Side effects from staying up past midnight

The side effects from staying up past midnight, surrounded by family and lots of food are sometimes really scary. This is not the norm for these two love birds, but as you can see, they did have a lot of fun.

Christmas Pictures

Christmas morning was a lazy morning. We all slept in, showered, ate breakfast and finally got around to opening presents. (It was 10 am when that started). The above picture is of SM's mom and his youngest brothers' girlfriend.

SM loves opening presents which makes it fun to give him presents.

My niece's family came over as we were opening gifts. I just had to throw this picture in and show everyone the "baby" that she received for Christmas.

And there's a crazy picture of me opening one of my presents. I can tell from the label that it is a present that I bought for myself, wrapped for myself and wrote the tag "to" and "from" myself. Ahhh, the perfect Christmas present.

And the hoodie that SM is wearing is the present that he bought for himself, wrapped for himself and gave to himself. I know we don't always follow tradition with gift giving and receiving, but we love getting just what we wanted!!

In search of a friend

I have a friend who used to live in Falls Church with me and moved her family to Arizona after her husband finished law school. I know she follows my blog but I don't seem to have her email any longer. This friends' name begins with the letter "A" and last name begins with "P." Last I knew, she had two daughters with names of cities (at least the eldest daughter has a city name). As you can tell, I'm trying not to give any personal information away. I was hoping to get an invite to her blog so that I can follow her and her family as they grow. If my friend reads this, please contact me (somehow)...I'd love to get back in contact.

Yarn

I have been crocheting a shawl to wear during church, to keep warm...and it is almost finished. I'll post a picture or two when it's finished. Meanwhile I am posting a picture of some yarn that I purchased on sale at Michael's last week. It was so hard to make a decision on what to buy so I bought a little bit of my favorites. Now I just have to make something small.

Favorite Christmas Gift

I wanted to post a few pictures of my favorite Christmas gift. SM surprised me with this pearl necklace. All of these pictures are of the same necklace, it just looks different because of the background.

Thanks, SM for a great gift.

Christmas Stockings

This last week I spent a couple days sewing Christmas Stockings. I took scraps from last years Christmas Tree Skirt and used them to make these stockings. And now everything matches...cool huh?!

Front view
Back view
More stockings....
And this is what the back of all of them look like.

And this is the Christmas Tree Skirt that I made last year.

Carpet Cleaning

My father-in-law recently reacquired a franchise of the carpet cleaning business that he owned and ran for 13-14 years (if I remember correctly) while they lived in southern Utah. He is starting to clean carpets again. This is the best way to clean carpet that I have seen! It cleans beautifully, dries quickly, doesn't leave residue (really!), and is affordable. (He sprays a mineral cleaner on the floor, brushes it into the carpet, lets it dry a bit and then wipes it up...no soap that draws dirt back to your carpet). He cleaned the family room the on Friday. Check out the difference.

Here are the stairs before cleaning....
The difference is huge...but the lighting only shows it a little.
This stripe was between the couch and a rug and a place where we sit to watch an episode of Stargate frequently. As you can see it's pretty dirty.

Ta-Da...beautiful, clean carpet. If you want more details about getting your carpets cleaned, let me know and I'll get you in touch with my FIL.