December

Date Night in San Francisco (Jan. 16, 2009)


Zac and I have wanted to go see the play Wicked for a long time because we had heard from just about everyone that it was absolutely amazing. So when we found out it was coming to San Fran we decided to make a date night out of it.

We started the night by going to dinner at our (okay maybe my) favorite restaurant: Red Lobster! I had to take some pictures of the delicious food! We had lobster and crab and shrimp, and cheese biscuits, it was awesome! Plus we had gift cards, so it was totally free, which made it doubly awesome!!!

Then we drove the rest of the way into downtown San Francisco to the Orpheum Theater. It is a beautiful old theater right in the middle of town on Market Street, it is the same theater we went to last year about this same time to see the Phantom of the Opera.

As promised the play was awesome, and we loved it! I had actually read the book before going to the play and I was surprised by how completely different they were. At some points I wasn't sure they could even be considered "loosely based" on each other. But that is not necessarily a bad thing, the play was much better than the book actually. The book is interesting because you get a lot more detail of the story, but the storyline they created for the play is much better (and happier) then the one in the book, so I'm glad they changed it like they did.

It was a great night, and I love going on dates with my incredibly cute husband. I love that he actually enjoys and seeks out cultural events like musicals and plays, and it is not something that I have to drag him along for. Plus we always enjoy getting to go to San Francisco, it is such a cool place! In my opinion it is like a million times cooler than San Jose; however, the cost of living is even higher there than here so I think we will just have to settle for living 45 minutes away and just going to visit. Plus we really love Monterey too, and living in San Jose puts us equidistant from both, so it probably works out better living here anyway.

Making Christmas Presents

So I was overly ambitious and decided to try and make personal gifts for everyone for Christmas this year. In all honesty I took on more than I could handle considering that it is now February and I still have not technically finished. I am still working on the gifts for my mom, my sister, and Zac's mom. However, I did finish the gifts for Zac's sister (Heather) and her family. And since we finally shipped them off (almost a month late) and they have opened their gifts I can now post the pictures! They turned out quite well if I do say so myself so I thought I would take some pictures to show the world my mad skills.

I made this bag for Heather.

I made this tie for Quentin.

This robe for Geneva.

And this robe for Wesley.

Mad skills right? Thanks. Guess I better get busy and put those mad skills to use finishing everyone elses very late Christmas gifts.

On the 17th we had Zac's work Christmas party. I even remembered to bring the camera this year, but still managed to forget to take any pictures. I was really hoping to get a picture of Zac with his old boss Stacey and his new boss Tom, but oh well, I guess I will just have to wait for another Stryker event.

This picture was after the party just before I left to go home, we decided we needed a Christmas picture like last year, so here is our happy family Christmas photo!


Washington

In order for me to use my mom's free ticket and so that some family members would be able to visit I left for Washington a week before Zac. Zac couldn't take very much time off of work so unfortunately he had to stay back and work a little longer.

Baby Shower (Dec. 19, 2009)

My first day back home and they throw me a party! Okay technically maybe it was more for the baby than for me, but it was still really fun! My mom and my cousin Kristin (who flew all the down from Alaska to be there!!) threw me the cutest shower, and I had a ton of family and friends there, and that really meant a lot to me, it was great getting to see everyone. By the way I apologize for the pictures, I got the pictures from my mom, but her computer apparently ruined a bunch of her pictures, so some of the pictures are a little chopped up or have weird colors on them. Luckily my mom still had the pictures on her camera so she re-downloaded them on to her computer, but I haven't got the good pictures yet, so you will just have to deal with the less than perfect ones. :)

Here is me, and my best friend Lexy.

My other mother: Sandy, her mom Winks, and Lexy's daughter Taylor.

My wonderful Aunt Linda, and my cousin's wife Shannon.

My cousins Christi and Heidi.

My wonderful mother, and my other mother Audrey.

Me with my cousin Kristin who made this really cute baby "cake" for me out of diapers, onesies(sp?), and other little baby things. It was a lot of work on her part and I REALLY, REALLY appreciate all that she did for me!

I was really happy that so much of my family made a special trip to celebrate this time with me. I feel very loved, and very special! (And so does "Baby" since she got a ton of really cute stuff!)

