Saturday, December 26, 2009

Christmas

So Christmas was exhausting.. in a good way =) It was so exhausting that I can't even make any comments on it. The main sumarry: Emmy is spoiled (and so are we). She is so spoiled that we had to take down the desk upstairs to make a playroom. Here's some pics of the festivites.. with a caption thrown in here and there...






Emmy and her Santa stash.....
Yes, Emmy had a fur coat for church this year. All during church she kept going to the people in the pew in front of us and handing them a program. She also ate about 100 kix and waved at everyone on the way to communion. But we actually made it through the whole service.



Sean was going for gangsta but ended up somewhere between jospeph and jihad =)

We went for the always stuuning matching tulle numbers

The last month photo shoot

It's the last offical photo shoot. If all of them were as long as this one I don't think we'd have made it past one. I keep making a long list of things that I didn't know before I was a mom. I'll know next year to never EVER take pictures the week before Christmas. There are 18 million other people who's kids are out of school trying to take Christmas Card pictures. They were also WAY overbook and to top it off there was no air conditioning. This would normally be ok in December, but it was one of those days where you thought it was going to be about 50 and dressed for that and then whoops! it's 85 by noon. So everyone was in sweaters with no AC.. and there were babies EVERYWHERE screaming... NOT fun. But Emmy was a trooper and hung on. I have to say, I am SO glad that I have these pictures, but I'm also glad that we won't be taking any more for a while =)





We tried to recreate the first birthday cake for a pic. Results were similar to the party.. a lot of eh leading to birthday cake meltdown!



Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Getting ready for Christmas (We're a little late)

We've had a seriously busy December, so the Christmas spirit took it's sweet time getting to Tomball. (You can note that this is also why we're not sending Christmas cards this year. We still love you, you're just not getting a card.) I am usually that guy who has their tree up the second Thanksgiving is over. I spend hours pouring over gift tags to find just the right ones to match my wrapping paper, and have each present wrapped as soon as I buy it. Yeah, none of that happened this year.
Blake and I both agreed that the thought of cleaning out the crap room upstairs enough to actually find the tree in the attic had absolutely no appeal. Emmy is also in the tornado phase where she spends all day finding new and creative ways to destroy things. All this meant that we had pretty much decided there would be no Christmas tree this year. I even tried to bribe several of my friends with 20 bucks if we could take a picture in front of their tree and then never tell Emmy that it wasn't her tree. But it just made me too sad for her not to have a tree on her first "real" Christmas. Since we're super lazy we went and bought a new one and 15 bucks of cheap plastic Christmas ornanments. It's the lamest Christmas tree I have ever had in my house, but it's a tree and Emmy can take her picture in front of it.

This is now my new everyday. I chase Emmy around as she takes the ornaments off the tree, loops the fishing wire around her only two teeth on the bottom (we couldn't have hooks so we tied fishing line) and yanks as hard as she can. She's going to pull out all of her freaking teeth.

We let Emmy pick out any ornament she wanted at Garden Ridge. Having the excellent taste that she does, she of course picked out a frog on a surfboard in swimtrunks drinking a milkshake. She picked it off the shelf and took off hauling a@@ across the store. It was THE ONE! Now at this point I had to think... there is someone that was shopping at Garden Ridge one day and said..... "Oh my gosh! There it is, the perfect ornament!" It's hanging on someone's tree (who is not a one year old) right now with the twelve inch feather parrot ornament, the hippopotamous in a tutu ornament, and the large mouth bass eating a worm ornament that were also left this time of year at Garden Ridge. This was, of course, the only ornament that she was interested in hanging.
The rest of the time she just sat in the ornaments, put them in and out of the box, janked the fishing wire on her teeth ......
and of course did this, becasue it is WAY more fun that decorating a bright shiny new Christmas tree that your parents bought just for you to decorate.... well, we did say we needed a tree skirt.
Today the Castille's came over to make Christmas cookies for Santa... because really what I need right now is more sweets. When I reach my limit, it BAD, becasue it's a pretty high limit! But Santa requires cookies so we were going to make them. I made a Paula Deen Recipe and it had an ENTIRE box of butter in it. An entire box. If you're interested, there are 32 servings of butter in a box and each serving has 11 grams of fat...I will be returning my skinny jeans that I got for Christmas. Their services are no longer needed.
Betsy and I started early with the rolling and cutting. Emmy gave it a big...eh...

