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. :-)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hi, remember my resolution about posting once a week...HA! That's why I don't really make New Year's resolutions. We had a nice, quiet Thanksgiving with my mom, Dave, Grandma Betty and Aunt Carol. My uncle, aunt and cousin also stopped by later in the day. We enjoyed everyone's company and the food.



We are now switching into Christmas mode. We hung our outside lights the last couple days, we have both our trees up, the stockings hung. It's starting to look festive around here. We have a little more to do, but its been a really nice long weekend. I'll try to take some photos of our decorations soon.


Here's some photos taken by Andrew of us in decorating mode:




Andrew took this cute one of Lily from outside looking into our front window.

We had the girls conferences on Monday last week. They are doing great, which is what we like to hear. I am especially proud to report that Ella's teacher told us she is the absolute most polite child in either of her two classes! She has started an Ella wall for her art work (Ella has made two pictures for her teacher so far). And said what a delight she is to have in the classroom. She said Ella has a quiet personality (which I think is true) and enjoys playing in smaller group situations with kids. And she also said many of the other children listed Ella as someone they really enjoy playing with (my heart is warming as I write this. :-) Awwww....) So socially she is doing pretty well. She still doesn't really initiate play with people, but they join her to play. She then tends to play with them later in the day if that happens. The teacher is working with her on being less shy about initiating play. Academically, she is a little behind in recognizing letters, which we kind of knew. The teacher suggested ABC art projects to work with her at home on her letters. For some reason (possibly related to her motor planning speech disorder), it has been difficult for Ella to grasp learning her letters. But overall, a great report from her teacher.

Miss Lily's teacher was a little less chatty in her conference. But it seems Lily is doing very well. She plays with the other kids well. She participates in the classroom activities and seems to be much more comfortable now than the start of the year. She will answer the teachers questions if they are posed to her, insteading of just shrugging her shoulders. I see that has a huge step in her comfortability. She is very shy and whenever a non-family member talks to her she sort of shrinks back. So it's great to hear she's feeling much more comfortable. She loves being at the art table. She is doing very well with her beginning handwriting. We even talked with the teacher about transitioning Bear out of the classroom after winter break. We're just going to talk to Lily about Bear staying in her locker, that way he's there if she really REALLY needs him. We'll see how it goes.

Both teachers said how well the girls cleaned up in the classroom and how they both help other kids clean up their messes too! I just about fainted when I heard that. REALLY! Um, that must be because they watch their mother clean up after them all day long and they learn through observation, because I cannot get them to clean up for the life of me! Okay, well that might be an little exaggeration. Ella is a very good cleaner when she is in the mood. But that is usually initated on her own. If I ask her to do something, I usually meet resistance. And Lily, ha!

We were very happy with everything we heard at conferences and told the girls how proud we were of them!

So now, I am going to say (again) I will update about Andrew's Gatorade shoot very soon. But I really, really mean it this time. Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!! Now that it is after Thanksgiving, welcome to the official start (at least for me) of the Christmas season.

Ella & Lily update

I don't have much exciting to report. They have settled into school. Lily claims to not want to go in the morning (this is said through one statement put mildly--not too much drama in it), but seems to enjoy herself while she's there. She usually gives me an energenic "yes" when I ask her if she had fun at school today. We'll see what her teacher has to say next week at her conference. We have back to back conferences with their teachers and then a speech conference for Ella after that. So while we spend an hour and a half hopefully hearing how wonderful our children are, they'll be happily running around like crazy at a My Gym day camp.

Ella is still loving school and really seems to be picking up her letters and numbers more. I know you say she's five and she should probably already know all that by now. But it does seem like its been a bit harder for her to grasp it. She tries so hard though! And she stills LOVES books and really wants to read on her own so badly.

We got their school pictures last week. I didn't order very many because they are expensive and I figured they wouldn't turn out very good anyway. But to my surprise, they are adorable! (At least in my biased opinion). I honestly don't think we could have gotten better pictures out of them.

