Spring is springing!

Two weeks ago Matt and the kids started a bunch of seeds in our spare room and they have already sprouted. The kids are pretty excited about it. Since it's pretty cold in that room, we have a space heater and I purchased some tarps and put them up so it kind of looks like we're doing some sort of illegal activity down stairs. Matt reassured our neighbor when she saw her at the gym in case she sees a glowing light on down there. I have a few more plants to start over the weekend. Maybe some annuals and some small space cantaloupe for sure. Had to throw in our photos of the space! I think I did a good job on the tarp wall to isolate the heat and Matt and the kids did a great job planting!

Next post--photos of the finished quilt! Yipee! I'm so thrilled with how it turned out and I snapped some photos today, but I'd like to get some with Jasper snuggling in it.

More Jamaica Photos

So I just thought I'd add a couple of photos. Matt on the beach with the kids. Jasper playing with the snorkel equipment and all 17 of us at a reception at the Great House on the plantation that we stayed. Our wonderful staff and Mika doing her best mermaid impression.

"Take a deep breath.....Inhale the surroundings....and exhale the stress..." Jamaica, 2009

"As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”

I going to open this post with a sincere thank you to my big sister for such an amazing week. You've provided us with such a perfect model of giving, I can only hope that one day I may bestow such a gift to another.

Take a deep breath.....Inhale the surroundings....and exhale the stress...

And thus began our long awaited and much anticipated Jamaican vacation.

That being said.. statistically on the top 100 list of most stressful experiences in life.. vacation comes in at #42.. smack in the middle of 'Christmas' (#43) and 'Change in Eating Habits' (#41) .. which ironically enough, were both played a major role in said vacation. Now, I'm fairly confident the author of that list never factored in the "international, post 9/11, holiday travel with a 2 and 4 year old" multiplier in his/her highly scientific stress study.. In doing so, my math has 'vacation' being promoted into the top twenty...somewhere betweeeeeen... foreclosure and pregnancy.

OK, so I fabricated a little comical drama for the lead in to make the obligatory vacation blog post a bit more fresh.. sue me. Honestly though, Mika and Jasper did great. They slept amazingly well considering they had to share a hard as granite day bed cushion, were in strange surroundings, and were relentlessly serenaded by tree frogs throughout the night.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. We spent a week at the Eight Rivers Villa, Prospect Plantation near Ocho Rios (click on the link, go to "The Villas" and chose "Eight Rivers". )
360 video below

A truly visceral experience in the sense that the week evoked an elemental level of relaxation unlike any vacation I've been on. It may of been the thick prehistoric like jungle surrounding, the sound of the surf, the smell of good food, or the feeling of never wanting... But what made it really special was that we were there with family. (my side at least! ... poor wife). The Horn's of Marshall, my sister, my brother and is family and my dad. Along with Bob (My sister's beau) and his family...14 of us in all.

Is it possible to get too relaxed? I don't know.. all I can say is I felt as if I had been lobotomized the entire first week back at work.

The villas, (there were 2 actually) came fully staffed with cooks, maids and rum punch toting butlers. But the sweet old ladies of the kitchen were something special.. "There are hundreds of languages in the world, but a smile speaks them all" best sums up Lorna and Madge. ( I can't believe I didn't get a picture of them.../palm to forehead x 10) They cooked from their hearts and smiled from their souls. Angels of cheer.

Ahh hell, I could go on for pages relating all the experiences of the week but I think I just let the pictures tell you the rest of the story.



(click on each to enlarge)

Homemade gifts

Well I spent a bunch of time this year making gifts. Matt jokes that my poor little sewing machine has been sitting there for 6 years barely seeing the light of day and then WHAM! out of no where it gets the beating of a lifetime! True. I've gone through spools of thread. What am I doing sewing? It's crazy--and I want to do more. I haven't scrap booked in ages. I will again. Just have to what is pushing my creative button at the moment, right? People ask me if I have some fancy machine, but it's just the basic Sears Kenmore one. The nice thing is, is that my sister has the same exact one so if we have problems we can call each other up and try to figure stuff out. Now one of us just has to tackle the zipper. It's a handed down fear. I even have a site bookmarked on how to do them easily so at least I know we're not the only ones with the fear. Now that I think of our zipper fear and Mikas button fears, maybe this family has some obscure fear of notions. Ha! Just joking, my sister and I only fear sewing zippers whereas my dear daughter fears buttons on clothing. Ok, tangent. Pictured here are some of the gifts I made. I did a reverse applique on the t-shirt (but didn't make the shirt) and I made 2 skirts, just one smaller for a friend, 3 total fish games, and 3 crayon/colored pencil rolls. I also made a stocking with embroidery but didn't photograph it since I finished it as we drove to Minneapolis. Oh, I also made 4 tote-able towels but I guess I forgot to photograph those. Now I just need to finish the quilt. (Special thanks to http://littlemunchkins.blogspot.com/ for the crayon roll tutorial!)

