Christmas 2010

Our Christmas this year! Not my best Oh Holy Night performance because we had less than 15 minutes to put this together last minute. But enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w27sfANlLBE

Much Thanksgiving

Since the last post our family has been involved in a tons of stuff. Thanksgiving found us celebrating with the Dave and Kim's family. We played games, ate lots of food and of course stuffed ourselves in our turkey but our turkey was not not stuffed with stuffings though because that dries up the turkey you see. WOW our turkey was so moist the meat fell off the bones as we lifted it. Yummy....
The day after Thanksgiving I was involved in an Annual Macy's Christmas parade downtown. It's a pretty big thing for Seattlites and a lot of people participated. I marched for the 5th Avenue Theater's A Christmas Carol. We got free tickets to go see it and can't wait!


Christmas means pictures and since I started this hobby, a couple of families asked me to do their pictures. Check out my photograhy blog! http://seastevensphotography.blogspot.com/ We also decided to take a family portrait as well for our Christmas cards. We just got the tripod out, I set it up and cheese! See how much the kids have grown since June when we took this picture by the lake?




You know winter has started in the northwest when almost every night before you go to sleep you hear the sound of the raindrops on your roof top. Yes we're getting more rains in, but we're still not quite sure why it rains so much at night. We love it. During the day it drizzles a bit but the sun comes out and dries up the rain and yes, we do see rainbows here quite often. The kids love that. My mom though, did not see much rain at all while she was here. My mom came out totally expecting to see rain, but nope. She was out here for 6 days and 5 days of it was sunny with 1 partially cloudy day. We were able to do outdoor things with her but she didn't care to see anything except her grand kids. She really enjoyed her time with them. She knows she already loves Seattle and is planning on moving here after my siblings are done with school (fingers crossed). We did take her to the Seattle Center to see all the Christmas lights and the famous fountain that plays music. She had me prepared the paper work to bring all of her siblings to the U.S. A day I hope to see soon. It would be a wonderful day. She is missed.



Figgy putting choral competition

Last month I joined Glee Club so I sang with them for the figgy pudding competition to raise money for the Pike Place senior center and downtown food bank. My mom was able to be here to watch the kids so that Dan and I could go to the event together. Dan had a great time and really enjoyed it; most especially because he was able to take his long board down on a block of a downtown street that was blocked off. If you haven't been to Seattle, downtown is very hilly like San Francisco, maybe even worse and about the only area where it's flat is the Westlake center where the event was held. Since then however, he's been riding down by the piers during his lunch break and really enjoys the view of Puget Sound and being so close to the water. Anyway here's a snippet of his fun ride.


We're getting ready for Christmas and getting into the Christmas spirit by doing various different things to help us remember the greatest gift God gave us. His Son. I gave the ward another solo, my 6th solo this year or something like that in the ward. I was asked 2 days before since the person that was supposed to do it couldn't do it anymore so the music coordinator asked me to substitute. There's a lot of talented people. I don't know why she asked me. But anyway I opened the Christmas season for the ward with "What child is this?" Dan got in the spirit of giving also by taking his very nice and thick jacket that he's worn only a couple of times and gave it to a homeless guy. The jacket made the guy's night. Here's a picture of the guy wearing Dan's jacket.

Our recent getting into the Christmas spirit was a visit to the Issaquah Cougar Mountain Zoo where Santa's house and reindeers are currently getting ready for Christmas with friends and had a wonderful time. Reena wrote letters to Santa asking him to bring her gifts to give Jesus.
Brie loved the reindeer.


Reena wants to be an angel for Christmas.

We're doing things out of tradition this year. We're hanging Christmas hats instead of stockings.

Our Christmas cards are out! We hope you all will enjoy what we wrote to you. LOVE, The Stevens.

News

Greetings from the Northwest Pacific! Our weather news - it snowed! 2 inches. The whole Seattle is shut down. Nobody wants to drive around in these monstrous hills and land in the water. But hey, after it snowed, it's always sunny and ski resorts are opened now because of that. And it is that time again to make fun of weather.com. We've woken up many times this week with sunny weather and yet we got the opposite from weather.com. But it just has to rain even a little bit in the vicinity for it to make it to the weather column as rainy so ok we'll forgive them. They're probably going to be mostly right because this year is La Nina. Great, we're building a home. More delays. That's ok because that means we can save up more. Hopefully anyway. The house is at Architectural Review Stage. Sighs, building a custom home in a new community is a lonnnnnnnng process.

