Snow fun

Back in December Andrew and the girls spent some time playing outside. It was a perfect day for making snowmen. And we had the "Snowman Accessory Kit" (bought from where else, but Target!). Andrew went about making a BIG snowman while Ella made her own. Lily sort of "helped" Andrew.

The funny part was that Andrew made the bottom ball of the snowman HUGE! Then proceeded to make the middle ball just as large as the first one. So he had a heck of time getting the second ball on top of the first. And did I help him? No way, I stood back with my camera, laughing hysterically at him! Elaspsed time of the photos below: 0:30 minutes. :-)


Surveying the situation

Plan A: We'll just lift it on up there.

Meanwhile: Lily's in charge of quality control and Ella builds her own snowman.

Yeah, this is not going to work.

Moving on to Plan B: Using a smaller ball to roll the big one up. (Notice Ella has her third ball on her snowman in the background.)

Ella's snowman she built "all by myself".

Plan B not going so well.

Making another attempt.

Oh, I got it this time! Yeah!

Not so much.

Meanwhile, Lily is putting on a show for me. This is Jingle Bells with a big finish.

Ah, Finally!



Top left: Ella putting finishing touches on her snowman, Top right: Andrew's snowman with Lily to give you a sense of how big this snowman was. Bottom left: Our snowman family. Bottom right: Frosty is complete!



We had a really nice day last week where it was actually 25 degrees ABOVE zero. So I quick got the kids dressed after lunch and they played outside for an HOUR! Here is a video of Ella "snowboarding" and Lily's version of Jingle Bells. I was so excited to finally get it captured on video. She sings all the time, but whenever she sees the camera she freezes up. We got a tiny Mino HD camera at Christmas that looks like a cell phone, so I don't think she's as intimidated by it.

Gatorade--More

Here are a couple more photos from the Gatorade shoot. How could I leave out Tiger woods?! The second photo is not super great, a bit grainy, and out of focus. But if you look really hard in the back left, you can see Andrew's out of focus face. :-)

Back in Time

(Brownie points to whomever can name the '80's reference in the post title.) ;-)

So I'm going to try and catch up on posts (again) and this time I'm going to schedule them to post once or twice a week. So that way, you'll get new stuff spaced out. You might still be reading about Christmas when Valentine's Day rolls around. But at least, I'll have regular posts. :-)

We'll backtrack to December 11, 2008 which was Andrew's 32nd birthday! We started the morning with present opening. The girls were very excited because this year for the first time I took them each to Target (on their own special trip) and let them pick out ANYTHING they wanted to give Daddy for his birthday. Ella knew exactly what she wanted to get him: a Bionicle lego guy. Lily had a little harder time but finally decided on the dinosaur below.

I love this photo of Lily showing Andrew the other dinosaurs he could collect on the back of the box.

In true birthday form, I convinced Andrew to take a couple hours off work to celebrate (this is a momentous thing...Andrew never just "takes a couple hours off"). We headed to downtown Minneapolis to attend the Holidazzle parade! I have been wanting to go to this parade with the kids since we moved back and we figured they were finally old enough to sit through it. Plus, we figured a Thursday night would be the least amount of people out to watch it. We arrived downtown an hour and half early and found a great spot in the skyway. Andrew and the girls went for a walk while I held down the fort. A bit later, they arrived with Chipotle and we had a spontaneous carpet picnic. Not too long after, the parade started. Ella LOVED it! Lily tolerated it. And we enjoyed watching the girls watch the parade. The nice thing about the skyway is that you don't freeze standing outside. Granted, you don't get the full effect of the music and so forth, but like I said, you don't freeze.





After the parade, we headed to the 8th floor of the Macy's building to walk through Santaland. This year's theme was "A Day in the Life of an Elf". I went to Santaland a few times as a kid and remember it being a fun experience. We didn't have to wait as long as we thought and the kids seemed to enjoy walking through. Santa is at the end, but again, our kids banned sitting on Santa's lap/Santa photos this year.



I love this picture of Lily with her hand over her eyes "It's too bright Mom!"

I usually hate most photos of me, but I really like this one with Ella. :-)

Gatorade Photos--finally

Finally, here are some photos from Andrew's Gatorade shoots. There's a certain politeness and protocol on the sets so no matter how excited you are to meet someone, you have to contain your excitement and be professional. There's no obvious picture taking, and no throwing-the-arm-over-the-shoulder "take a picture with me" photos. But these are pretty cool and they give you an idea of the scale of their production and the type of equipment they use.

The project was a 5-city, 6-day shoot with over 20 different major league athletes. They were supposed to tell the camera what their "G-moment" or Gatorade-moment was--a highlight in their career or life.

Without further ado:

Just the set and crew setting up:

Andrew "with" Michael Jordan:

Picabo Street:

Andrew "with" Peyton Manning:



Billie Jean King (with Rocky, the director):

Derek Jeter's glove:

Andrew setting up for Jeter:


The client area (set up for them to work and hang out):

NASCAR champ Jimmie Johnson:

Andrew chatting it up with NASCAR guy Matt Kenseth (he's from Wisconsin too!):

Olympic track champion Usain Bolt's golden shoes (that's him hamming it up for the camera too):


Dwayne Wade taking direction from Rocky (don't you love the look of total confusion on his face?):

Wonder what Andrew really does all day during the shoot? Here he is being Serena Williams "water boy". :-)

So there you have it folks. This was a totally ridiculous shoot in terms of the little things that happened that they had to cover for. Andrew was pretty stressed, but it was a lot of fun for him too. Gatorade is rebranding which is why they were doing this in the first place.

The first Gatorade commercial was on television today during the NFL Wildcard games! We were watching the Vikings get beat by the Eagles and there it was. That meant we were okay to finally post photos of the shoot. The website is live as well. The commercials you see on TV were done by Spike Lee and his crew. All the athlete information on the website was done by The Famous Group (and Andrew!). HERE is a link to the Gatorade website (Click on the "Athletes" link at the bottom of the Gatorade frontpage). And below is a video of the commercial. Please feel free to leave Andrew a little comment love as I'm sure he'd be excited to hear what others thought.



Also, there are some other Gatorade commercials on You Tube. Here is a list in case you'd like to watch the others as well!

Holiday Letter

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).

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

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.

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. :-)