our Christmas Day...

Gma and Gpa and all of the grandkids!


Tessa is fixing Grandpa's hair:

My handsome brothers...



Our close friends who stayed up super late and played games with us!

LOTS of yummy food!!! )Don't you love how the sinful FUDGE is right next to the healthy veggies? LOL)



Off to Nebraska, have a great week!!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

Our Christmas Eve...





Hope everyone has a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

Remember, JESUS is the reason we celebrate :)

sleepover...

The Prince and the Princess spent the night with us last night, I was delighted to have such cute faces to practice taking pictures of.

The boys hamming it up and Jonah sporting an Alfalfa do:

The girls wouldn't even look at the camera til I pulled out the marshmallows, it's obvious they are used to getting their pictures taken!






Cousins and friends forever!!!

extreme BLOG makeover

Do you like my new blog look?

Christine fixed it all up for me! To get your own just email her: Genmarie@verizon.net, and be sure to tell you that I sent ya!

she's home!!!

She came to the upstairs office window and Jonah let her in (that's her favorite way in and out!) and has been purring and eating ever since.

Thanks to any crossed fingers for her :)

missing kitty cat

Lucy, the top kitty, has been missing for 2 days :(

We have put up signs and walked all over the neighborhood looking for her and calling her.

Ricky (the orange kitty) has been walking around yowling, I think he misses her.

Please keep your fingers crossed we find her, we all miss her!

testing, testing, 1 2 3

Today I had a mini photo shoot to try to figure out the manual mode on the camera. Tessa really wasn't up for it so I had to bribe her with some marshmallows, then she was more than willing :) These are my favorites of the ones that came out, they were all either way dark or way too light, and even these 3 are still very bright.

But it's soooooo fun and addicting!


She giggled the whole time I took pics of her feet! They're so cute, I couldn't resist!

teacher's gifts...

I feel like I totally bombed on teacher's Christmas gifts this year! I had plans on making the teachers each a charm bracelet with teacher/school charms and stamp their names on a silver disc...then couldn't find any teacher charms I liked ANYWHERE, and yesterday I panicked. Today is the last day of school before the break so I ran into Mardel's (a Christian store that has books, music, pictures, home decor, teaching stuff, etc) and grabbed them all gift cards. It's a gift that I would LOVE but gift cards seem so impersonal to me, not sure they show true appreciation?

The boys did make their teachers a beaded wrap bracelet, I gave them full reign to a box of my beads and let them go to town. I wish I had taken pics to show, they definately look like they were made by little boys! But hopefully the teachers will see how excited they were about giving them!

So I'd love to know, what did you get your kid's teachers for Christmas this year?

stick a fork in me...i'm done!

This is my last set of orders that I shipped out TODAY, as of just a few minutes ago I am officially DONE with jewelry orders for about 2 weeks!!! I love making jewelry and am honored that people have let me make their loved one's presents...but I'm so happy to be taking a quick break so I can enjoy my family during Christmas!

I had to stop and grab my favorite drink to celebrate- Peppermint Hot Chocolate...YUM!

I have sooooo many things I'd like to do during the break:

...bake cookies with the kids (will be doing this tonight)
...paint Tessa's room
...figure out the new camera
...CLEAN the house (I don't really WANT to do this one but it need to be done, I've neglected cleaning trying to finish up my orders and I'd be so embarrassed if someone popped over right now!)
...come up with some new jewelry designs for Spring
...and I think we're going to head up to Nebraska for a few days after Christmas to visit Ryan's family that live up there.

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some shopping fun...
I bought the cutest little 2008 calendar from Jem Jam, it's already hanging in my office and I love it!

I bought some Christmas tags from her too and they are SO CUTE!

I also bought Tessa an apron from bloomworks on Etsy:

She sells lots of cute stuff with fabrics I LOVE! Tessa LOVES her little apron :)

I'm BAAAAAACK!

Did ya'll miss me? LOL All 3 of you that read this blog! :P

Here are some pics of the tree damage, we have little limbs scattered but these were the main ones:

This branch barely missed our deck and lays inches from our house!

I had no idea ICE could do all of this!

One of our neighbor's trees fell over on our fence so Ryan got to clean that up and put up some new boards on the fence. He was actually out of town during the ice storm (He has good timing, doesn't he? lol) so he came home to a huge mess of trees to clean up.

Thankfully our power never went out, well, it did the first night for about 2 minutes around 3 am and Jonah freaked out, but then it came back on and stayed on. All 3 kids were snuggled in bed with me and we laid there listening to thunder and ice pelting our windows. Some family and friends that had lost power stopped by each day to thaw out and even stayed the night after shivering for a couple of nights! The internet was gone til today (yippee!), I went to Starbuck's and parked in the parking lot with the laptop but I had to PAY, I couldn't find free wi-fi anywhere, I don't think anyone had it up and running. So the kids watched Barnyard in the backseat and I checked emails, thanks to all that have emailed!

