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Posted by Michelle on Jun 1, 2012 in Hayley, More Family
Hayley’s Christmas present to Uncle Jay was a paintball experience down at Black River Paintball. They both came back having taken a shot in the neck but really no worse for wear. They do look pretty badass!
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Posted by Michelle on Feb 11, 2012 in Hayley, Jeff, Michelle, More Family
We had another great holiday season!
We co-hosted a Christmas Eve party with our next door neighbors Wes & Jenn that turned out to be a huge success. We usually hang with them on Christmas Eve and we decided to ask a few more friends to come on over. We figured most people wouldn’t be around but they were! And they wanted to come so it got big right quick. It was lots of fun and hopefully we’ll do it again next year. We hang out with them on New Year’s Eve too and thank goodness that was a lot lower key even if Hayley had friends over.
We did the tree downstairs in the library this year for the first time.
I’m so bad about taking photos on Christmas day… I’m just so busy doing other stuff and then sleeping that afternoon. My mother-in-law luckily took some cute ones and shared so we can thank her for most of these!
One of her favorite gifts – a little pink papasan chair for her room.
The best thing in the world – my grandmother’s recipe for monkeybread. I have to make two batches each holiday.
And this was our sixth Gingerbread Demo Derby! We made a bunch of houses and had neighbors join us to smash them up! Super fun Christmas afternoon.
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>>Christmas (slideshow view) (detailed view)
>>Gingerbread Demolition Derby (slideshow view) (detailed view)
Posted by Michelle on Nov 7, 2011 in Hayley
What a Halloween scene! The highlight was hitting the insane haunted house in Snow Camp, the Original Hollywood Horror Show. As most of you know, we are horror nuts and love to be scared. So we made the hour drive to be scared out of our minds in the best haunted house around. It was well worth the drive! The bonus of the night was the site was a shoot for a vampire movie earlier in the week and some of the actors hung around – including Michael Welch (Mike Newton in Twilight!!) and Johnny Pacar (Damon in Make it or Break it and Jackson in Flight 29 Down). OMG – an actor from Twilight (he’s the local guy from town who asks Bella out early on and stays her friend) and Johnny Pacar… Hayley has loved both of his tv shows. Johnny hugged her and she swore she wouldn’t wash it for weeks.
The guys were hysterical hams before the haunted house
and great with Hayley
What a messy Halloween – it rained when we went pumpkin picking and rained all Halloween. Didn’t stop the girls from going out for candy of course. Hayley’s friend Mia came over again and Mason went with them on their candy run.
Picking pumpkins
Tired post-trick or treating
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Posted by Michelle on Jul 5, 2011 in Hayley, Jeff, Michelle, More Family
We went up to Blacksburg for a Fourth of July vacation. Blacksburg is so lovely in the summer when it is just sweltering down here. I know Jeff was happy to visit Virginia Tech’s campus as well since it had been a few years.
The big news was that Jeff and his folks ran the Shawsville 5K. Jeff did great for his first race, his mom was first in her age group and his dad was third – the rest of us just slept in and then drove around in the Jeep cheering for them. Just for the record, Grandma Sharen crushed everyone in croquet twice. She was on the winning girls team for games with me and Hayley as well. I think that means Grandma Sharen wins the Fourth of July.
Jeff nearly done
The athletes
Everyone after the race
Hayley about to whack away at a ball she hit
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Posted by Michelle on Feb 26, 2011 in Hayley, Michelle
For some reason I decided I’d be real crafty for Valentine’s Day. I made cards for Jeff and Hayley then decided to try a new recipe for my sweeties, cake balls. I basically used the cake balls recipe by the awesome Bakerella. I was going to finish it all myself but the final decorating part was too fun not to let Hayley help. I’m sure next time we make them they’ll look even better but they were so really tasty and cute.
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Posted by Michelle on Jan 4, 2011 in Hayley, Jeff, Michelle
What a great Christmas! It started off with going to the Carolina Ballet performance of the Nutcracker with Jenn and Mason. We did lots of crafts and baked, did our Christmas Eve Gingerbread house decorating and then our Christmas day Demolition Derby, the sixth annual! Between them, we opened scads of gifts and then had a full house for dinner. Top it all off with snow for a white Christmas and I don’t think we could ask for more!
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>>Christmas Crafting (slideshow view) (detailed view)
>>Christmas (slideshow view) (detailed view)
>>Gingerbread Demolition Derby (slideshow view) (detailed view)
Posted by Michelle on Nov 24, 2010 in Hayley
We’ve been in a very arts & crafts sort of mood! I’ll add more over the Holidays…
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Posted by Michelle on Nov 6, 2010 in Hayley, Jeff, Michelle
Know how you can tell Hayley is getting older? Less photos. She went to a costume party as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz on Friday night and I got no photos. Then on Halloween she had her friend Mia come over to trick or treat, I got one photo and *poof* they were off into the night.
The Hippie and Skeleton Witch
Although, we did do tons of fun Halloween stuff this year. Since we all loved to be scared silly, we watched stacks of horror movies and went to haunted houses. Jeff and Hayley went to a scary night time corn maze and got so spooked, she fell over and took him with her – haha. Then we did the Clayton Fear Farm, the hayride was lots of fun. Lordy this child loves anything scary and yes we’ve relented finally on some of her horror movie requests – still no extreme gore tho. Thank goodness Halloween is my favorite holiday!
Posted by Michelle on May 11, 2010 in Hayley, Humor
As usual Hayley had many birthday celebrations – what can I say, we like to have fun. We had pizza with our neighbors on her actual birthday and then ice cream sundaes. Then Jeff’s folks came down and we went out with family to our favorite place Ginza that Saturday night and a cute cake that look like a horse pasture.
Then the next weekend we went to Frankie’s for her party with friends – go kart racing, bumper boats, video games, laser tag and the drop zone ride so many times I thought I’d puke just watching them. I have no idea how how they got back on that ride after dinner – and I mean a full dinner in the restaurant there and birthday cake.
We got a very cool cake done by Blue Moon Bakery to look like the book Eclipse, the third Twilight book and the next movie coming out in the series. The sides even looked like icing and spine of the book. Chocolate with chocolate mousse filling, so good. They do great work! The wait staff at Frankie’s begged us for pieces it looked so amazing.
The big surprise was we gave her a cell phone which she was dying for but we told her she wouldn’t get until middle school. She thought she was getting a flat screen TV for her game room (and she did get it later that weekend) but we faked her into thinking the TV was shipped here and she needed to open it. Of course it was a fake huge box full of peanuts with the cellphone hidden in it. It was so funny watching her dig through it and try to figure out what the heck was going on.
I had to put the video on youtube b/c it was too long for flickr:
Bless Jeff’s heart, he cleaned up all the peanuts for her and they were EVERYWHERE. All in all, it was a really fun birthday. I really didn’t take a ton of photos this time and I kept forgetting to at family stuff but there are more videos than normal though.
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