Nothing new to report

I've hit a blogging wall. I used to blog several times a week and lately I'm good if I blog every couple of weeks. What's my deal, people?

It's funny how much just hanging pictures on the walls makes a house feel like a home. I've had things leaning against the walls to figure out where I wanted to hang them, and now I'm making real holes in the walls to hang portraits of the kids and other cool things that I've been collecting over the years. For example ...

I'm not very scientific when I hang pictures, unfortunately. The first one up is easy -- I just eyeball it. The 2nd one is easy, too, but the others are definitely harder to hang evenly. Hence, this grouping has 2 pictures hung while the others wait patiently on the floor.

When Paige saw me hanging these up, she asked if we were having someone "freakishly large" over for dinner. :)  Mike isn't entirely won over by the giant silverware either but they make me happy every time I walk by them.

I am just barely taking the Christmas trees down today. Why has it taken me so long, you ask? Because I don't have enough furniture to fill this house and so taking the trees down has quite literally left some gaping holes in my decor. Christmas lights just make a house feel magical, too. Don't people decorate with twinkling trees for Valentine's? Easter?

I'm kicking myself for not having taken more pictures over the past couple of months. Pictures of all 36 of our Thanksgiving guests, or of our Young Women's pajama breakfast here the other morning, or of Christmas morning, or of the private Orange Leaf frozen yogurt party that the extended Mayfield clan had. I didn't even take a Christmas pajama picture this year. Probably because I had the flu on Christmas Eve (so awesome), but still .... Here's a few random shots that I did manage to take, though.

My adorable niece, Ali, with my adorable Elle. There's some serious love between these two.

The girls had an American Girl rock concert. They made instruments for the dolls out of paper and then had a lipsync concert to Paige's ipod music.

We had quite a few cousin sleepovers over the holidays.  Lots of cousins running around together is definitely a good thing.

Elle's preschool gave a little concert at a care center for Christmas. Elle couldn't have been more serious during the concert but she sang every note and did all of the actions. For as animated as she normally is, she sure clams up on stage.

There's always lots of playing around with phone apps. There's the 'stachematic' mustache maker app,

... the 'fat booth' app that adds 100 pounds to your face (this is Christian's friend, Ian -- trust me, he's a cute kid),

... and the 'zombiematic' app that turns your precious daughter into this monster:

That's just wrong.

Back to tackling the garage and the remainder of the boxes that need unpacking ....