Past Christmases

Check out some of these old times from Christmas.
This is from when I was about 5 years old. Do you see the little house on the floor... that was my favorite! I think these presents are a combination of Birthday and Christmas because I got the house for my birthday and wouldn't let my sister play with it. So for Christmas she got her own house.


Maybe I'm 8 years old here? This must have been Christmas morning because all gifts in the background are still wrapped.


This is Grandma Whitaker with all of us. Until she passed away in 1998, we used to take her little Christmas tree and some other little decorations to her apartment. After Christmas, we'd go back, pack everything up and then take it back to our house for storage. I really miss going to her house at Christmas time.


When I was about 10 or 11, I was in East Sandy Singers with my sister Cindy (right) and my friend Shelly (left). We learned Christmas songs and then went to like the Festival of Trees, malls, etc. for little performances.


This giant snowman was created by me and my little bro, Jeff, a few Christmases ago.



Stay tuned for our Christmas Report 2009 after we have warmed up under the Hawaiian Sun!

Thanksgiving in Hawaii

We hosted a little Thanksgiving party this year with some of our neighbors. None of us have family on Oahu, so we combined forces to make a great meal and have a day a little different from all the others.

This is our living room, ready to go for the feast. We brined the turkey in salt/sugar water which made for a very juicy white meat! I suggest you try. Here's Dave with Amy, Jaden and Jon, our upstairs neighbors.
This is Sam, Dan and Riley, our garage neighbors.
And here we are with Mindy, the rest of the garage neighbor family.
We had a lot of fun today even though we missed our families. Last year we went to the beach a couple times over the Thanksgiving weekend. This year, Dave's trying to finish an 18 page research paper! Guess what we'll be doing for the rest of the weekend? Not the beach! :(

IT'S a BOY!!!!

Ok so the video here is short, and you can't see much but I was going to do the whole ultra sound but if you listen really carefully you can here the tech tell me we can't video the ultrasound "because some times the video makes it look like the baby is growing two heads or three feet stuff like that, but whatever enjoy!! it is like five seconds long!!



so here is the important picture first!! Wendy was so sure that we were going to have a girl, sorry Wendy!!



then obviously this is a profile picture, for those of you who new Grandpa Larson, if you look close enough you might see him in this picture!!!



and for those who think I might be crazy in seeing my grandpa in this picture you have to look at the face, the nose is really what I'm talking about!!!



and then here is one of my son, looking at the other profile, can't see the face well but he has a good strong back and he has a healthy belly already!!


Here is a bonus video as well some of you have heard about the Haunted Lagoon!! well every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday nights in Oct we heard the haunted Lagoon, we even went twice!! but we heard it so much that when we heard this one section we would repeat it and it got so annoying that we couldn't take it anymore so on the very last night we went again to ride the ride and when we were headed home we heard them call out "last Boat" so we thought that we could share this last bit of the Haunted Lagoon with you it's dark and you can't see much except the glow sticks but Wendy pokes her head in and explains what's happening!!! so Enjoy!! and don't hate us too much if it get's stuck in your head, we had it for a whole month!!!!

Pumpkin Carving

So we started our Halloween Pumpkin Carving Night about two weeks ago, well we've told you all about the humidity around here so we should have known that a pumpkin would go rotten in two weeks, but we didn't so here was a wasted investment in entertainment. oh well easy come easy go!!!
And if you look behind me at the door you can see our movable scarecrow decoration, the scarecrow and some inflatable ghosts that are hanging in our window are the only decorations we have up for this year.



Since we lost our last pumpkin to the humidity we bought two more and carved them after our big ultrasound appointment, and here is us pulling out the guts!!!



This is a close up of my Pumpkin it's a scarecrow, Wendy's is a bugaboo(not pictured),but her's is pretty cool. This year we used a Jack-O-Lantern Pattern Book just so you don't think that we are amazing carvers. No we just cheat!!! the "tools" that we used weren't very good, the small knife for detailing broke early on and then the tracing tool didn't work very well I pressed pretty hard and I could hardly see the marks in the pumpkin so I replaced the paper and cut out the pieces with the paper on the pumpkin.



BOOOO!!! Oh wait here's Wendy's Bugaboo. Obviously finished. it's cool!!



And here is my Scarecrow we worked pretty hard on these!!



I hope everyone has a SPOOKTACULAR Halloween!!!

Halloweens Past

Today, we're going to relive Halloweens from the past by examining some of my old costumes. I do not have nearly as many pictures of costumes on my computer as I did of pumpkins. But I'm sure you'll enjoy looking as these just as much.

The last time I dressed up was a few years ago. This was a particularly cheap costume. The only thing I purchased was the white pants. I made the buttons and carrot nose out of construction paper and borrowed the top hat. Here I am with my life guard and butterfly roommates.
We dressed up for a stake Halloween party. The church was so hot... but me in my snowman costume (which I had double layered because white can be a little too transparent) made for a really uncomfortably warm evening. I ran in to an old pal while I was at this party and met his friend. Later, this old pal told me that his friend kept asking him when they could hang out with his "snowman friend." I didn't realize my snowman costume was so attractive and had made such a big impression!

The year before that I dressed up as a Paramecium. I know, who does that? I even labeled myself so all could recognize my unique organs.
Actually, I was part of a whole team. My roommates and I went to our ward Halloween party as the Kingdoms of Life. From left to right you see a lion (animal kingdom), a mushroom (fungi kingdom), me (the paramecium kingdom??), a virus (not exactly a kingdom...) and a palm tree (plant kingdom). We totally should have won the costume contest! But instead the Harry Potter team won (sooo not original.)

