Best Job

This is for all the wonderful Moms in my world. Thanks for all you do, the love you give, and the support you provide!

Happy Day To You!

Mom was super busy this weekend with her BIG Lily Ball for work. I stole her for a few hours today to treat the both of us to much needed pedicures! We're doing our family celebration Monday night after work because that was when the 6 of us got our schedules to match up.

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY, MOM!

We can't thank you enough for all you do for us! You really deserve a whole month to celebrate, so I'm glad we can at least stretch it out over two days :)

:)

Merry Christmas!

Minnie & I are wishing you & yours a very Merry Christmas!

We'll be spending the day with family and friends at Mom and Dad's house. We're thoroughly enjoying winter break and are pleased the 10 inches of snow won't be keeping family from getting together this year like it did last year!

Maybe snow will come, but let's hope it doesn't strap everyone inside ... I've got a fully booked week off from work. I hope Santa brings you everything on your list! :)

Your day

Happy Father's Day!

I chose this picture for my Father's Day post for a few reasons.

1) It is a great family picture ... minus our additions since it was taken (Erik, Minnie, Ellen).

2) It is summertime and this was taken in late July many years ago.

3) It is funny to see us in old pictures.

4) It is a picture taken from Camp Waldemar, the camp where Molly & I each spent 7 summers between the ages of 9 and 16. Today for Father's Day, I gave Dad a book called P.S. I Hate It Here! It is a compilation of hilarious notes home from summer camp. Dad was the KING of sending us mail while we were at Waldemar. They even got us to record 1-sided conversations on blank tapes & send those home in addition to letters.

Thanks for being such a great dad, and for being the KING of so many aspects of our lives: planning family road trips, teaching us to keep our cars clean & gas tanks filled (even if I had to meet you in DeSoto for cash to fill said car), helping us with school projects (like staying up late to bail me out when I've procrastinated too long), sending us to great colleges, taking care of your Granddog & Granddaughter when needed, providing lots of laughs, sharing your love of photography with us AND supporting us in whatever we do!

Love you, Dad!

Too many thank yous

Today, on Mother's Day, I thank you.

I don't even know where to start, but I'll try.

Thanks for always caring for us and loving us, even when I know we were (and maybe still can be) difficult.

Thank you for supporting me in my NEED to get a puppy for my 25th birthday. You even showed up with a kennel and collar for this little one, even though we were "just going to look at the puppies".

Thank you for thinking she's still cute, even when she crawls on your kitchen table.

Thank you for being my shopping partner at estate sales and at antique malls.

Thank you for showing me how sisters should love each other ...

... and laugh with each other.

Thank you for teaching me how to play cards, complete puzzles and love dominoes.

Thank you for the dresses, shoes, hair & nails on special occasions.

Thank you for all the vacations, even the wild trip to the lake with the girls one summer!

Thank you for passing down some of your jewelry to me, because I really do love it & wear those pieces with pride.

Thank you to all the women in my family for being great role models and second mothers when I needed them.

Thank you for moving me, too many times to count.

Thank you for helping to get me through KU and graduate with the degree I've wanted since I was 7 years old.

Thank you for showing me that I should always speak my mind, if I believe in something.

Thank you for supporting me when I completed my Master's program a few years later.

Thank you for passing along your crafty and creative genes, and helping me with my crazy decorating ideas.

Thank you for being you. I love you! Happy Mother's Day!

Smashing eggs!

I hope you all had a nice Easter. We didn't go to church, but we heard the church bells ringing & enjoyed time with family & friends. The weather was BEAUTIFUL and we spent time after brunch sitting outside, watching the kids play. Ellen enjoyed her first Easter egg hunt and loved smashing the hollow eggs that Mére made. They were filled with confetti & were fun to break.

Gearing up for another big week at school. We have three more days of State Assessments. Math is this week, then we're done. Woo Hoo! It was nice to relax this weekend before I need to get serious and get back into the swing of things. Happy Spring to everyone ... I think it's finally here for good!

Winter Break Review

I was feeling bad that I hadn't posted in a while, but I didn't really know how to sum up what had been going on since the beginning of my Winter Break. So ... here it is in pictures. I have a few more days of break, so any additional pictures, you'll just have to check out my photo blog. I've decided to continue with it for year two. I really enjoyed doing that blog since it was simple & quick. I also felt that it was a great way to work on my photography skills. My goal for this year is to save up enough money (ha!) to treat myself to a fancy digital SLR camera.

Here we go!

Part of my Christmas decor. I love the way my condo looks with all my decorations up. Last year I took it all down by January 7th. I'm hoping to put it all away by the time I go back to work next week.

