Our annual holiday letter is now available online. Please visit to view it:
http://www.hollyandrew.com/holidayletter
Then come back here and leave us a comment! We'd love to see whose "visiting" us, and I'd love to hear what you all think of the online vs. receiving paper letters with your card.
And as usual, I'm way behind on my blogging. I have Andrew's birthday and our holiday weekend in Central Wisconsin to get updated. Hoping I'll get to it soon! The Christmas festivity preparations have kept me away from the computer quite a bit lately.
We hope all our faithful readers have a wonderful holiday and happy New Year! I'll be back soon with updates (but I know you've all heard that one before).
12/23/2008
12/08/2008
Hurry Down the Chimney Tonight
Santa baby, I want a yacht and really that's not a lot
Been an angel all year
Santa baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight
Santa baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight
We've been listening to some Christmas music around here. :-) It's really cute, I've caught Lily humming "Happy Holidays" and she can sing "Jingle Bells". She's definitely our musical child. Oh, and "fa la la la". She sings that too.
Andrew was out of town this weekend to schmooze with the 49ers and Jets clients at the game in San Francisco. So the girls and I came up with various holiday activities to occupy us. We attempted a little Santa penguin art project. It was a pom pom kit. Didn't really work out. The glue wasn't sticking. Very frustrating (at least for me. When asked
later in the day what her favorite part of the day was, Ella said making the penguin. So apparently we had different experiences with it). :-)
I also got out the box of Christmas Little People and told the girls to work together to build a Santa village. Here's a photo from that. This was taken about 30 seconds before they lost interest in the "working together" part of my project. Funny sidenote though: Various pieces of the Christmas Little People sets play music when you push on them. Lily brought two pieces that light up and play music up to my bathroom this morning while I was in the shower. She set them up and pressed them to play the music and then ran away. I guess this was her version of ding dong ditch. ;-)
After playing outside in the snow while I shoveled, we came inside and started writing letters to Santa. The girls have
made it very clear to me that we will not be visiting Santa in person this year (so no Santa pictures. ;-( I let them know that we could write a letter to Santa instead, so he would still know what they wanted. In November, we visited Toys R Us as a family so they could do a little Christmas browsing to decide what they really REALLY wanted this year. We had a conversation about how Santa can only bring one or two gifts to each child because he has so many gifts to give out on Christmas Eve. So they might not get EVERYTHING they ask for. I was planning on having them write letters and then dropping them in our mailbox for the mailman to take. BUT, when we were at Chaska Community Center for Ella's speech appointment last week, we noticed a mailbox there. It was specifically for Santa! AND "Santa" will write a letter back to the child if you leave your letter there. PERFECT! So Saturday night the girls and I worked on their letters. Here's some photos:
Lily's letter says: Dear Santa, I really like the Princess cash register I saw at Target with my mom. I really want Santa to write me a letter. I'm excited for you to bring me a present. I have been good this year. Merry Christmas! Lily (She actually told me most of that. I added the "good this year" part.)
Here is Ella's: Dear Santa, For Christmas I would like the white toy kitty I saw at the toy store. I was very good this year for Mom and Dad. Hope you have a good trip to give all the gifts. I'll leave some milk and cookies for you. Ella PS. I would also like the baby doll I saw. Merry Christmas. (She, obviously, wrote the Dear Santa and the Merry at the end. If you look really close, you can see the Santa she drew at the bottom in the middle. And those are ornaments she drew all the way around.) But look at her envelope! Isn't it cute?
Can you read the P.P.S.? She wanted to make sure Santa knew about our outside Christmas lights because it would make it really easy to find our house :-)
We'll see if we hear back from Santa. We had a lot of fun doing the letters. It's been a lot of fun this year. Ella has had a lot of questions about Santa. How does he get in? How does he get through the glass of our fireplace? How do the letters get to him? Where is the North Pole, etc.