Then there was the time I threw a costume together several hours before a party. I borrowed black pants, black gloves and a black hoodie. I already had the white tape and black scarf.
Personally, I think I made a dang good skunk! Whenever I look at this picture I'm sad that it turned out kinda blurry!

Now we'll rewind a few more years to high school. Both of us were a bunch of grapes. The best part of this costume is that while we were Trick or Treating we heard some boys yell down the street, "Hey, look, balloon girls! Let's go pop 'em!" And that ended our Trick or Treating fun for that night!! (No, we never got popped.)

And finally, one of my favorite costumes of all time, a witch costume made by my mom. I vaguely remember watching her make it on the sewing machine. I painted my face green like the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz... but somehow I missed my whole forehead?

This was probably about the same year that my dad taught me how to spell witch for my spelling test. I had tried all evening to learn how to spell witch and ghost and wasn't getting it. When I woke up on the morning of the spelling test, my dad told me he had a way for me to remember w-i-t-c-h. He told me: Wendy Is The Cute Head: w-i-t-c-h. I remember him telling me it was a silly way to remember...but guess what, to this day, that is how I remember how to spell witch.

And on a mostly unrelated note, the pumpkin we bought at Foodland (that I wrote about last time) molded while it was sitting on the floor waiting to be carved! Stupid humidity!

Halloween's Many Faces

Who doesn't LOVE carving pumpkins for Halloween? Since the 1860s, this pumpkin art has been associated with Halloween. Since 1981, it has filled at least one of my October evenings in preparation for the big night of October 31st.

1982 (?) Here you see me (in pink) with my cute little sister, Cindy, with our pumpkins. I'm not sure of the year but don't you think I look about 2 and she looks about 1? Whatever our ages, it was long before we were old enough to use knives to carve pumpkins, thus the permanent marker. In fact, it was long before we were old enough to use permanent markers; I'm sure Mom and Dad drew these faces for us.
1987 (?) A few years later, we had this pumpkin for Halloween. I remember my dad had this great idea to put hard boiled eggs in the carved eyes and an apple slice coming out of the mouth like a tongue. But, if you'll notice the 4 pumpkins in the background... those were ours and they are UNCARVED. Looks like we were all still too little to use knives!

Back in this day, we used to put our pumpkins out in the garden after Halloween was over. Through the winter we'd watch them slowly shrivel under the snow. By Easter, they were completely flattened in the dirt.

(I carved many pumpkins between 1987 and 2004, but have no pictures on my laptop to display.)

2005 This is my roommate, Melanie, with our pumpkin that we carved at an FHE group (the same mashed potato dragon group). I think we gave it an awesome name to go with those giant teeth, but I don't really remember.
2005 A few days later that same year, my other roommate, Haley, and I decided to try carving mini pumpkins. Let me tell you this: Not as easy as you'd think! And, WOW, they were smelly!

And then because our mini carvings were way too awesome to keep to ourselves, we stuck them in a planter box next to the stairwell at Continental Apartments so all could enjoy our Post-Halloween pumpkins creativity. (But they didn't last very long in the planter box... someone quickly tossed them out, not fully appreciating our hard work!)

2006 I had a great idea this year which stemmed from my inability to decide if I wanted to carve a mean face or a happy face. I was probably torn between happy and mean because this was when I lived at the "Tramp House" and had reasons to reflect mean-ness and happiness which will not be further discussed here. The bottom line is that I ended up carving 2 faces on 1 pumpkin: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.

This is the happy side (my expression is reflective of the pumpkin's expression as per request of the photographer.)

This is the mean side.

And just so you know that it really was ONE pumpkin, I took this pic looking in through one eye and out the other mouth.

2007 And finally, we come to the most recent pumpkin carving experience I've had. Dave and I were dating at this time and he showed up one night with 2 surprises: a pumpkin that we would carve together and the news that he was leaving the NEXT DAY (instead of 2 days from then) to work in Texas for several weeks. I was not happy! But we carved this amazing pumpkin. My favorite part about this one is that as we were talking about what kind of face to give it, I looked down at the news paper ads on the counter and saw this little tiny drawing of a spider that was no bigger than 1/4 of an inch. I said, "Let's make this spider!" And we did. I enlarged it on the pumpkin and we took turns carving.

And, sure enough, I was the only one around on Halloween to actually enjoy it... cuz SOMEBODY had to go away for work!

2009 We did nothing with pumpkins last year because Foodland, the local grocery story, sold out. (Weird, huh.) We got an early start this year and purchased our pumpkin from Foodland yesterday. It cost 69 cents/pound! A grand total of $7 and it's small!

And now we debate: What should we carve into Jack this year?

Memory-lane Monday: Mashed Potato Dragon

Three and a half years ago I was living at Continental Apartments in Logan, UT. A usual highlight of the week was Monday night's FHE activities. I have pulled from the archives some pictures of an especially memorable FHE activity: Mashed Potato Sculptures.

We met downstairs in a boys' apartment and it looks like each apartment brought a pot of instant mashed potatoes. Then we got to stick our hands all over in the potatoes and make something. Here's some people in the group (none of my roommates are featured.)

After everyone else was finished, I kept working. (Masterpieces take time.)

This is the creation I came up with. Isn't it awesome!?!

I may not be all that "crafty", but you've gotta admit that this is one stinkin' cool mashed potato dragon!