The kids went back to school Thursday, we were ALL ready!!!

So of course I now have LOTS to do, orders piled up a bit during all of this. I can't wait til all orders are out and I'm enjoying Christmas Break :)

And now they're predicting SNOW to start TONIGHT, anywhere from 2-6 inches!!! Please pray that it melts quickly!

ICE STORM, NO INTERNET

Sunday we had a MAJOR ioce storm that has left large tree debris everywhere, 70% of our town has no power and we have NO internet.

Any customers- I can't answer emails right now and I can't take any more orders to be guaranteed by Christmas, so sorry!

I'll keep you all updated and show pics when the internet is back!

win a basket of goodies from Parent's Magazine!!!

The Silly Wagon and Parents Magazine Goodyblog are at it again, with yet another amazing giveaway basket!!! Look at what all you can win:



That's my "Mom to the Power of" necklace in the top right corner! For your chance to win all you have to do is leave a comment HERE.

When you comment feel free to show the Vintage Pearl some LOVE, help me get my name out there!!!

a day for fun

Today I decided to take a break from jewelry orders and have some FUN with Tessa so we headed to the mall. Ryan's office has their fancy restaurant Christmas party tomorrow night and I needed something to wear. I don't necessarily NEED maternity clothes yet, but I though what's the point of buying regular clothes that I won't fit into a few weeks from now? I ended up getting this green chunky turtleneck sweater that I plan on jazzing up with a festive scarf, it's something I can wear alot over the next few months...I also got it in the oatmeal color!

Then Tessa and I grabbed a cookie on the way out of the mall and headed to get our nails done. Ryan surprised me with a gift certificate a few days ago and I decided to share it with Tessa, she was super excited! The girls were very nice and one painted Tessa's finger nails while another did my pedicure.

I always feel self conscious getting my nails done in a salon like this where they are all Asian and speak in their language that I don't understand to each other. At one point the lady doing my toes asked me if I wanted my eyebrows waxed and I said no thanks, then she looks over and says something to the other girl who then looks at me and they both laugh! Maybe I should have gotten it done! Here's Tessa's new nails (she had to pick BRIGHT pink, of course!) :


After our nails we picked up Jonah from school, stopped by Wal-Mart to grab stuff for dinner (enchiladas tonight!) and then came home. We just got a new camera (my other camera is dying a slow death, and it had gotten so bad that I would take about 40 pictures to get ONE good picture! After lots of nagg- I mean asking, Ryan finally caved and let me get the one I REALLY wanted!) but I have been so busy I haven't really played with it much yet. I tried taking some pics for Christmas cards, I'll have to take some of Caleb when he gets home, but here are my faves:


This is what I started getting when Tessa got tired of it:

So be honest, can you tell a difference in my pics? I haven't figured much out yet, I plan on mastering the camera over Christmas break!

I've been banned from vacuuming

Yep, that's right, my husband has seriously banned me from vacuuming. How did I get out of this tiresome chore? I vacuumed up a GLOVE. A woman's glove, not a tiny kid's glove.

Oops.

In my defense, the glove was BLACK and I was vacuuming with only one lamp on so it was dark, I couldn't see very well.

I honestly had no clue I had run over it (which leaves hubbie totally perplexed) but after I ran over it the vacumm started making this awful noise. Ryan beelined in from the other room and jumped at me to flip the off button before I could think "now that does not sound good."

Over our 7 (almost 8) years of marriage I have managed to go through many vacuums, Ryan thinks he's starting to understand why after the glove incident. I wish I could get a dollar for everytime I've heard him mutter "I have never seen anyone have such a hard time with a vacuum." I'd be rich.

Now if only I can figure out a way out of dusting...

Tessa's songs

shopping with Tessa

The other day Tessa and I are shopping around Wal-Mart- she's sitting in the front of the cart that I'm pushing. It's super busy, tons of people are doing their Holiday shopping. Tessa reaches out to me, grabs my chest with both hands and announces to a large number of strangers:

"Wow, Mommy, you have some BIG ONES!"

I glance around at the snickers and smiles all around.

I. almost. died.

first basketball games!!!

This morning Caleb had his first 2 basketball games. They're all first graders and it is SO CUTE!The refs don't call double dribbling, out of bounds (it's pretty confined) or walking unless it's like 10 steps because otherwise the game would stop every 2 seconds. The first team we played, they were GOOD, but they played together last year as kindergartners- I think they won like 25-0!!! The second game the team was about the same as us and I think we tied (they don't really keep score). Caleb HUSTLED, as you can see in the video, and he scored one basket and had an assist. He loves to dribble all over the place, it was so fun to watch. Here's a quick video (mostly for the grandparents but feel free to watch if you want!) Caleb's number 33 and he starts with the ball: