Merry Christmas, Mon!

Merry Christmas from Tennessee!  Here's one of the pictures Sandals took in Jamaica; more to come in a couple weeks when we've returned to our camera cord!

A Pretty Party

Last Saturday I hosted a final spouse social for the spouses of Caleb's pilot training class.  Sort of a farewell party but additionally an early birthday party for one of our spouses who is expecting a baby in March.  Together with my friend Maylis and her hours of browsing pinterest.com, we created a color-coordinated party with some decorations that our friend can reuse in her nursery or wherever.

Unfortunately I was in a terrible rush when snapping these pictures as the girls arrived so they're not the best but hopefully you'll get the idea.

So the colors were purple, turquoise and green.  Here you can see the branch that we sawed off one of my trees, planted in a vase with dirt to weigh it down, and wired little leaves out of scrapbook paper all over.  This was my favorite.  After the party I was so sad to see it go that I made a second similar but quicker and easier version.  I'll post pictures of that sometime too.  Also you can see the little paper flags in the muffins and a little bit of the banner we made for the wall.

 This picture didn't turn out so well, but I also made a little baby version of the banner on the wall for the table!  Our food didn't really fit the theme: brownies and kettle corn.  We had sprite with grape juice ice cubes that did fit the purple color scheme.

Yay Me

This is the little engagement card I made for a good friend of mine who got engaged several weeks ago.  I got the concept off Pinterest or Etsy or something like that but changed it up quite a lot.  Unfortunately I couldn’t think of anything more clever and succinct than “You are engaged!” to write on the front.  “Congratulations” or “engagement” was just not going to fit.  I still thought it was pretty cute.

A Creative Christmas

Just wanted to share a few little projects from the past couple weeks.

1. Gingerbread house from scratch.  Not quite the Martha Stewart moment I imagined, although I do like this picture.  I thoroughly read several blog posts and online articles about making a gingerbread house and thought that would just be the epitome of domesticity.  Several hours into making and refrigerating the dough, which didn’t even taste good as a dough, printing, creating, and cutting out templates, rolling out and cutting shapes out of the hard-as-a-rock dough, baking the pieces, decorating the pieces with hard-as-a-rock icing, here I am with my mother and sister-in-law, trying to assemble said pieces.  It was going fairly well until we realized the pieces became too contorted in the baking process to fit together very well and we didn’t have enough time to really wade through the process.  Also, I burnt my finger on the burnt sugar mixture intended for gingerbread house mortar.  The day after assignment night Caleb and I broke all the pieces into little tiny pieces and threw them away.  I guess that was kind of therapeutic.  I just hope I remember what a time-consuming process this was before I go and attempt it again next year. 

This little wonder is actually the creation of my mother, who got the idea from a children’s magazine.  Simple, adorable, and a great way to preserve beautiful Christmas cards.  All you need are some pieces of stiff felt, some cute ribbon, some fabric paint, little squares of old Christmas cards, some sort of craft glue, and little bits of velcro, and some magnetic tape for the back if you want to put it on your fridge.  Assemble.  Admire.  Use again next year.

This one was actually completely my brain child.  Since we are going to be out of town for three weeks surrounding Christmas, we agreed it would be a waste of money to buy a real tree, but I couldn’t stand the thought of not seeing the pretty lights and our special ornaments this year.  With a single strand of Christmas lights and some clear thumbtacks, you too could have a completely needle-free, low-cost fake Christmas tree! 

Assignment Night

I know some of you have been wanting to see some footage from assignment night, so here’s a video of Caleb’s roast and the revelation of the plane and also the little movie that his class made as an introduction to the class at the start of the program.  Apparently it’s a parody of Animal House and/or Old School so if you’ve seen those it makes more sense but even if you haven’t you’ll hopefully get the gist and it’s still kind of funny.

Get Ready...

Cause I am about to compensate for not blogging for the past two weeks.  Honestly, I thought it had been two months. The past two weeks have been very busy and this coming week is looking quite busy as well.

You probably know by now that we were assigned an MC-12 to Beale.  Not gonna sugarcoat it; that was a huge shock and a disappointment but we are definitely counting all the positives about the location and the mission of that plane.  The MC-12 is part of the ISR(Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance--aren’t those three words for basically the same thing?? Yes, yes, they are) community so basically Caleb will be flying around over the combat zones overseas with the belly of the plane taking videos and pictures of what’s going on in the area and then they directly communicate that information to ground troops and air command so they can do more smart things and fewer stupid things.  :-)  Gotta love my laymen’s terms.

So the mission is pretty important and therefore enviable and exciting among pilots.  Beale is near Sacramento, CA, which makes it enviable and exciting among spouses.  Hello, civilization!!

We are thinking of living in between Beale and the suburban heaven of Roseville, CA. So, not too far from work, not too far from Crate and Barrel.  And a great library, church, REI, Sacramento Airport, etc.  We will probably move in March although it may be February.  We’ll know for sure this week.

One thing we were not counting on until we got the MC-12 is that Caleb will most likely deploy for six months starting this summer.  That’s just the way this aircraft’s system works: it has a very brief training period and then off you go!  Deployment kind of stinks because you are apart but career wise it’s good because you get a ton of flying hours and air medals and stuff.  Also, you make more money. :-)

So, there you have the big update.  We hope everyone will come visit once we’re in CA because we’ll actually be in a desirable, attainable destination. :-)