SnowBot 1.0

Updated below! (most recent on bottom)


What do you do when the snowplow throws Titanic-berg-esque blocks of compressed snow onto your driveway? (2 times in 2 days in fact..) You make a 7' snowman! .... (then realize it looks more like a robot and tell your kids that was the goal all along.) Of course this being Marshall, I received confused expressions from a couple of rubberneckin' drive-by's.. But at the end of the day I have a Snowbot in the middle of my driveway and they don't! so HA ! hmm.. middle...DOH!

Sorry for the landscape viewing - no rotate option on Blogger it seems. So either park your left ear on your shoulder or tilt your monitor and enjoy the cuteness that is Mika.

(hint..It's a video.. so click on the triangle to play)



Sunday Morning - Dec 14th update

Saturday was beautiful but all through last night and this morning there's been 20-35mph winds gusts. Surely at some point in the night the fragile and top heavy Snowbot would have toppled. But low and behold! the winds have merely 'bent' him backwards into some sort of pre-limbo pose. Ya.. it's a slow news day ;-) but I'm having fun playing with the still cameras video features so just click below!

Friday Afternoon - December 19th update

(click on pictures to enlarge)

Snowflake..

the slowest limbo-ing snowbot in history

... ( I guarantee I'm the first person to type that sentence...)

The last five days have been.. well.. gravity defying.. additionally, The local paparazzi have been relentless in their coverage. Yes, Snowflake made front page news in the Marshall Independent newspaper. (See video below)

I'm baffled at what's keeping his 30+lb head on. This morning my truck nearly did what 5 days of strong winds and gravity could not, as I nearly clipped Snowflake's cold cranium with my driver side mirror.

Not really much else to say about this.

Before.... and 5 days later.....

New Scrapbook Page

Although I've done many pages since my last slide show post, I just wanted to post this one quickly since I spent a bunch of time on it and I like it so much. Since the surgery, it was more comfortable to sit on the couch or in bed, so I did loads of stitching on this layout and it reminds me of all the crafting my mom did. Also, since our family photo is the main focus of the page it really makes Matt and I think about how much we miss our moms. Since both of us lost our moms in October and it's breast cancer awareness month it really drives it home for us as well. (They both died of cancer, my mom had breast cancer) The thing I know that we really miss is them seeing the kids and vice-versa.

Anyway, here is the layout which is based on the October pagemaps sketch. I stitched the bird and the circle around it. If you click the photo, you can see an enlarged view. Thanks for looking!

Quilt update!

I've been working diligently to finish Jasper's quilt by Christmas. I don't know yet if I'll meet the deadline with other looming projects but I'm getting closer, especially considering it's my first quilt and I started around November 15th. Anyway here are a couple of photos since I now have the entire top done. Special thanks go out to Jacquie at Tallgrass Prairie Studio for assisting me in not only choosing fabric but also for posting a great tutorial of how to piece a wonky log cabin quilt on her blog. Check out her blog, her quilts are fabulous! Now I just need to quickly piece the back and learn how to top stitch the whole thing and finally do the binding. I plan on practicing the top stitching (meandering) on some squares I didn't like and making a very small 6 square lap quilt.

Mika's 4th B-day Bash !

On Nov. 28th 4 years ago, Debra and I began driving 90 minutes to Olivia MN, Corn Capital of (MN, the Midwest... the World?) and home to the only water-birthing facility in Southwestern MN. She delivered our first little bundle of spark-a-tude 5 hours later and what a little doll she has grown up to be! (Mika not Debra... not saying my wife isn't a doll.. k, nevermind). Which brings us to her 4th b-day party held at Auntie Wendy's beautiful new Bloomington home.
Have to give planning and execution credits to Debra for yet another fabulously creative b-day celebration. Food = Butterfly cupcakes with licorice antennae and white chocolate pretzel wings (anyone else humming Lucy in the sky with diamonds ?)... Quiche, Raspberry French toast Strata, and of course crunchy oven-roasted, applewood smoked bacon bacon ~yummy~ other pic's in this post include an arms length self portrait including brother Jeff and a brooding Jasper sporting the duel fingers in mouth look. Fun was had by all!