Serving Dinner at the Homeless Shelter (Dec. 21, 2009)

Every year my mom likes to have us do a service project for those who are less fortunate than us. We usually do a Christmas breakfast for the homeless at a shelter through the Girl Scouts, but apparently the Girl Scouts stopped doing the breakfast, and all the shelters we called didn't need any more volunteers on Christmas, so we opted to go a little before Christmas.

Our neighbor Linda, Kayla, Kevin, my mom, and myself were all able to go to downtown Vancouver and spend a couple hours preparing and serving dinner to the shelter. As always it was a good and humbling experience. I am so incredibly grateful for all the blessings that I have: a beautiful apartment, two working cars, a really great husband, and a wonderful family. I am so glad my mom takes the time to make sure we do service like this to help us remember just how blessed we truly are.

The Christmas Tree Hunt (Dec. 23, 2009)

So better late than never we decided to go get a couple of Christmas trees, mostly for the experience, since we usually do it every year, and we have a hard time letting go of traditions. My parents had already bought a Christmas tree for the front room from the High School, so we got a couple small trees to put in my room and Kayla's room. Although we were too busy with projects to actually decorate them, it was nice to have a festive touch in my room, and it smelled wonderful. Plus it wouldn't be Christmas with out a Christmas tree hunt.

Oh and this year Mesa got to come, even though his presence stunk up the truck significantly. But I think he thoroughly enjoyed himself, and I'm glad we brought him. He was excited by the snow, and being in the great outdoors without a leash on, he kept rolling in the snow just for the fun of it. However, his greatest joy still came from someone throwing the ball for him, anyone who knows Mesa is not surprised by this (you may be able to tell in this picture that he is staring intently at his ball, setting it there was the only way to get him to be in the picture).

Christmas Lights (Dec. 23, 2009)

Later that night after the Christmas tree hunt Zac was finally able to fly in, and the first thing we did was to drive into Portland and see the Christmas lights on Peacock Lane.

We had a bit of an interesting experience trying to use the bathroom at the local Walgreen's while we were there. It is downtown Portland so it is understandable that they have a policy of making you buy something to be able to use the bathroom, but most people would make an exception for a women who is clearly 6 months pregnant and in desperate need of a bathroom, well this checker would not. So since I needed more pre-natal vitamins we went to look for them, of course the ones I use were the only ones they were completely out of. So we decided on a pack of gummy bears instead, we checked out, and the lady forgets about the bathroom key! I reminded her, and she was like, "oh yeah" and she called someone to open it for me. Then when I got in it was filthy and there was no toilet paper or paper towels. It really shouldn't have been a big deal, but I was (and still get- even writing about it) slightly irritated by the situation, I'm going to blame hormones for that.

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

Onto the main event, the best day of the year!

Here we are on Christmas Eve hanging our stockings, in our new Christmas Eve pajamas. It is a tradition in my family to get a new pair of pjs on Christmas Eve (my sister and I always get matching ones, even now when we are in our 20's and married). It is also usually a tradition that my mom makes these pajamas and she is usually making them on Christmas Eve, well apparently this year she decided to save herself the trouble and bought us pjs instead. So I stepped in to fill the void and I was busy sewing pj pants for Zac (they have golf balls on them- he is not a big fan of pajama pants- but he loves these!) and for my mom. Thanks mom for passing the procrastination/try to do too much torch on to me! Of course we also watched our traditional Christmas movies, that my mom grew up watching, and now Kayla and I have grown up watching. Zac and Kevin are still warming up to them, I have made Zac amend his original assessment of "lame" to "cheesy." I guess without the attached nostalgia of having watched these your whole life, I could see how maybe they are not quite so cool, but I still love them none the less.

On Christmas morning we decide to hand out Christmas breakfast bags since there wasn't a specific shelter we could visit. It was still really fun, and we found a lot people who were really grateful for some extra food that morning.

After that we made our traditional trip to IHOP for breakfast with the Hadenfeld family. We always get way too full, and enjoy hanging out and talking. The boys all talked sports and school stuff on one side of the table and the girls all talked baby stuff on the other side. Lexy had just announced that she is pregnant with their second child! Congrats to Lexy and Ben (and Taylor who is going to be a big sister soon!)

