessing) but nothing helped. I finally made Chet call his doctor after an hour of no change. Dr. Knorr reassured us (mostly me) that everything was ok and that it was probably his ears again. (Harris is notorious for ear infections) I finally let Chet go sleep in Harris' room and put Harris in bed with me so I could monitor him. I eventually fell back to sleep around 6. At 7:01 Livvy came in and said "Let's go, let's go!" I sent her back to her room until Harris woke up. (poor girl) She was very understanding though and patiently waited until Harris went and got her at about 8. Harris was kind of a bump though. He sat on my lap most of the morning and only played with his toys for a minute. :( After the opening of gifts at home, we headed to the Robinson's. About 5 minutes after we got there Harris started throwing up. Lucky me caught most of it in my hands. We stayed for a bit and enjoyed watching them open the gifts we got for them, and their gifts to the kids. Before we left, Chet and Chet Sr. gave Harris a blessing to feel better and to be able to enjoy the rest of the day. We then headed to my sister Jann's house for prime rib. (It was an amazing dinner by they way. Thanks, Jann!) Harris sat for a while and then felt well enough to play. He even ate a little. Yay! All in all we had a great day! Great presents, great food, amazing family! Thanks everyone! Merry Christmas!


We thought we would share a short video of when the kids came down the stairs on Christmas morning, enjoy!
Note: at 1:43 in the video you have GOT to check out Harris' reaction to his toy dinosaur, it is hilarious!

2 in a row, Happy Birthday J-mo!

Well, well, 2 blog posts in a row for Chet...hot dog!

Anyway, I just wanted to post a short blog entry to wish my dear wife and friend, Jaime, a very happy birthday. I can't believe you are 29, I am sure this will be the first of many happy 29th birthdays!

I have seen this done in other blogs and thought I would copy. On Jaime's 29th birthday I thought I would share 29 things about my dear wife that you may (or may not) know.

Here it goes:

1. She is hilarious, especially when she doesn't mean to be. This one time she was trying to do her Severus Snape impression from the last Harry Potter movie. He says, "Obviously..." when it was mentioned that he didn't get the post of Professor of Defense against the Dark Arts, well Jaime was trying to do her impression of that voice and it came out unnaturally high-pitched. I thought it was hilarious, but reading this it doesn't sound quite so funny...

2. Sometimes she laughs so hard and uncontrollably that she starts bawling. Now, THAT is hilarious.

3. She has the most beautiful blue eyes I have ever seen. Some may even call them, "stumbling"...

4. She is a natural blonde...that has to have her hair colored to look it's natural color...

5. When we met she had a scrapbook of Keanu Reeves.

6. She also had a scrapbook of the Mazda Miata.

7. She is obsessed with Disneyland (most of you probably knew that one)

8. She loves Christmas (not too original, I know, but she really really does.)

9. She is an "animal person", meaning that she sometimes relates to animals easier than people.

10. She can be painfully shy.

11. She is an amazing homemaker.

12. She is a fantastic chef and cook. Almost every new recipe she has tried out on the family has been a success (the only real misfire would be the Polenta from last week...)

13. She is a big fan of high fashion and has greatly expanded my vocabulary with strange french and Italian designer names (Louboutin, Dior, Ferragamo etc.)

14. Her favorite Christmas movie is "Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas", look it up it is awesome.

15. Her favorite Halloween movie is "The Great Bear Scare", look it up it is soooooo lame.

16. She is most scared of Michael Myers, not Mike Myers from SNL but the scary mask-dude from the Halloween movies. Every year I threaten to purchase a Michael Meyers costume and wake her in the middle of the night while wearing the costume and brandishing a knife and every year she threatens to leave me if I do that...

17. She has an awesome talent where she can somehow lift a cup of ice cream by biting the side of the cup and raising her head...ask her about it some time, it is quite impressive.

18. She loves socks and slippers.

19. She would wear pajamas all day if it were socially acceptable.

20. She does not sleep well at night.

21. She is addicted to Pepsi, not to caffeine, mind you, but to Pepsi. (I know this because I used to substitute her regular fountain Pepsi with the caffeine-free version and she would never notice and it would seem to satisfy whatever weird cola craving she would be having)

22. She is soooo accident prone. I now have to supervise her when she uses sharp objects in the kitchen.

23. She is an expert gift-wrapper. It is probably hereditary.

24. She used to think that being a bastard meant that you didn't have a mom.

25. She also used to think that the Calvin Klein cologne, CK One, was a "bi-sexual" cologne. (She meant unisex, but in reality she probably wasn't that far off...)