I'm way behind on blogging so let me go back and review the events of the last part of October and beginning of November. Reena had her primary program. She did great until her mommy got up to conduct, which was less than a minute from her little line "I will follow faithfully". She did her line so beautifully and sweetly that I even got complimented on it later. But the whole time that we were singing and I conducting she was making eye contact with me and asking for a cracker. "No Reena, mamma doesn't have a cracker so be quiet!"

Big news this month, not bad news (we'll leave that for the media), is that we've moved. We wanted a cozy little place to be for the winter while we wait for our house to go up. We figured that anything we could save up will go towards the house so why not live simple for the next 8-9 months. So we packed everything up and 1-2-3 we're here.
It's small but has amenities to make up for it. We're lucky to be right next to the facility they have with an indoor pool and hot tub, basketball court, kids playroom and a gym. I especially love the gym for training because my sister asked me to join her in the Utah half marathon in April.
The goals for us moving to an apartment to wait for our house to be built are: to get a head start on packing; to save up both in energy usage and money in general. The other unspoken goal is living a simple life. We started off the first week saying we'll unpack only the things we need and keep the rest in their boxes. Like I said, this lasted a week. After a week of not baking, it drove me crazy and I now have gotten some new kitchen appliances to add on to my other kitchen appliances in the boxes.

Our cozy hibernating hole for the winter. 3 bedrooms though not quite as nice as our 2 bedroom luxury apartment on the 21st floor looking out to the bay in Seattle.
We had a whole entire pool and hot tub to ourselves! No way!

I ran 5k, then jumped in the fun with the fam!

Pumpkin Time or Play Time
Pumpkins are super cheap here. We got 4 pumpkins for $12. You could even go and get free pumpkins after Halloween is over before they push them all down into the ground.
So we got a huge pumpkin and the lady at Remlinger Farms just gave it to us for $3. You can tell the size difference here on an average carving pumpkin as compared to this one.
Reena carved hers as a cat. For Brie I just cut out some holes and she turned it into a huge Mr. Potato or Mr.Pumpkin in this case. The rest I cut out, cooked and froze. I've since then turned into this yummy pumpkin pancakes. What a wonderful way to sneak some veggies into your kids diet. They love Mickey Mouse pumpkin pancakes.
You can also tell when I used the iphone to take pictures and when I used my photographer's camera. Ah. Craving some right now.

This year Dan's birthday fell on a Sunday and since we were moving on Saturday, the day before his birthday, we decided to celebrate his birthday on Monday. I looked around at different restaurants, and found one that looks so good. Danube Bistro was the name of the restaurant. It served food from the Danube region; Italian, German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Russian, Peruvian food. It was amazing. A true gem. We had some mouth watering authentic dishes that night in the beautiful downtown Bellevue. I called ahead of time and even got them to bring Dan a dessert and candle out for his birthday. They brought him creme brulee, for free!

First big purchase, I mean, ahem, that's right Dan had a birthday. Yay! Wow doesn't he look amazing? I got the coolest and cutest Stevens boy!Buying boarding supplies with daddy.

Dan was so excited for his very first long board. He got it, put it together, took it for a spin in the parking lot (smart move this time :D) and then created a template using grip tape and placed it on his long board.
Here is the finished product. He did a great job, didn't he?! Of course it has to be a guy getting hit in the head with a toilet and falling over. Oh Dan.

Harry Potter Exhibit and Store!!!
Dan and I are big Harry Potter fans. I took the kids to see the exhibit and bookstore because I was so excited but of course they were more excited to see the science center. Can't wait for my mother to come babysit the kids so Dan and I could go back and check out everything they used on sets to film Harry Potter. I can still remember the night the last book came out. We stood in line for 3 hours until 3:00 AM to get that book and because of that I stayed up all night to read it and finished it in 3 days because I couldn't stop. Luckily, Nama, the kids grandma was there to help take care of Reena. She probably thought I was the craziest daughter in law ever.

And to add to that craziness, I joined the Seattle Glee club. I sent them my youtube music and they expressed interest in my voice, asked me to come in for an audition/rehearsal and welcomed me into the club. So there, I'm in Glee. They have opportunities for solo performances so it sounds alright. They're competing in a Christmas celebration to raise money for charity. Sounds fun, right? We'll see. My composer has about 50 songs for me to learn so I'm not sure how much time I have to dedicate to this club. It's more of an opportunity to expand beyond my group of church friends. Not much missionary opportunity there.

