Secret Santa Swap!!

 

So this Christmas I linked up with Eloping Stethoscope and The Dreamy Meadow for a Secret Santa Swap.  And it was AWESOME.  I had so much fun doing it.

I received my gift from Melissa over at Dreams and Colour  - she sent me some awesome swag.  And she's a fellow Canuck - so go check her page out :)  Also, this is my first attempt at vlogging - don't mind the messy house... or the preggo acne lol.

Merry Christmas (ya ya it's a late Christmas greeting lol)  and I'm SO excited for the New Year - 2013 is going to ROCK!

Christmas Eve!!

So this year, I participated in a few Christmas type swaps.  The first one I’m going to share with you is the Stocking Swap hosted by the lovely Brittany over at Tales From a Sailor’sSoul Mate.  My partner was Denise over at That Girl Denise.  I had a lot of fun shopping for my gift for her and I do hope that she enjoyed it as much as I’m enjoying mine!!

 

My super fun Stocking

The awesome contents of my Stocking:

A super hilarious card.  A gorgeous Bell (which I LOVE), Pink Nailpolishes, Holiday Earrings, Newborn Baby Girl onesies, Supercute Baby LegWarmers and Candy!

 

My Jingle Earrings (hubby took this lovely pic of me lol)

 

The Candy!  She must have read my blog and known of my love of candy.  We’ve already eaten two of the three boxes lol.

So Merry Christmas Eve from our little family to yours – Wishing you all a wonderful love-filled day tomorrow.

 

An artistic Belly Shot that hubby took of me last night with Bella our Labradoodle, in front of our Christmas Tree.

New Look!!

So if you haven’t ben around here for awhile… you might notice some differences around here!!  I have a new blog design!! Thanks so much to Randalin over at Harvesting Kale for the fabulous new look.  I’m so happy with it and it is totally me!! 

I’ll have lots of posts coming up this week (even with Christmas being only 1 day away!!) because I participated in several Christmas swaps that I need to document!  And I have some big plans for 2013, one of them being that I plan to try to blog more regularly lol. 

So Merry Christmas to those of you who won’t be checking blogs this week and see you in the New Year!!  And for those of you who will have time, see you soon!!!

Tuesday Ten

Ten Random Things on my Tuesday for you!

1.  My inlaws arrive tomorrow.  I'm not sure how long they are staying.  It should be fun, right?  So today is filled with cleaning and trying to organize things so that my mother-in-law doesn't re-organize them for me.  She has a tendency to do that.  And it drives me bananas.  But that's a whole other post.

2.  The craft sale two weeks ago didn't go so well for me.  I didn't sell any of my tutu's.  But that only fueled me to get more of them made and I'm slowly getting ready to open my online store selling them.  Seriously.  Stay tuned for more information on that :)

3.  So I have at least one more month of teaching.  They received a grant this month so it gives them enough money to run until January... after that, we will see what happens.  We can only hope that they receive more grants or that money falls out of the sky somewhere.  I'm hoping that they fix the furnace in the studio with that grant... but I'm not holding my breath.

4.  I am 21 weeks today!!  And still getting sick pretty much every other day.  It SUCKS.  I totally thought that it would be done by now.  And I really wish it was.  It's taking a toll on my marriage because I have no energy and often feel ill and well, let's be honest, men don't really understand how we're feeling because they never have to go through it.  So we are snappy with each other quite often.  I hope the sickness starts to fade soon.

5.  And with the sickness comes my lack of motivation.  I just don't feel like doing anything lately.  I like snuggling with Nora and playing with her, but cooking, cleaning, crafting, baking.... nothing seems to keep me interested.  That needs to change asap but I just don't know how to get motivated again.

6.  I love Disney Jr.  I will admit it, I let my 17 month old watch TV.  And SHE LOVES Disney Jr.  Especially Tickety Toc.  She will dance around the living room and clap - it's so adorable.  She also loves the Disney princesses.

7.  Christmas gifts suck this year.  Since we are staying here and not going to see family - everyone is asking us what we want for Christmas and somehow, somewhere along the way, because we just put random things on our list that we need/want, someone took it the wrong way and thinks we are doing poorly financially.  Which we aren't.  We are finally in a really good spot.  We have one credit card left to pay off and our loan and the car.  And that's it.  And we only spend cash or use our debit cards.  We just put stuff like that on our lists because we are actually trying to downsize what we own - we don't need extra "stuff" that we don't really need to have.  So I'm a bit frustrated.  That and NOBODY will give us their lists.  And we have to mail everything - so it needs to be done in the next week so it gets there in time for Christmas.  Ugh.

8.  I can feel Baby Hansen moving now.  It's awesome.  I missed that part of being pregnant.  And she is sooooo active - almost moreso than her big sister was.  Speaking of Baby Hansen - we have NO ideas for names lol.  We can not agree on anything.  Names I like, Paul hates - names Paul likes, I hate lol.  Thank goodness there are still approx 19 weeks left to decide lol.

9.  Jamaica is so close.  I can not wait.  I'm so excited for this trip - I'm excited for Nora's first big trip to a foreign country.  I'm pumped for the beach.  The Sun.  The HOT weather :)  Hopefully it will be an awesome and relaxing trip :)

10.  I finally got a Klout Perk.  And I was SO happy.  I received two full sized bottles of Aveeno lotion.  Which I absolutely love but rarely buy unless it's on a super sale (a normal bottle up here is about $9-$11).  And it feels SO nice on my baby bump :)


Okay - so I realize now that some of my list were a little bit whiny - and I swear I'm not normally like this.  I promise I'll try to be more positive and upbeat in the future - this week just has me kinda down.

Hope y'all have a great Tuesday!!

Happy December!!

I was going to post last night - but man oh man was yesterday a busy day.  We had Santa pictures at LightGraph at 9:45, I worked at the gym from 10:45-4:15 and then we had to head out to Gan for the Santa Claus Parade since the dance studio was dancing in it.  By the time we got home (and I thawed out from being so cold lol) I was exhausted and completely forgot to write a post lol.

Nora did okay with Santa.  Last year was much better lol - she had no idea what was going on.  This year she has a bit of shyness with strangers so she didn't want ANYTHING to do with Santa.  It makes me so glad that Pam had Santa come to her house and it was just us, Santa and Pam in the room.  She seemed to warm up after a little bit and the photos I've seen so far are awesome :)  Here's a sneak peak!

Isn't she just the cutest??  I know, I know, I'm totally biased because she's my baby lol.

Work was work, nothing too exciting there.  I have a few more shifts at the gym this month which is nice.  It means I'm able to get more hours for maternity leave.  I've kind of stopped counting to figure out how many I still need because it just starts to stress me out.  I only need 600 hours but I think I'm only halfway there... which means I might not get enough, but I don't want to even think about that.



Then after I was done work, we headed out to Gan for the Santa Parade.  It was SO COLD out.  I think the temperature was about -5C (not sure of the conversion to F) but it was chilly and Norabear got super cold.  I was very happy when we were finished lol.  Unfortunately on the dance front, things aren't looking too good.  There's a meeting tomorrow night and then I'll have more details on the future of my teaching there.  I'm worried but relieved that they are finally doing something about it.  For now here are some pics of my awesome students and parade fun time!