Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Tying up December's Loose Ends

I know that I have plenty of typos on my blog. (Mainly because my mom points them all out.) I try and proofread everything, but things slip through the cracks. (It is just part of life.) I proofread stuff for Tyler as well and I am surprised how many things I catch. We all have those things that bug us. Tyler has a lot of them, but I'm guessing high up there is the mixing up of 'your' and 'you're.'

I've noticed that I don't like how people mess up 'lose' and 'loose.' I was editing a document for Tyler and I think he wrote loose at least six times when he meant lose. (It was a disaster simulation. You lose a lot of things during a disaster. I'm thinking with the scouts in charge, life will be the most frequent thing lost.) Then again, I can't ever use the word 'lay' correctly in a sentence. Is it lie, lay, laid, lain? I just don't know. Good thing it is my blog, and I can be grammatically incorrect if I want to. So there. (Yes mom, you can keep pointing out the mistakes. I like to go back and fix them.)

Today I will be tying up the LOOSE ends of December. We aren't even halfway through the month, so that is ducky. Where to start? Hmm....let's go with the non-anniversary.

You can tell you have accepted the official move of your anniversary when you don't remember to take any pictures on your actual anniversary. We now celebrate in October and have for some time. But when the real anniversary rolls around, we still like to go out to dinner if we can. This year, we went to Texas Roadhouse since we won that gift card at the Scoresby party. We really enjoyed the 'snake bites,' which are deep fried cheese and jalapeno. Yum. But we didn't remember to take any pictures.

We went to the Mall later and shopped around. We ended up purchasing some shoes. This is the only proof of our anniversary.


Also, we had a date planned for December, since we are doing a planned date each month. December was supposed to be Cook Something Exotic. Well...we kinda planned something to make, but it had a lot of strange ingredients that we weren't sure how to get our hands on. Then suddenly, it was Christmas. And from Christmas, it is just a slide into the New Year. We realized somewhere along the way that we probably weren't going to have time to make something exotic. So we opted to eat somewhere exotic. Once in the car, we decided we would just try something new. Our meanderings led us to the Black Bear Diner. The food was very tasty, although maybe not in the exotic category. We took our picture by an exotic bear. (Okay, it is just a black bear, but they aren't native to Utah, so it is sort of exotic. Shhh...I know they are native to North America, but I have never seen one in Utah, so that mostly counts.)


June had been wanting to have a White Elephant party, but I decided we should mix it up a bit, so we had a White Elephant Bingo party. My mom talked about having these in her childhood. We tried to have something similar but we did tweak the rules so that everyone could go home with a gift.

The rules were simple. Everyone brought a white elephant gift and all the items were laid out on a table. (See...I don't even know if you should use the word laid there. Is that correct?) Then we played Bingo. I found an app on my phone...super easy. We used M&Ms for markers.


The first person to get a bingo got to come choose a prize from the table (even their own gift if they wanted). Any subsequent bingos by someone who already went to the table received a candy from a basket. So everyone's first bingo got a gift and then they collected candy. We played in Carnegie, but several people were in the parlor listening from there.


It was fun and Ivory was such a good sport, since she ended up being the very last person to get a bingo.

After, we played the game where you draw a scene on a paper plate while it is on your head. You can't see what you are doing, so the drawings are quite unique. Sometimes you get points for specific things, like if your stocking is touching your fireplace, or if your star is actually at the top of the tree. We just judged by opinion and how much we liked them.


Hannah ended up winning. Her special prize was a bag of weird Santa ornaments that we were getting rid of. You should never expect too much from a white elephant party.

Grandma visited for Christmas, and like a champ, I forgot to take pictures yet again. She stayed for several days and took Daisy out for her birthday and everything and I still didn't take pictures. Sometimes, I am just not in picture mode.

Luckily, the kids sometimes get my phone and Tyler takes a random shot here and there to save my bacon. (Mmm, bacon sounds good right now.)

Ivory was lugging Pip around in her normal Ivory fashion. You can almost always count on there being a dog picture on the phone courtesy of Ives. However, they are often very blurry, so they don't always make the blog. This one of Pip is hilarious. The kids would wrap her in blankets and she would get very staticky. (That is a made up word.) The extra hair on her ears would stick up from all the static. It was pretty funny.


We did several puzzles while Grandma was here. The first was a gift from JR and Jami. It was race and we finished first because we got to work right away. It helped that the kids were watching Inside Out and since I don't like that movie, I went to work on the puzzle instead. I was later joined by Grandma who also didn't care much for the movie, and eventually Tyler too. We finished most of the color area, but we didn't get the brown done until the next day. Wow, the brown area was killer.


Here is the closeup. I like the picture. It is a James Christensen picture. I sometimes feel like that guy weighed down by all my stuff and knowing I should let it go and grab hold of the rod. (Still wondering why his shoes don't match?)


We also did a map puzzle that Grandma got for us. The middle piece looks like a little house.


One last picture. It is our TP cloud after we put it up. It is like being in heaven. Just a bit smellier.


I think that about wraps up December.

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