Here is Brie trying on Harry Potter's glasses at the Harry Potter store. She looks like Harry Potter's grandma. I know she acts older than her age, like being potty trained already and such but this old?! Speaking of potty trained, she's amazing. She'll tell you that she needs to go potty now.
I took Reena to the Festival of Trees at the Fairmont hotel in Seattle. It was beautiful and so majestic. I forgot my camera and the pictures from the iphone just aren't right to show how beautiful the 20 Christmas trees were, so I'll have to come back for pictures. But here's a a cute picture we caught on camera of Reena reading to her sister that will make you go awe....

Costume and Party

It's beautiful because it's all around us. We don't have to drive to canyons and wooded areas to see this. We simply step outside. You see clouds in the sky, we see colors.
(The leaves are all red now since I took this picture)

The past 2 weeks have been unusually busy for the Seattle Stevens. We managed to keep ourselves busy. I see people who do so much busy work and I wonder why. I'm terrified at the idea of aging and there is definitely a correlation between overexerting oneself and aging. Our goal for coming to Seattle was to to be adventurous and keep a blog on our lives while having fun and staying young, which for Dan is long boarding, despite past experience. Aye! (More to come on the next blog about his birthday).
The ordinary of the past couple of weeks for me is taking the kids to different places to entertain them, teaching preschool, visiting the homeless, crafting, going to my composer's house and learning his music. The un-ordinary is recording the music with crazy wild kids in the studio. I've considered joining theater and the Seattle glee club which expressed interest after listening to my youtube video, but I'm a soloist more than a group or choir person. I enjoyed doing Women's Chorus at BYU but again, I like to be a soloist and have my voice be heard singly rather than in a group. Then again, what's more important than spending time with family? Something I think a lot of us forgets when we try to do so much. But we don't want to bore you with the details of the ordinary so if you want to skip down to the pictures, you may do so now.
The ordinary for Dan is working at Amazon, playing with his expensive computer toys, being a great daddy. The un-ordinary for Dan is his new band. He spent a good number of hours picking out songs he would like the band to play for him to sing. For a while our house was full of music. We're both soloists. He inspired me to write a grunt song for his rock band and reminded me that I fell in love with his sexy rock star voice before I completely fell in love with him :)
For Reena and Debrie there is no ordinary. Everything I'm going to mention is out of the ordinary, at least to me.
Reena took a pair of scissors and chopped off her bangs. This was following her painting extravaganza. She and Debrie really love scarecrows. They're had more fun going from one scarecrow to the next rather than picking out their pumpkins from the pumpkin patch. I had fun taking pictures and this one here is my favorite. Reena shaking hands with Mr. Crow. He looks excited to meet her as well.

Debrie because she is potty trained, doesn't like having accidents in her diapers or pull ups. She thinks she owns the toilet. If you're on it, she will fuss and indicates to you that she needs to go potty. She will point to her diaper and holds it just like her sister when her sister needs to go badly. We could hardly believe that our 17 month old is potty trained.
However, here is the fun part. One day when we put her down for a nap she didn't want to go down but instead made the biggest mess I've ever seen. She tried to change herself and you can let your imagination go wild. She had poop all over herself and smeared it on the wall and all over the crib. She was covered head to toe with that nasty stuff. I refrained from posting the picture I took of that event and am replacing it with this one. She doesn't allow us to feed her. So she feeds herself at the dinner table and this is how she usually looks after each meal.


These are the adventures we had in the last part of October and early November that are unique and out of the ordinary.
I flipped through an old magazine I got in college and saw this. Had to make it! So the idea for a tea party came to mind.
I taught the kids how to set the table correctly and fold a sleeping bag napkin
Notice the decor in the background. Reena did the decorations.

The cake was a pumpkin pie cake. Very moist and i love the coconut on top with cream cheese frosting.
I opted for making these ladybugs rather than the ones in the magazine. It had cherry tomatoes on crackers with cream cheese and black olives for the head. I don't think any of the kids would've touched that. But these were a hit and this is my original idea so I was pretty happy.




Halloween Night
I thought I was done with Halloween costume when I made my Reena her Tinkerbell costume and Brie has Silvermist but Reena wanted to be a mermaid instead for this Halloween. So I got down and for a couple of hours I finished it in time for her T party. It was bit difficult because I did it without a pattern but it impressed my seamstress mother so I was pleased. We had a lot of fun trick or treating and chatting with our friends while eating their chocolate.
Reena wanted Brie to be a mermaid like her so that made it easy. Same fabric and almost the same pattern.




Going for a swim with her clam sandwich.
Dan's birthday, the move, the new route. See you on the next blog!