Sunday, December 21, 2008

Christmas!

Oh how I love Christmas! It has taken me a while to get these pictures posted, but I have been so busy lately! And besides, better late than never! So I wanted to do a Christmas picture card and newsletter to send to people, but I ran out of time before Christmas, so I decided I would just post some pictures and our letter on the blog. So here you go...! Merry Christmas! So of course I decorated for Christmas, and so I have to post some pictures! As our friend Jesse says, "it looks like a Christmas bomb went off in here!" And it most definitely does!

So this is our beautiful, "perfect" Christmas tree. And Zac would like me to point out that he was the one who decorated the tree. He set it up in the stand, put the lights on, topped it with a star, and arranged the ornaments so perfectly. I have to admit, he did a great job!



I have to take credit for these curtains. I found this fabric at Jo-Ann's on the red-tag clearance, and bought it on a day when all clearance items were half off, so they were dirt cheap, it was awesome! I think they turned out pretty great. I even had a happy miscalculation that made them turn out even better. After a measuring error, I ended up putting a band of the opposite color across the bottom of each curtain. You can't really see it in the picture, but when you see it in real life and you do notice it, I think it's actually a nice touch.

This is the rest of the room. Included in this picture is the advent calendar that my mom made for me.









I made these trees at Thanksgiving. They aren't actually done, but they are done enough for a picture I suppose.

There are some stuffed moose (or meese as my mom would say) in this picture that my mom gave me.










As you can see, one stocking has a "K" on it and the other is blank. This is because I couldn't find a stocking at any store that had a "Z" on it! How lame! So I will have to find a way to put a "Z" on it. And anyway my sister is supposed to be making me and Zac our special Christmas stockings, which we were supposed to get for Christmas, but, ehem, someone didn't finish! Chop Chop Rodent! (Rodent-that is what I call Kayla by-the-way. You should call her that too, she loves it.)



In this picture is a little wind-mill thing (I'm not really sure what you call these things) anyway, it is really cute, and my mom and sister got it for Zac and me when they were in Europe. Thanks guys!

This is the centerpiece on our table, and I have to say that I am pretty proud of it since I made it myself, and I think it turned out pretty awesome! I saw one like it at Costco for like 60 bucks and I said, "heck no!" to that price, so I went to Jo-Ann's and got the flowers and green foam stuff on a great sale, and the hurricane lamp and deer at Kohl's on an awesome 70% off sale and made the whole thing for like $20. Sweet huh?

By the way it is way cheaper to buy real poinsettias than the fake ones, and real is always so much better than fake! We got this one at Home Depot for like 6 or 7 dollars and the fake ones about the same size were about $20 even at Wal-Mart. The moose in this picture is from my mom, and the cute Santa Clause is from Ann (Zac's mom).

This is a picture of the little bar thing that divides our living/dinning room from the kitchen. If you look really closely in the picture on the left, you can see a Santa Clause in the background, I point this out because it is really cute, and my mom hand painted it. She made one for herself and her mom, and when she got back the one from her mom she gave it to me. Lucky me! Tough luck Rodent! Oh and also you may notice that there are two reindeer, one in each picture, at the ends of the bar. Mom told me to only take one, and leave one for you Rodent, but as you can see I took both! Ha! I can taunt my sister like this because she is currently out of the country on a cruise with my parents- without me! and I am slightly jealous, hence the taunting. And since she has something (a two week cruise around the bottom of South America!) slightly better to rub in my face (which she hasn't actually done yet, either because she is a better person than me, or the more likely reason, she has been too busy with finals to get around to it) I am taking the opportunity now to gloat in the fact that I got two reindeer instead of one!!!









Sorry you have to put these two pictures together in your mind. I took them with the panorama feature on our camera, but I'm not sure how to meld them together. On my old camera it did it for you, all on it's own, so now that I have to do it myself...well... I'm at a loss.

So anyway, you kind of get the picture of the Christmas bomb that went off in our apartment. As for some of the things we have done this month, on Dec. 6th we went to Zac's work Christmas party. It was a blast! We had dinner with a bunch of our friends, we talked and we even did some dancing. It was awesome because we could go out and dance, and look dumb, and nobody cared, or will remember because they were all so drunk. (Nice huh?)
We actually forgot our camera, but luckily Cat remembered to bring hers so we got some nice pictures from her.