But Caroline said... oh HELL no...
Then the Daddy's came over and we got to the good stuff. Like the Christmas tree, this was more of an adult cookie decorating party. The girls chased each other around the kitchen and stuck interesting things in the diaper genie. It's a fun new game that all the cool kids are playing.
Blake and I made a voodoo doll and Mexican flag... feliz navidad... very christmas-y...
Betsy and Colling made a series of sparkly ornaments...
And the girls said YUMMY... this looks like interesting colored poo in the making!
And in "signs that we're probably not mature enough to have a baby" news.. this is what Betsy and I did while the girls took a bath. It's STILL funny to me =)

So the Vacek's are ready! Bring it on Christmas!

Friday, December 18, 2009

Blake Vacek, MBA

It's offical, Blake is now a Master of Business Administration. Not only did my super smart Hubby graduate, he graduated with the Dean's Award for Excellence. This means that I married one smart cookie. He stuck it through for three long years and not only graudated, but graduated with high honors. We're so proud of him!
Since they don't make graduation hats in extra ginormous, he had to get a liiiitle-bitty hat. Ok it was normal sized, but it DID fit Emmy already.

Speaking of Emmy, she had a GREAT time. She danced to the band, clapped for every single person and flirted with just about everyone around us. We also read about 25 books during the ceremony and ate a couple of granola bars. But hey, we made it through with a little help from GiGi and Pops.
After the ceremony we went to Yia Yia Mary's for a little grub. The only thing Blake requested for his graduation was a Red Relvet Cake from a bakery called Rao's by our house. When they opened the box to show me the cake I literally started laughing out loud. They really went above and beyond in the decoration. I'm thinking someone probably strained a wrist from working so hard on it. You know you want one.
So Blake's career as a Coog is over. He's fondly miss the weekly emails about the latest assualt on campus, driving over an hour to class a couple times a week, and you know he's going to miss reading all about Behavioral management. He just LOVED management. He swears he is done with graduations and school. This officially makes me the only person in my immediate family without some type of graduate degree. Mom, Dad, and Blake have one and Laura and Sean will have one soon. I'm looking like a slacker!!!!!!! Hey, if you can get a cake that sweet, I guess it's all worth it.
We're so PROUD of you!

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Bon Bons and Birthdays

It's a new(er) family tradition in the Sansom family to all get together and make a ridiculous amount of bon bons for Christmas gifts. I think we figured out that this was out fifth year, and since we're involved it of course has gotten exponentially more out of control with every passing year. This year we added cookies and cream, butter pecan, strawberry preserves, lemon, and cinnamon struesel to the traditional german chocolate, italian cream, and others. We each are assigned a station for the day. There are dippers, rollers, choppers, logistics, and decorators. This year we had to come up with a new position, Emmy Wrangler. This was one thing I don't think anyone wanted her "help" on. Mom did make her a really cute Emmy sized apron!Our grand total this year was around 1050. More than last year but nowhere near our record breaking close to 1400 a couple years ago.
In the middle of bon bon day we took a quick break to run over to Seth and Aiden's first and 3rd birthday party. This was the first time we've gotten to celebrate with these two (to be fair this is the first opportunity with Seth ;) ) because they've just moved to Houston. Seth is not too keen on anything besides baby food right now, so he just kind of poked at his cake. We finally got to meet my old friend and former college roomie Melissa's new baby Josh. He's a cutie! It was so good to catch up and celebrate another first year! So after that much cake and eating all day, Blake and I of course decided to go to eat again. We took his parents for a celebration dinner at Marks! Yes, we did it up fancy. No, we're not celebrating bon bons. Blake is graduating with his MBA next week! Hooray! The desert was so pretty that yes, I DID pull out my i-phone in the middle of Mark's and take a picture.Not taking a picture were the people next to us. We noticed that they ordered some kind of special appetizer that we were sure wasn't on the menu. We asked the waiter what it was. He said it was some kind of noodles with truffles. AND he said that the truffels cost 14 Bucks a GRAM.... they each had 8 grams!!! That, folks, is almost a 120 dollar appetizer. Just another Saturday night dinner I guess! Wow....
But even if we can't afford fancy truffle appetizers we are so thankful to have family, friends, and even bon bons to be thankful for. We are blessed =) ....those truffles WOULD be good though! ;)

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Where did a year go?

Emmy is officially 1!!!!! Since we had her big party last weekend, we decided to make today a little more low key. We started off the day in a not so fun way at the doctor getting her one year shots. Unfortunately, we've got ANOTHER ear infection. We're about one away from getting tubes at this point. The GOOD news is that her head is no longer off the charts! It's still growing but we've moved to only 80%! The doctor actually told me that "we don't like to see heads keep growing for too long, so if it's still growing at 15 months we'll start discussions." I assured her that she comes from a family of GIGANTIC nogs so I wasn't all that concerned. In other statistics news, she's now 30.5 inches long (90-97th%) and 23.7 lbs (75-90%). She's growing and growing!