This pic pretty much sums up Christmas morning. Ellen wanting to get her hands on all the presents & Minnie looking flustered and running around.

The cute moss terrarium that Molly & I made for Mom and Ann. They were doing so well the first week and now they seem to have some yucky mold growing in them. I will read into some quick fixes ... but the best fix may just be starting over from scratch. They are so darn cute, I hate to see them do poorly.

I came home on Christmas night to find this lovely leak in my living room. After FREAKING out & using my fancy ear-to-wall detective skills, I realized that it was snow/roof related ... not pipes/bathroom related. It continued to drip pretty steadily for 4 days. Now it has stopped, but the plaster on the ceiling fell off & the ceiling is stained much more than what this picture shows. The HOA workmen say they'll be out in a few weeks to fix. Hopefully this will, in fact, be covered by my HOA dues!

It snowed ... and snowed .. and snowed ... AND SNOWED! I'm not sure when I've ever seen this much snow in Kansas City! I don't think Minnie has even been alive when there has been this much snow. It's NOT fun walking her in the bitter cold, but at least she'll go out!
The crew at the Wagner's annual Cookie Decorating Party. It was the 20th (or was it the 21st?) year of the party ... so it was 1989-themed. A fun time was had by all ... unfortunately we were missing some due to snow, family & plumbing disasters!

My cookie this year! I normally just do one cookie. I earned the 2nd Runner Up prize with this snow globe. It took me close to an hour ... well worth it!

Look! It's a Snuggie! You can even knit when you are wearing it. Mitz & I were so cold, we both wrapped up in the Snuggie that Adam & Jill got at their family gift exchange.

We spent a lot of our break playing Wii. Big Brain Academy is always good for a laugh! I call this girl on the right, "angry, unicorn, gap-teeth" when I'm trying to remember what the characters look like! :)

Becca & Charlotte playing at the girls' gift exchange. Charlotte is so funny when you put a camera on her. She blinks & smiles right when she sees the flash!

It was so nice to get together for our gift exchange. Thanks to Megan & Emilie for cooking up a wonderful dinner. Love you girls!

The other way that we spent our Christmas break. A rare picture of me that Jilly took. Mitzi realized that she hadn't played Guitar Hero since she moved last March. We missed it ... but I could do without playing Van Halen GH.

Jilly & Adam rocking out to 80's Guitar Hero.

On the 31st, I actually went up to school to work for a few hours. I gave up after 3 hours when I couldn't feel my fingers to type. The temperature was anywhere from 60-64 degrees while we were up there! Brrrr!

Went later that day to play with Ellen. This was the first time I'd seen her have a bath in the big tub & not the kitchen sink. She LOVES to play with her toys & move around constantly (probably to stay warm)! Look at those lashes!

And ... here we are. A new year!

No pictures! No pictures!

Ellen is already aware of the paparazzi ... now that she's famous!

In case you didn't hear, Ellen was the Grand Prize winner of the Kansas City Star's Cutest Costume contest. Say that three times fast. Molly got the call early today and by the time we got home from shopping & running errands, they had already posted the news online!

Check out this screen cap. There is our little salmon sushi roll ... on the front page of the KansasCity.com website! The other winners had some GREAT costumes, too!

Thanks to all of you that voted for her online. I'm not sure how Ellen will top her first Halloween, but I bet Molly already has some idea in the works! :)

Best Sushi In Town???

Okay ... that's not really what we are voting on, but we are voting on who was the Best Dressed Kiddo in KC this Halloween!

Miss Ellen is one of the 166 entries in the latest KC Star contest.

She would LOVE to win and she's begging you for her vote! :)

Here's the scoop:

• She is submission #139 out of 166 of KC's best dressed kids. {You should seriously check out her competition. Some of the pictures are so blurry you can't even tell if it's a pic of a child or a magazine picture! Ellen has a real chance to win!}

• The winner is the photo with the most number of votes. Voting is open from Wednesday, November 4th at 5:00am - Friday, November 6th at 5:00pm CST, once per day. {It's not too late to get a vote in today!}

• You do have to register on the site to vote (wah, wah, wah). Be sure to check the box to not send any unwanted emails. After the contest, you can send an email to privacy at upickem.net to remove your email from their list.

Here are the links you need:

Click here to REGISTER (it took me a while to get my confirmation email ... don't give up! It will come.)

Click here to VOTE!

The extent of my fall decorations

My glitter crafty project started with the glitter acorns I saw at Curious Sofa last week. I saw them and thought, "I can do that!" as I do quite often. Well, that night, I collected a bag full of acorns from Molly & Erik's backyard.

Then ... I was sick for a week. I didn't have the energy to deal with the acorns I brought home. When I finally opened the bag, I found that all of the acorns were moldy & went straight in the trash.