This is Jesse, Cat, Zac, and myself. Kaylee, Ryan, and some other friends that we know from Stryker who are also members of the church (Jesse and Carly, and Don and Sarah) were also there, and we did get some pictures with them, but I still have to get them from Kaylee, because luckily she remembered to bring a camera too! Oh and Stryker also had a raffle and Zac actually won something! He won this cool i-home! We actually already have one but it was still cool to win something! And I "kind-of" won the table centerpiece. At the beginning of the raffle they said to count off around the table, Zac started so I was #2. They announced that #4 won the centerpiece. Well #4 was a girl that we didn't know, and she didn't seem very excited when she won, and when she and her friend left about 5 minutes later, and didn't come back, I was the first to speak up and say, "well 2 is half of 4, so I will take it!" Every one agreed; hence I "kind-of" won the table centerpiece.

Also this month, Cat and Jesse left for Hawaii for a weekend (lucky dogs!) so they let us watch little Pupface again! We loved every minute of it of course! And of course we had to put her in a Santa hat and take a picture! She is just so cute we couldn't resist!

Oh!!! Who knew napping could be so cute?!!

And Zac is a pretty big sucker for rubbing her tummy! She definitely gets spoiled when she is with us!
Also this month, we went to our ward Christmas party, which I made posters and cookies for. It was a Polar Express theme so everyone came in their pajamas. I wore my jingle bell reindeer slippers and reindeer antlers to the party. They were quite the hit, so it's too bad that we didn't take a picture of it. However, a number of people in the ward stopped me for a picture, because it was pretty funny looking, and they remembered their cameras! Zac wore the Santa hat, and luckily my mom had made him some pajama pants last year for Christmas, because he usually just wears basketball shorts, and basketball shorts don't really look like pajamas.
We also went to Zac's team party for work. It was at his boss's house with just the people he works with in Joint Preservation. It was really nice to get to meet his boss and all the people that he works with. His boss Stacey is so funny, incredibly nice, and a wonderful hostess. She made a wonderful dinner for us! Then Stacey and the Director of R&D , Todd, gave everyone a very nice plaque for being the founders of Joint Preservation and a couple of gag gifts. Zac got a Budweiser baseball cap with a bottle opener on it, because they teased him that since they go on outings where everyone drinks, and he obviously doesn't, at least this way he will be useful with his bottle opener. Everyone is actually very respectful of the fact that Zac doesn't drink, which is really awesome. They also got him some golf balls because they know how much he loves to golf. We also did a white elephant exchange, and we ended up with movie tickets and a white elephant goblet (which will come in handy as our gift to the next white elephant that we go to!) We also played a rousing game of Catch Phrase, which got a little intense, but it was all in good fun. I wish that I had remembered my camera, but as you can tell I forgot the camera for a lot of important functions! One of his co-workers, a really sweet girl, Lindsay, had a camera and was taking a lot of pictures, so maybe she can send some to Zac and we can post them.
This past Thursday we took the 45 minute drive into San Francisco to spend an evening there. We ate out at a restaurant on Market Street and topped it off with seeing Phantom of the Opera at the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco. It was so cool! I have seen it before but Zac hadn't so it was cool to see him experience it for the first time. We both loved it! We didn't end up getting home until 1 in the morning - on a work night! It felt like college again.
So all of that, plus of course work (Zac still at Stryker, and me substitute teaching),Christmas shopping, and callings at church, we have been pretty busy this month! We are leaving for Utah in a couple of days for Christmas and we are really excited for the break! We are going to spend Christmas with Zac's family, and it is going to be cool because almost all of his family will be there, even his sister who lives all the way out in Illinois. The only person who won't be there is his youngest brother Dallin who, is of course still on his mission in Hong Kong. We will be in Utah until Jan. 4, so we would love to see anyone who is or will be in Utah from Dec. 24 to Jan. 4.
We are so grateful for all of our friends and family. We are incredibly blessed, and we thank our Heavenly Father for it everyday. We wish everyone a Very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!
Love,
Kira and Zac Greenhalgh

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Decorations in November

Okay, so here are my Thanksgiving/Fall decorations. I suppose I am just kind of bragging about my decorating skills by posting these, but I do think it turned out really cute! And since it is now officially December I get to take them all down and decorate for Christmas! Yeah I love Christmas!



































Sunday, November 2, 2008

Posting Extravaganza!