Ella still attends private speech sessions. They tested her in September and she's at about 80% for her intelligibility, meaning a stranger who has never heard her speech can understand about 80% of what she says. I think we were at less than 5% when we started all this a year and a half ago! She is now at a 4 year old level. So just a little behind. She gets three days of speech help at school and then one day a week private sessions. We have been working on initial F (fork, four, five) and final F (surf, golf, wolf) sounds and just started the initial th- sound. This is the perfect time of year for the th- sound because Thanksgiving is coming up and we can say things we are thankful for. She did one activity with the speech therapist where she had to pick things out that she was thankful for. Here is what she picked. I don't know how much you can read that. But the first one she picked was Lily! She is thankful for Lily! Isn't that the sweetest thing ever! And I would say that's the last thing I would have guessed she'd say. And her speech therapist didn't prompt her at all. She also picked coloring book, candyland, Berenstain Bears books, hugs, and family. I loved the hugs one. I just thought the whole thing was neat to see what she came up with.

I think that's it for now. I'll update about the girls again after their conferences. As for the Andrew update, I'll do that tomorrow. We're still discussing which pictures would be appropriate to post. We're a little worried about security issues and don't want random pictures of sports celebrities to get out into cyberworld. Not that the photos are embarrassing or bad, there's just something to be said for a celebrity's (of any kind) privacy. There's a video I would love to post that Andrew's co-worker put together. But there's no way to ensure that it won't end up on youTube. So I'll put up some photos tomorrow of Andrew at work.

A New Resolution

So that was a real pain in the butt to do all those updates so late after the fact. I've decided that I will do my very best to get up a new post every week, so I don't get myself into that situation again. And that way, our faithful blog readers won't get so bored always checking back and never seeing anything new. :-) Please scroll all the way down as I've put the updates in order. You may have read a few last week, but there are a couple more after the Vikings game post.

Coming your way tomorrow: an Andrew update with photos from his Gatorade shoots last week and a quick update on the girls with their school photos attached!

Andrew is off again the middle of this week to Los Angeles to finish up the Gatorade shoots so I may have one more sports star update in the future.

Random sidenote: For those of you who might feel compelled to purchase Christmas gifts for our little family, I have updated each of our wishlists (Click link in the sidebar). Please notice the helpful priority settings and comments to help guide you to the perfect gift. :-) Let us know if you purchase something off one of them so we can mark it off. Thanks for thinking of us!

Finally, CONGRATS to Andrew's brother Benjamin, who finished the San Antonio Marathon this morning with his second best marathon time ever!!

A New Post Finally

Okay so I have a ton of posts to get up. But I'll start with the most recent one and go from there since I think I really left some people in suspense with that last post. But you'll have to read to the bottom of this one to find out who Andrew is currently working with. :-)

On Sunday, Andrew and I went to the Vikings/Packers game at the Metrodome. We met up with my cousin Cindy and her husband Shawn and proceeded to locate our seats. They just happened to be on the FIELD! We were about 20 feet from one of the end zones. Very cool! We were super close to the action. We couldn't always see everything, but we could see the the action on the jumbotron so it worked. It was the Vikings Salute to America so there were a lot of military men there. Some sitting right in front of us, including the navy man saluting in the picture below. Unfortunately for him, he was a Packer fan. Cindy and I had a good time ragging on him about that. He left for a bit and during that time the Packers scored TWICE, so we told him he couldn't leave again. ;-) It was very exciting at the end of the game when Adrian Peterson scored an awesome touchdown right in front of us. And the whole stadium was on pins and needles as the Packers had the ball back. We held them off and they didn't make their field goal leading the Vikings to win 28-27. It was incredibly exciting. Oh, and the US Gymnastics team was there as part of the America fanfare. Shawn Johnson and others walked right in front of us. She waved to Cindy. :-) Andrew has to dress in Viking colors (although maybe he should have gone with gold, he could have been neutral then) because we got the tickets from his Vikings client. Really, he was happy with whoever won the game. Here are some pictures from the game (you can click on them to make them larger if you like).


Above: This is how close we were to the end zone and Adrian Peterson taking a moment before the game.





Above: Celebrating the Viking win. That's my big head. And all the Vikings fans near us.

Above: Two shots from the Vikings open that Andrew worked on.

The US Gymnasts.

CJ and Andrew at the game. CJ went to Knox and was the golf coach for a couple years. He started as an intern at the Vikings this year. He's hoping to get a full-time position with them.