After breakfast we came back home and started opening our loot, but of course we had to take a family picture, another McKay family tradition. And yes my cat is in a Santa suit, yes he does look dashing, surprisingly he was not that upset, and yes Zac does think that it is absoutley ridiculous that I take so much pleasure in dressing up my poor cat.

Here are all of our overstuffed stockings. If you are observant you will have noticed that there are 8 stocking there and there are only 6 people in our family. That is why 2 of them are empty. You see 2 years ago when Zac and I moved from Utah to California we lost our stockings, I thought they got lost in the move, and I was pretty upset about it. Well Kayla, bless her heart, agreed to learn from my Aunt Linda how to knit the stockings and decided to make new ones for me and Zac. Well over the past 2 years my sister has given (and re-given) me our stockings for various occasions (about 5 times) all in various stages of almost done-ness. I tried to tease her only slightly because I know they were a lot of work, and I was really grateful she was doing it, but I did think it was funny how many times I recieved them as a present, so I couldn't pass up the opportunity to tease her a little. Anyway right before I was getting ready to come out for Christmas I was looking through some empty boxes I had saved, well turns out, one wasn't as empty as I thought, and low and behold I found our old stockings! Of course it was right about now that Kayla acutally finished them and was planning on giving them to me completely done. Perfect timing! Oops! Well thanks for making them Kayla! Anyway now we have 2 sets, and 2 is better than none!

This last picture is all of us with all of our loot! We made out like bandits, it was pretty sweet! Thanks mom and dad!

Projects

So right after Christmas Zac decided to throw himself into a huge undertaking of a project. He decided to build our daughter her crib! We looked at a bunch of cribs and of course the one that I liked the best was $430, way, way out of our price range. Well I suggested to my mom, that maybe my dad could make us a crib instead since cribs were all so expensive. My mom didn't think my dad would have enough time to finish the crib, so I suggested that Zac could help over Christmas. Well this project kept getting bigger and bigger. Instead of using a pattern Zac designed the plans himself so he could make it similar to the one that I liked, they went to my dad's favorite hardwood store and my dad bought us real mahogany to make the crib out of, and Zac spent numberous hours from sun up to sun down working with my dad's help on this crib. He had full access to my dad's state of the art shop and all of his "fun toys" without which Zac never would have been able to make such an impressive crib. My dad taught Zac new skills, and Zac helped encourage my dad out of his comfort zone: the need for a "real pattern" and to just make a crib from scratch.

They did a spectacular job and the crib looks absoultely amazing! Against all odds Zac was able to finish most of the crib before we had to leave, although he was still staining up until an hour before we were supposed to leave for our flight. They got all the pieces cut out and stained, and from there my dad just had to glue them together after the stain dried and spray on the finish. However the story doesn't end here, it continues next month...

Well I couldn't let Zac be the only one who was crafty and make something super special for our daughter. So I decided to make her bedding, with my mom's help of course! It took me like 2 days just to decide on a color scheme, but I finally settled on pink, green, and yellow with little birds, vines and flowers. As you can see from this picture of the quilt squares Morteki approves of my color choices.

Instead of making an easy quilt I decided to design my own pattern. As you can see Zac and I suffer from similar conditions that make us create more work for ourselves to get what we really want.

I spent most of my time designing, and my mom did the executing. I designed and cut out the bumpers, bedskirt and diaper bag and my mom took on the task of sewing them, and with the mink-y fabric I picked that was actually not a very easy task, I'm glad she agreed to do it for me because I don't think it would have turned out as nice if I had done it instead.

So basically if you haven't noticed already this little girl is not even born yet and is already completly spoiled with a completly custom made bedroom set compliments of her parents and grandparents! Plus as it turns out making a crib and making bedding turns out to be nearly as expensive as buying them already made, so we are incredibly INCREDIBLY grateful to my parents for buying the wood and fabric for us, and the use of their extensive collections of tools which made these special items possible. We are absoultely in love with what we have created and we certainly could not have done it without the generosity, skills, and talents of my parents, so if we haven't already told you enough mom and dad... Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! You are both so awesome and we love you so much!

Well that was the month of December. I told you it would be long! As you can see the story of our "projects" continues on into January so stay tuned for more on that later!