Monday, November 29, 2010

Santa's Coming! (by boat!)


One of the things I love about visiting the Cape during Thanksgiving, is seeing Santa arrive by boat. The kids are just so excited (and so am I) to see him come waving across the water. They all wait on shore and on the dock to see him run the gauntlet to a waiting police car which takes him to a local department store to meet the kids. Jake was debriefed by his older cousins and their friends on what you have to look for to see if the Santa is "real". I'm hoping he'll be a believer!



After we saw Santa, I was determined to get a good (ok, decent) family photo for Xmas cards. Something fun, casual, and not too "posed". I'm not sure why I'm always so surprised at how difficult this is to achieve! We went to a lovely location...Fort Hill in Eastham with the marsh/Atlantic in the background. And then we froze as the wind whipped our hair in 6,000 directions and we decided to head to lower ground to get out of the wind. Jake was impatient, and just wanted to play with his cousins, and so it goes. Needless to say, we ended up w/ several questionable shots, most of them where I look cold and tired and messy. Like this...


Sigh.

I looked through all the great cards on Minted. And, I played around w/ a great feature the have called Find It Fast™ which quickly lets you see your photo(s) in all the designs. However, their site was a little funky last night, so I wasted over an hour on the project, so I gave up and went to bed. Without a card.

Tonight, I've managed to design my own, and just uploaded the whole thing to Vistaprint. I've never used them before, and a friend recommended them, so I thought I'd give them a try. It was probably at least half the cost of the cards at Minted. And, although I loved those cards, I'm not sure the somewhat odd, blurry photo I ended up using really warranted the extra expense.

And, to make my life somewhat easier, I "splurged", and for about $10.00 I got return address labels so that I may actually manage to get these in the mail this year when they arrive! Stay tuned friends, and check your mail boxes!

Friday, November 12, 2010

Pirate Booty


I'm sure everyone to Mars and beyond has been aware of the skulls and crossbone trend that's been going on the last couple years. I think it's okaaaay (meaning, really, somewhat ok), but I really can't stand how much of it I've been seeing on kids clothing lately. The Gap (my go-to source for Jake's clothes) is all over the trend. Do you really want to put your precious little boy in clothing sporting that icon? To me, it just seems like tempting fate (completely neurotic?). But, also, what does he know about skull and crossbones? He might put it together with a pirate image, but he'd really think it was so much cooler to wear Curious George on his T:

Thursday, November 11, 2010

A few of our favorite books...

I'm sure many of you have seen these delightful paintings of "favorite books" by Jane Mount. Each one is cuter than the next, and they have me thinking what Jake and I would include in our line up of Favorite books.


I think we'd include a few of the classics like The Big Red Barn, and Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, and we'd want to show Eric Carle and Bill Martin's Brown Bear, Brown Bear front and Center. And, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Lucy Cousin's Maisy the Mouse books would be included, and Is Your Mama A Llama, along with a few Curious George books. Oh, and let's not forget our new Busytown books by Richard Scary. There's a reason why some of these are classics! Also facing forward please would be Auntie M's books Hello Boston, and Hello Cape Cod. Jake thinks they were written especially for us.

I've been religiously reading to Jake at least 5 books a night since he was born, and I love just cuddling up with him. We were recently reading a book that had the characters spelling out the word A-P-P-L-E and when I asked him how to spell it, I was shocked when he started to! He missed on the L-E and truthfully, I was a little relived. The child is smart, but I'll be happy to keep reading to him for a good long while! Do you think he'll still let me when he's 15?