Andrew is currently in Indianapolis as Part 3 of 5 for a major project that just fell into their laps. Last Monday, Andrew got home from Cedar Rapids and immediately had to do a bid for this Gatorade job. There are two components: a commercial side and a web aspect. Andrew's company is working on the web aspect. They were awarded the job and had to swing into project planning mode. I talked to Andrew on Thursday morning and he told me he was on his way to the airport to go to Orlando. I said okay, what for. And he nonchalantly told me he was going to do a shoot with TIGER WOODS! WHAT! Tiger Woods! Wow! Okay. So last Friday, Andrew spent the day working with Tiger and two other sports starts (sorry can't remember their names). He flew home Friday evening and we enjoyed a nice weekend and he left again Sunday night to fly to Chicago for part 2 of the project with Michael Jordan, Picabo Street, and Mia Hamm. Today was in Indianapolis with Peyton Manning (and others, sorry again my memory escapes me). They are off to Miami after that and Los Angeles next week. Oh and for the commercial part of the project, Spike Lee is directing. Pretty exciting project! He took the camera with him and hopefully got a picture or two. Hopefully, I'll have something to post when he gets back.

For now, I'll leave you with this snippet of video. Ben caught Andrew (in the purple shirt and hat) and Shawn (in front of Andrew with a Vikings versey) on FoxHD while watching the game. You can see how close we were to the action.

Lily in the News!

PROP (People Reaching Out to other People) is a charitable organization here in Eden Prairie. They provide services for people during time of need including being a food bank. The Eden Prairie News is a small local paper that comes out weekly. They ran a story a while ago stating the need for food donations. It seems they are seeing fewer donations since the economy has taken a turn. The month of October was Neighborhood Heroes month at Ella and Lily's preschool. Their teachers asked the parents to bring in nonperishable items for the kids to play with in their classroom "dramatic play area". They had a pretend grocery store set up. At the end of the unit, the kids donated all the food to PROP. The newspaper came and took photos of Lily's class playing. The next day, Ella's class loaded up the food into wagons and walked it over to the PROP office to drop it off (the preschool is attached to the city center building where PROP is located). The kids were celebrating PROP as a neighborhood hero and the kids became neighorhood heroes themselves!

Lily's picture made it into the newspaper along with Bear! Here is the photo:

Annual Trip to CR

Finally, the last post to get me caught up! For the previous two years, the girls and I have spent a week visiting my mom and Dave in Cedar Rapids at the beginning of November. So it seems we're making this a tradition, at least until the girls are both in school, then we'll have to see. After the excitement of Halloween and visiting Knox, we took the opportunity to relax a bit on Sunday. Although, we did venture to the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art in the afternoon to see Mary GrandPre, the illustrator for the American edition Harry Potter books. She had an exhibit up at the museum and did a book signing. We hauled my first edition hardcovers there to have her sign them. Not that I'll sell them, but some of those books are going for $250 without the signature! So someday, those could be worth quite a bit of money, especially because they are already coming out with 10th anniversary editions of the first book.

Two things to notice in the above photo of me (sorry, my stepdad cut my head off when he took the photo). :-) First, I have some fun new glasses! It's been six years since I've had a new pair and boy did I need a new pair. I also got scolded by the eye doctor for wearing my contacts too much so you may see my new glasses popping up more often in photos now. The second thing to notice is that I'm in SHORT sleeves on November 2nd. Yes, for several days in Cedar Rapids it was 65-70 degrees and sunny! That's unheard of! At night, it was like getting off the plane in Orlando in December. I was just flabbergasted by it. Thank you, global warming. Of course, I had to drive through a snowstorm to get home just 5 days after this photo was taken.



The girls and I enjoyed our visit to Cedar Rapids. We did some shopping (even got some Christmas shopping done!), we ate great food cooked by my mom. I visited with my friend Molly who I hadn't seen in a year! It was great to catch up with her. The girls were loving the nice weather. We went and played at the playground at my old grade school down the street and Daniels Park nearby. The girls "tortured" the cat. Really they just played with Lucy, hide and seek was a favorite. The cat would run away and hide and the girls would go all over the whole house to find her again. My mom says Lucy sleeps for two days straight after our visits. :-)



But perhaps the most fun thing for the girls: the itty bitty hill in my mom's backyard. My mom bought a wagon at a garage sale this summer and the girls decided to go play outside one afternoon. All on their own, they pulled the wagon out, Lily got in and Ella pushed her down the hill. They had a grand old time doing this over and over again and taking turns. They tried going together. My mom and I were in hysterics watching them from the kitchen window.




Thanks Mom and Dave for an entertaining week. And thanks for letting us invade your house! Hope you've gotten it all put back together again! :-)