Okay so I was really, really, really behind in posting so I decided to sit down and catch up on everything all at once. So I realize that there is a lot here, but most of it is pictures. So please read all 7 of the next posts! Most of them are short on words and big on pictures so it shouldn't take too long! I just wanted everyone to know that everything that is showing on the page is actually new. Okay thanks, enjoy!

Halloween Night

For Halloween Night we got together with Jesse, Cat, Ryan, and Kaylee. We all met up at Cat and Jesse's house, and of course little Pupface was there as well.
Jesse was a ninja, Cat was a geisha (but she got chocolate on her costume before we got a picture), and Pupface was Picachu.

Zac was a King, and I was a Queen. For anyone who might be worried, don't worry, I didn't actually dye my hair (or grow it really long overnight) this is actually a wig. I thought it would be fun. I look so different right? The little blurr you see at the bottom right of the picture is Pupface jumping up trying to be in the picture. Our costumes turned out pretty well considering I only had four days to do all of it! I made Zac's top and pants, my dress, and both capes. Plus factor in that I had to buy the patterns in kid sizes since they were out of adult sizes, so I had to alter the patterns, cut out all the fabric, and my sewing machine kept freaking out on me and making my life just that much more difficult! We tried to make these really cool crowns too, but they ended up looking more like chef's hats than crowns, so we just used these pre-made ones. It was hard work, but I think it paid off, because they turned out really cool.

Ryan and Kaylee were presents. I thought that was a pretty cute idea.




For our first activity we made gram cracker haunted houses. We decided to make it a competition of girls vs. boys. I think you can guess who won. The girls of course! I will have to admit however that the boys had some really good architectural ideas, but it took them so long to put it all together that they didn't have any time to decorate. This is a picture of the boys haunted house.

This is the front side of the girls.





And this is the back side.


For our second activity we broke up into couples and we each got a bag of random stuff and we played Halloween "Project Runway" for Pupface to see who could make the cutest costume for her.


This is Jesse and Cat's witch costume.







This is Zac and my witch costume.





And this is Ryan and Kaylee's pirate costume.









She looked so cute in all of them that we decided to call it a tie.

After that we did a murder mystery game, and that was really fun. We all picked character books, and learned secret information, played charades, and revealed information. After we all submitted our guess as to who the murder was we discussed it as a group. All though no one guessed right on their individual guess, as a group the majority of us did correctly guess Zac's character as the murder.

We had a really great time, and we are so grateful that we have such awesome friends who like to get together and do this totally fun, yet somewhat corny types of things with us. All in all, we had a great Halloween!

Halloween at Stryker

Stryker celebrated Halloween on the Wednesday before Halloween (why I don't know, seeing as how Halloween actually fell on a Friday, but that is how they decided to do it). Each group dressed up together with a theme. Joint Preservation (Zac's group) decided to go as gangsters. So this is Zac's thug costume. He looks so tough huh? And yes he did grow and shave a goatee just for this occasion.
This is Zac's team. From left to right is, Kyle Pilgeram (he is in R&D), Lindsay Matz (Buyer), Zac Greenhalgh (Planner), Eli Perez (Material Coordinator), Vicki Onyabor (Quality Engineer) and Gabe Castillo (Packager). They discovered when they got to work that they were all different types of gangsters, but it still worked. Kyle was a mobster type, Lindsay was an East Coast type, Zac was Malibu's most wanted, Eli was a Bay area thug, Vicki was a Mexican chickida type, and Gabe was scare the crap out of you if you cross him type.

Pumpkin Carving Night

The Friday before Halloween Zac and I got together with Jesse and Cat to carve some pumpkins. It was a fun and yes, messy night. Zac and I went to the pumpkin patch first, mostly for the fun experience, and decided the pumpkins were too expensive (we would have paid $36 for 2 pumpkins!) there so we went to the grocery store and bought the same size pumpkins for $7 for both!





Obviously the cat is mine, the skull in cross bones Cat and Jesse did together, and the haunted house is Zac's. So cute huh?!

Halloween Decorations!

Ok so I was really proud of the awesome decorating job that I did for Halloween so I had to post some of the pictures. Cute and spooky all at the same time right?



























































I understand that all the pictures are rather random and probably hard to put together if you haven't been to our apartment before, but it all looks cohesive when you see it together, I promise!