26. She is a great gift-giver. She cares more than anyone I know about what gifts she gives to others at birthdays and Christmas.

27. She thinks that Pittsburgh is a state.

28. She sometimes suffers from "short-term memory". I think that is just when she remembers things that just recently happened...

29. She is the most intelligent, caring and beautiful person I have every met and I am honored and privileged to call her my trophy wife.

Happy Birthday Jaime, I love you always and forever.

Chet M.

Chet's 2nd Post, My favorite Christmas decorations?

Yes, that is right. I am going to blog on my very favorite Christmas decorations. Some of you may be asking if Jaime is putting me up to this and the answer is NO. In all honesty, I love the Christmas season and one of my favorite things is the various decorations we put around the house. It is a yearly tradition and I thought I would share with the world some of my favorite things. (As a side note, for those of you concerned by the un-manly nature of this post, I just have to go on record by saying that I have never been all that concerned about appearing manly. Those of you that know me know of my love for goth-girl rock; Garbage, Evanescence and Paramore, as well as my love of the Twilight series of books, yep that's right I said it and I have no issues with it, so there.)

Anyway, here we go.

So, let's start with the outside of the house. We have a 2-story home and I do not own a ladder so we actually pay someone to put lights on the roofline and above the porch. Lining the walkway are some really cool tiny Christmas trees that Jaime and I purchased during an after-Christmas sale at Target a number of years ago. It takes me many hours every year to get all that stuff up, but I like the way it makes the house look and am considering keeping it up year round...There are a number of Christmas ornaments that mean a lot to me. The first one is an ornament that my father and I made when I was like 3. We made them out of some sort of flour and water mix and 27 years later they are still around. I don't have a lot of things from that era of my life and I think it is cool to haul these out every year. My dad has always been a really influential part of my life and I feel like I get to honor that relationship every year when I hang up our ornaments (there are 3 from this era, I have 2 and my dad has 1)

This is the 2nd of the ornaments. It is Santa, in case you can't tell...

Ah yes, this one is super cool. When I was smaller I remember Wendy taking me to a Christmas craft fair at Provo high. There I found this awesome home-made Ghostbusters ornament. To this day I am the only person I know of with unlicensed Ghostbuster merchandise...

So, one of my favorite movies, Christmas or otherwise, is A Christmas Story. This year Jaime purchased for me a leg lamp ornament. Yep, that's right, the soft glow of electric sex right on my tree...(it's a quote from the movie, BTW, I know that at some point I will be asked to explain myself)So, I have this pet peeve about Nativity Scenes. I find it absolutely ridiculous when those cheesy gift stores that sell all sorts of nick-knacks put out Nativity Scenes that feature non-human characters. Knowing this, Jaime purchased for me an ornament that features the traditional Nativity Scene but with Mooses (Meese?). Yep, moose baby Jesus...

This one is especially awesome because I made it. When I was younger we decided to make our own ornaments one year. For some reason I decided to purchase a pair of wooded birds and paint them and then highlight their feathers in glitter-glue. This is the extent of my artistic talent...

OK, last ornament. This one was a gift from a family that I baptised when I was a missionary in Russia. The Russians didn't have much and it meant a lot that they would spare some of what they did have to give me a gift.

There are a couple non-ornament decorations I wanted to bring attention to as well:

I bought this Nativity Scene for Jaime last year. Jaime is into these weird Willow Tree figurines and I thought that this made for a cool decoration but I am always way freaked out by the fact that nothing has a face. Oh well, at least they are human...I think...

One of my favorite traditions we had as kids was the Christmas countdown tree. There are little pockets for treats and each day someone gets to hang an ornament and eat a treat. I used to always love it when it was finally my turn. Wendy was gracious enough to make one for our family when Olivia was born. One of my favorite recent memories of this tradition is explaining to Liv that when the last ornament was hung we knew it was Christmas Eve. When we weren't watching her she tried to hang all the ornaments up to "hurry" Christmas along...I love the logic of kids...