So, I found pine cones on the ground during my walk with Minnie. I started with just 6 ... and then went to pick up 10 more ... and then found a bag of plastic pumpkins, acorns & squash at Michael's today.

I think they turned out really cute!

I then went in my storage closet to find the rest of my Halloween/fall decorations and they were all housed in that cute Trick or Treat box. So ... I set it all out. I'm not a HUGE fan of Halloween decorations, but I do like these. AND, my fun glitter decor can stay out through Thanksgiving (I think) with maybe some new turkey-inspired decor. Anyone have any ideas?

Small babies, Medium babies and Large babies

Yesterday was a day of babies for me. I was lucky enough to go visit Becca & her 1 1/2 week old, Charlotte. Both Mom & baby were doing great and I had forgotten just how small new babies were. She was precious and slept the entire 1.5 hours I was there.
CONGRATS to Becca & Mark!

Small babies: Charlotte Spears
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After I left Bec & Charlotte, I headed over to Molly & Erik's to spend the afternoon with the girls. I walked upstairs to wake up Ellen and I was SHOCKED at how big she seemed compared to Charlotte. Those babies grow so fast, you hardly realize it!
Ellen looked very cute in her new "Kiss Me" shirt for St. Patrick's Day and I decided to put a bow in her hair. It was SUPER cute! We were off to go take lunch to Marie & Preston for a little play date.

Medium babies: Ellen Lund
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I'm not by any means saying that Preston is a LARGE child, but of the three babies I saw on Tuesday, he was definitely the biggest! I've been reading the blog all about Preston, so I feel like I am updated on him, but I haven't seen him in person since he was a newborn last summer!
Preston is so big & happy and he is very close to walking all on his own. He's a mover and he definitely keeps Marie & Clint active! It was fun to be around both babies yesterday and I hope we get to have more playdates this summer!

Large babies: Preston Hooker
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Happy Valentine's Day to all my girl friends!

1 resolution down, 1 resolution to go.

Last year's resolution was to start a blog to keep in touch with friends and family. I did great with my resolution, and it might be the first one I've ever kept! Even though I posted 372 times last year, I wanted to have something else to do this year, in addition to The Bets Week Ever.

I love to take pictures, but I wanted a way to work on my photography skills this year ... using my new, fancy, PINK camera!


This year's project/blog is all about photography. 1 picture a day. Well, actually 2 pictures a day. I pitched an idea to Jill for us each to take a photo and post them to the blog each day. I thought it would be fun and we'd get to each have a chance to play around with our cameras each day. I sort of stole the idea from 3191: A Year of Mornings/Evenings. During the end of winter break, it was sort of the race to see who would post their photo first. Now that we're back to work, I can tell that they might come later in the evening.

Soooo ... January 1st it was. Jilly came over so we could get the new bloggy blog all set up. We had a few name ideas, but unfortunately, some yea-hoos stole the blog names first and haven't posted since 2002! Finally, we came up with the name and set up the site.

The View Across Town

We are now one week in and we've been doing well. The pictures can be of anything we want, I guess. We didn't really talk about it. Mom asked if I could be in the picture, and I assumed yes. However, after looking at many, many pictures on my computer, I've realized that once you become the photographer in your group, there are very few pictures of you on the other side of the camera! The title to each of our posts will serve as the description for the photo. Look carefully for the labels for extra info. We'll see how long we are both able to stick to a picture a day, but I figure that if I can WRITE 372 posts in a year, surely I can deal with just putting up a single picture!

We'd also love to read your comments! Let us know what you like. What you don't like. What you want to see more of. Mostly, just enjoy!

Blog Year in Review

This might be the first time I've stuck with a New Year's Resolution!!!

Here is the e-mail I sent to family & friends a year ago:
Hi Family and Friends!
I wanted to send out a Happy New Year e-mail to start my year off right. One of my resolutions for 2008 is to stay in better contact with people and reconnect with old friends!
How am I going to do this? Well ... one way was for me to start a blog so people can see what I'm up to on their own. So I'm putting some of my resolution on you! I have a couple of friends that have blogs and they inspired me to get my act together.
I think I'm off to a good start so far because I actually got my blog up and running before the end of 2007!
So here it is: www.thebetsweekever.blogspot.com ! Go bookmark it and check back often. My plan is to post something every day. I'll write about anything and everything ... just so it doesn't make me lose my job! If you're lucky, you might even be featured on my blog ... I promise to be nice. Just go check out Mom playing Play Station 2's Guitar Hero yesterday! Feel free to comment on my page. If you don't have a g-mail account, you can comment anonymously, but I'd love it if you sign your name so I can see what you have to say!
[Also, if you see any Google ads on my site that look interesting, click away! I get paid per click ... whether or not you do any real shopping or browsing on those sites!]
One of the things I'll post about every week is my Etsy "Deals of the Week". If you don't know about www.etsy.com yet, you should! It is very similar to eBay, but it is all homemade items and you don't have to bid on them ... you can just purchase them right away. Last summer, I started crafting and putting things on Etsy for sale. It's a fun way to justify all my crazy crafting that has taken over my house and room!
Here is my Etsy site: www.betsyonetsy.etsy.com !
I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday break with family and friends!
Here's to achievable resolutions in 2008 ... I'm on my way!