Enough rambling for one night, I'll close with a cute photo of Ella in her Santa hat. I made this for her two years ago. She didn't wear it at all last year. She found it in the closet two days ago and hasn't taken it off since. In fact, she's even slept in it the last two nights and wore it all day at school today. I just find that adorable.
Andrew was out of town this weekend to schmooze with the 49ers and Jets clients at the game in San Francisco. So the girls and I came up with various holiday activities to occupy us. We attempted a little Santa penguin art project. It was a pom pom kit. Didn't really work out. The glue wasn't sticking. Very frustrating (at least for me. When asked
later in the day what her favorite part of the day was, Ella said making the penguin. So apparently we had different experiences with it). :-)I also got out the box of Christmas Little People and told the girls to work together to build a Santa village. Here's a photo from that. This was taken about 30 seconds before they lost interest in the "working together" part of my project. Funny sidenote though: Various pieces of the Christmas Little People sets play music when you push on them. Lily brought two pieces that light up and play music up to my bathroom this morning while I was in the shower. She set them up and pressed them to play the music and then ran away. I guess this was her version of ding dong ditch. ;-)
After playing outside in the snow while I shoveled, we came inside and started writing letters to Santa. The girls have
made it very clear to me that we will not be visiting Santa in person this year (so no Santa pictures. ;-( I let them know that we could write a letter to Santa instead, so he would still know what they wanted. In November, we visited Toys R Us as a family so they could do a little Christmas browsing to decide what they really REALLY wanted this year. We had a conversation about how Santa can only bring one or two gifts to each child because he has so many gifts to give out on Christmas Eve. So they might not get EVERYTHING they ask for. I was planning on having them write letters and then dropping them in our mailbox for the mailman to take. BUT, when we were at Chaska Community Center for Ella's speech appointment last week, we noticed a mailbox there. It was specifically for Santa! AND "Santa" will write a letter back to the child if you leave your letter there. PERFECT! So Saturday night the girls and I worked on their letters. Here's some photos:
Lily's letter says: Dear Santa, I really like the Princess cash register I saw at Target with my mom. I really want Santa to write me a letter. I'm excited for you to bring me a present. I have been good this year. Merry Christmas! Lily (She actually told me most of that. I added the "good this year" part.)
Here is Ella's: Dear Santa, For Christmas I would like the white toy kitty I saw at the toy store. I was very good this year for Mom and Dad. Hope you have a good trip to give all the gifts. I'll leave some milk and cookies for you. Ella PS. I would also like the baby doll I saw. Merry Christmas. (She, obviously, wrote the Dear Santa and the Merry at the end. If you look really close, you can see the Santa she drew at the bottom in the middle. And those are ornaments she drew all the way around.) But look at her envelope! Isn't it cute?
Can you read the P.P.S.? She wanted to make sure Santa knew about our outside Christmas lights because it would make it really easy to find our house :-)
We'll see if we hear back from Santa. We had a lot of fun doing the letters. It's been a lot of fun this year. Ella has had a lot of questions about Santa. How does he get in? How does he get through the glass of our fireplace? How do the letters get to him? Where is the North Pole, etc.
Enough rambling for one night, I'll close with a cute photo of Ella in her Santa hat. I made this for her two years ago. She didn't wear it at all last year. She found it in the closet two days ago and hasn't taken it off since. In fact, she's even slept in it the last two nights and wore it all day at school today. I just find that adorable.
Gatorade Update
Hi there. Did I make it with a new post within a week? Well, it was close. ;-) Soooo, remember how I commented that we might not be able to show photos for security reasons? Well, I was all set to post them (I even have it drafted and saved) and Andrew received a new email from the client (Gatorade) on Friday stating once again the dire repercussions if anyone leaks anything having to do with the the shoots or rebranding of Gatorade. Oh-kay. Well, we don't want Andrew to get fired. So, we'll just save that post and I'll upload it when the new Gatorade campaign launches next month. The commercials (that Andrew's company did not work on) will air during the Super Bowl. The web launch (the stuff the Famous Group did) will launch before that in January. Sorry to get you all excited once again. But we'll revisit that topic in a little while. :-)
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