We decided we might try to beat the crowds at the mall and head over to see Santa at the mall. Now at Easter I complained and complained about the Easter bunny picture lady because she let everyone take like 25 pictures and look at each one and pose and stand around. It meant we stood in line for forever. Well I guess they got a crapload of complaints because this lady gave you two shots and that's it. You better be looking because she's taking them and you're paying for wahtever you marked on your envelope rather you like it or not. Well fortunately, we didn't even have to worry about all that becasue Emmy absolutely positvively HATED Santa Claus. But look at the dude, something's just not right. He didn't say one word and I'm pretty sure that Santa is supposed to at least pretend to smile. This guy's just got a wonky eye and a yellow beard.... Emmy's not buying it. Yes, we paid 15 dollars for this picture. We're actually thinking about going ahead and using it for our Christmas card as planned. Man, there's just something not right about that Santa.
So after that fiasco we went home to let Emmy pick whatever she wanted to have for dinner. Right now she's in a phase that we like to call " Noodle-atarian." She refuses to eat anything unless it's a carb. So we decided to give her a gigantic plate full or noodles and a huge honkin block of cheese for dinner. Nutrious! She also polished off her plate of carbs with a sugar cookie. The WHOLE sugar cookie. but she did have a random pack of raisins. Hey, don't say I don't know anything about balanced nutrition.
I had to inlcude this video. Since she is a noodleatarian now, she's developed a very particular way that she eats her favorite dinner. She'll just sit and be completely quiet and slurp and slurp and slurp. And I'm dumb, so I videoed with the camera sideways... just tilt your head to the left and you'll never know the difference =)

Monday, December 07, 2009

It's My Party!

Emmy's 1st Birthday party last weekend was a huge success! Thank you to all the family and friends that came to celebrate!!! We really appreciate all of you coming to celebrate our special girl with us especially since most of you traveled (From katy or Port Neches) to be with us.
Blake compared it to the day we got married. His recap...." I was smiling, I was talking to all these people I haven't seen in forever, we were cutting the cake, and then all of the sudden it was over. " I completey agree. And on that note.... IF YOU TOOK ANY PICS, WILL YOU SEND THEM TO ME? We were so busy running around we didn't get to take as many as we wanted with everyone....even though I think there's 500 pictures on this blog post ;)


Emmy has just recently starting "prissing." I put her over the top birthday tutu on last week just to make sure everything fit and she put her hands on her hips and starting prissing around the house! I guess little girls are born knowing how to priss. She LOVED the crown, well most of the time.



Emmy had a "gymnastics" party at K2 Academy. All the kids had a great time playing on the equipment. The big kids loved the zip lines and trampolines and the little kids hung out in the ball pit. Emmy LOVED the gigantic bouncy balls. There was so much fun stuff to play on for the older kids and they took in the trampolines, rings, and zip line.



We had quite a spread of food and cake. I always plan something that's completely within reason in my head and it ends up getting totally out of control pretty quickly.





Emmy was cutting not one, but TWO, teeth the day of her party and I fought her for an hour to make her take a nap and she finally won. This was her earlier in the day...




SO for a little girl with no sleep and two new teeth she did pretty good.... until the cake. We had been looking forward to this since we've been doing cupcakes every month. We thought she'd dig right in. This picture pretty much sums up the cake experience....
She finally calmed down a little bit and crammed a little icing in her mouth. She never actually made it to the cake but she did have a complete and total meltdown so we couldn't take any real "after"pictures with her.

She got into her gifts and would say "uuuuuuh" and point at everything we opened. This little girl is definetly loved. Thank you to everyone for the fun toys and cute clothes! She gets so excited when we pull a new one out.



After the party a few people went to have a quick dinner. I took this picture with the same kiddos at her baptism in March. It's amazing how much they've grown in the past year! Emmy and Benjamin couldn't even sit up and now look at them!


Kate, Lance, and Michelle came to spend the night and the girls had so much fun playing together. As you can see, three little girls means the house is a disaster, but it was so cute to see them playing together. How amazing is it I that I have friends I've known for 20 years and now all of our little girls are friends!



We feel so blessed that we have all of you to celebrate this special occasion with. Thank you so much for making this day special for us and for Emmy!