I successfully posted enough to have an average of one per day. The only thing I didn't stick with was my weekly Etsy "Deals of the Week". I did do them more often than I thought I would, though.

Here are some stats for the last year:

• Blog posts: 372
• Comments posted: 823
• Number of labels used when posting: 50
• 5 labels used the most: Friends, family, school, Minnie, TV
• 5 labels used the least: Downtown, books, bars, art, snow (Hmmmm ... more TV than books. No surprise there. Ellen also tied for least used, but I'm sure that will change. She's only had a few days to make her way onto the blog.)
• Etsy sales from posts: 12
• Month with the most posts: January '07
• Month with the least posts: June '07 (That's when I was 'homeless', so I think I had other things on my mind.)
  
• Money earned from ad clicks: $103.51
• Family members that I've gotten to start blogging this year: 2 (I still have Mom to work on.)
• Number of visits: 15,000+
• Hours spent blogging: endless! I could never count.
  

Thanks to all of you that have followed me through 2008!!! I won't be posting every day this year ... the plan is to wait for the really important things that I want to share. It might be hard to post less because I've gotten so used to sharing news daily. I do have another blog project in the works ... I'll be sure and share it when I have time to get it figured out! I hope everyone has a wonderful New Year's Eve with friends and family! Cheers!

It's that time of year!

Last night was the Annual Cookie Decorating Party for the Wagner family. They've had this party for family & friends for 19 years and I've been lucky to be a part of it since my freshman or sophomore year in high school!

The rules of the party are quite simple. Decorate sugar cookies using any of the many colors of icing you want and any or all of the sprinkles provided! I've won many awards in the past for great cookies:

My "Teacher Set"

I won the Lifetime Achievement Award for this beauty below in 2006.
Here is Miss USA, complete with coke under her nose and a beer bottle in her hand. I've learned that if you decorate a cookie as something big that happened in the news that year, it might hold up in the judging. I also know the judges well (Emilie, Mr. Wagner, Em's bro-in-law & cousin and Mr. Tobin), so that helps.

Last year I won the People's Choice Award for this OK Magazine cover! It took me FOR-EVER! I used toothpicks to place each one of those tiny sprinkles.

Other good cookie entries have been a Plaza skyline, complete with lights, and I've also had great competition. Kristin always goes all out with one cookie that takes her most of the evening. She's made Priest Holmes, Napoleon Dynamite, Coach Mangino, Cat in the Hat, etc, etc, etc. First time contestants are also notorious for winning: Mark's billiards balls & cue, Sandy's 3-D tree, etc.

This year, I came in with very few ideas, which was my problem to start. My entry (see below) made it into the top 20, but then, I was out of the contest. I guess I need to start thinking of ideas for next year's party!

Here we are after all the decorating and awards have come and gone.

This was my one good entry. I also made a gingerbread man missing a leg. There were a few other Obama logos, but mine was the only one with the motto on it.

This is Megan's 1st place winner! Megan is also quite the decorator. She's had many awards in the past with Fruit of the Loom characters, a to-scale KU bball court, and McDonalds fries & burger.

This was Kristin's winning entry for this year. She took my idea to the next level. I think she won 2nd runner up.

Here is a sampling of some of the cookies. Look closely at the Miss Pac Man in the top right, the Mexican-themed entries (this year's party has a Feliz Navidad theme), the other Obama log, and on the bottom right is a hand in a popcorn box.

Here are Kristin, John & Meg decorating.

And Julie pretend eating Mike's 1st entry. This was his first year at the party, and Julie's come-back after several years of being OOT. Mike decided just to pile as many colors of frosting and sprinkles on the cookie as he could.

Kristin was the one who got the pinata to finally crack! No surprise there!

And this is at the end of the evening. I was taking Julie & Mike home, and Matt asked if he could have a ride, too. I told him, "Sure, but I'm not sure that you'll fit!" Turns out, I wasn't too far off. This is why I am never asked to be the driver. Poor Matt was practically eating the windshield and Julie and Mike were packed like sardines in the back seat.