This is my Christmas stocking. I remember buying it at the mall when I was a kid. We all had some sort of bear-looking stockings. It brings lots of fun memories about trying to wake my parents up at 4AM so we could open presents and them saying NO until about 5:30 AM or so. Most of our really cool gifts would not be wrapped and would be sitting out around our stockings. We would play with the gifts that were out until the parental units would finally awaken and we could begin. While technically we were probably lower middle-class growing up,

Dad and Wendy always provided an incredible Christmas for us. I can only imagine how long it took to pay off :)

OK, so for the finale:

So, my very favorite Christmas movie is absolutely the Rankin-Bass classic, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I will have to do a separate blog post about the myriad ways and reasons I love this movie. Anyway, when Jaime and I were first married, she saw an advertisement for this really cool Christmas village and at the rock-bottom price of $49.95. Well, what Jaime didn't realize was that it was actually 8 easy installments of $49.95...

Yeah, so as an indigent married couple I ended up paying over $400 USD for a Christmas village! I told Jaime that I forgive her but to this day I am still not sure...

Anyway, I absolutely love this Christmas village and take great joy from my ownership thereof. Here are some extra shots of said village:

Anyway, this is my monster-sized Christmas post. I hope it was as fun for you as it was for me.
Cheers and Merry Christmas!
Chet

Disneyland Recap

I didn't think that Disneyland could be a more magical place than it already is but I was wrong. In fact, Chet and I decided that if we only went to Disneyland once a year it would be during the Christmas season.

The decorations alone are worth the trip. They are amazing and adorn everything! Even the tiny houses on "Storybook" have wreaths on the doors and tiny pots of poinsettias! Each land has decorations that match that area. My favorite is Sleeping Beauty Castle. Every night there is a little ceremony when they turn the lights on the castle, and after they are turned on it snows! It is pure magic.

They have lots of fun events that they do as well, like Santa's Reindeer Round Up (you get to meet Santa and his reindeer. Yep, real reindeer), Haunted Mansion Holiday (which is decorated with a Nightmare Before Christmas theme), and "It's a Small World" Holiday (with so many Christmas lights it's unbelievable).

It's a Small World

They finally reopened Sleeping Beauty Castle, it has been closed since 9/11.

Liv and Chrys being weird on Autopia.

Harris in Pixie Hollow sat down and said "take a picture". OK. (Cute shirt huh Ben? It's his favorite. Thanks again.)

Ahhh, we love Uncle Chrys. (at the giant tree in California Adventure)

Chet (the jerk) got to go to Disneyland one night and stay after hours for an HP event. I have always wanted to be at Disneyland without anyone else there. What an amazing experience for Chet. He said it was "surreal" to be there without hardly anyone else. He took this picture on Main Street as he was leaving the event. (notice the absence of people, awesome!) We later found out that price for such an experience is about 350k!!!

We also got to see lots of new characters! So check out the "Our Hobby" slide show.

Santa and Talkin' Turkey

Today was another fabulous day at Disneyland! Chet had a break in his meetings and actually got to spend most of the afternoon with us. I was happy about that because I really wanted to take the kids to see Santa today. I think that tomorrow, being Friday, would have been too busy. As it was the wait was only about 20 minutes. It was great! Livvy was very excited that it was the "real" Santa not the fake one like at the mall. Harris was hesitant at first but Livvy took his had and walked up to Santa with him. When they sat down Santa asked them what they wanted, of course. Harris immediately said, "Spike the Dinosaur!". Liv was more reserved and told him Rollerblades. When I asked her, "Why Rollerblades?" she said because Santa won't know what a Juicy purse is. (which is what she really wants) It was really fun. After we saw Santa, Harris had to show Chet the "chicken". When we got to the turkey there was a whole bunch of people standing around trying to get the turkey's attention. Harris went right up to the cage and started screaming at the bird like he did yesterday. (such a boy) Sure enough the turkey started gobbling back. It was hilarious! I did feel bad for the bird though so I made Harris stop, but that didn't stop other kids from trying the same thing. However, he did not gobble at any of them. Just call Harris "The Turkey Whisperer".

Presidential Pardon

Every year on Thanksgiving The President "pardons" a turkey. Do any of you know what happens to the turkey after he is "pardoned"? No, he doesn't get eaten anyway. He gets to live at Disneyland! We happen to be at Disneyland right now and got to see him. He is so cute!("and delicious," says Chet) Harris was fascinated and started making gobbling noises at him. They turkey responded by gobbling right back and scaring Harris to death! Needless to say Harris was done looking at the turkey after that.