The Beast and the Replicator

So Jasper does ALMOST every thing Mika does. She says it, he says it. She does it he does it. It only gets complicated when she tells him how she wants him to play such as, "Buddy, you and I can both be mermaids, I'll be the purple one and you can be the green one." He doesn't want to play that, disagrees and a fight ensues. Other fights are over toys. Anyway, on to the funny point of this post. Every now and the we have some funny Mika-isms. Two happened on this Tuesday. Jasper decided he wanted to sit on the potty (like Mika) so, of course, I let him. He sat, Mika and I tried to read some books. Mika interrupted, "Mommy, Jasper has a peanut, why does he have a peanut?" Oh my gosh! I had to try so hard not to laugh too much! We've never called it a peanut, its typically a penis. So I corrected and told her boys have a penis, which she knows. This was all around lunch time.

Later after Matt got home and after we had had had dinner but were still at the table, Mika had another question. "Mommy remember that day we were at the snow sled store and the girl had a necklace on her teeth, why do people were a necklace on thier teeth?" Snowsled store? Necklace on teeth? WTF!? Matt and I looked at each other and then it hit me. "Oh, you mean braces! People have to wear those so their teeth get nice and straight. Mommy wore them for 2 years." Mika replied, "well, I don't want to wear them". Typical. At least it was funny!

Renaissance Festival

Mika's all time favorite part of the summer/fall is the Renaissance Festival, of course she calls it the CASTLE PLACE! This year was no exception. Her only downfall this year was the privy. She was very frightened of the blue water and everything in it. I told her not to look in right away when she started too, but her curiosity got the better of her. She always checks toilets out before sitting down anyway. She won't go on the automatic ones either. Both Matt and I tried a few times to take her in to no avail. Regardless, she did very well and "held it" from the time we got there, around 9:30 a.m., till around 2 p.m. when we returned to St. Paul. She and Jasper went on a few rides, saw the animals and snakes, watched a parade, watched in awe at the paper mill water wheel and the fire dancer, and even made some magic wands. The day was a success! (click image to see larger!)

Fair--Part III

Poor Mika was so tired by the time we sat down and had a late lunch. Not even excited about guacamole, one of her favorites. Papa and Jasper in the chicken barn, Mika with Chole in the wagon and me enjoying some cookies!

Fair--Part II

So if you didn't guess already, here are the answers to the fair food...
1. Fudge Puppies, Belgian waffles on a stick, dipped in chocolate, topped with whipped cream
2. Cheese curds
3. Corn dog
4. Sweet Martha's Chocolate chip cookies
5. Pecan Caramel cinnamon roll
6. Scottish egg
7. Sweet potato chips
8. Buffalo shrimp kabob

Although you can't tell in the photos, Jasper LOVED the rides. We had been to the Schwans picnic and they had the blow up jumpy things and they had a slide one that he went on over and over, as much as we let him, which was lots. Due to that, he didn't quite get the concept that you couldn't just go on the rides repeatedly, which did make him sad. Especially the slide. As Mika said, "The rides weren't my favorite". She liked the slide lots but would only go on that and the ferris wheel which she did NOT like. It was too loud. She would be fine if they made no noise. Hence why she love the man-driven rides at the Renissance. (Photos to come from that soon). We went to the fair with Papa, and the Gerber family including Mikes mom, all the kids (and adults) had a good time!

Name that Fair Food!

Ok, so we are a little delayed in the fair postings but here is the first of two. Can you guess what these foods are? Check back in a day or two for the answers and to see other photos from the fair.

Saturday Morning Snuggles

Mika and Jasper doing all they can to take their moms mind off her post surgery aches and pains. Pic within a pic background makes for a complete impromptu family photo.

Anyways, as you can see below... Debra has put on her happy face despite her pain and discomfort ;-)

Overlaying smiley face is actually a wrought iron sculpture in the foreground found during a trip to the Holmburgs Apple Orchard earlier this month. In retrospect.. a 40 minute trip down a bumpy farm road just days after surgery probably wasn't the best choice of activities.

So, A jar apple butter, a bag of honey crisps, and 3 pumpkins later we were heading back to Marshall. Ignoring our apathetic GPS, we decided it was best to return via an alternate PAVED route.

Caption Contest !

OK....No.. we didn't hang our beloved child from the nearest tree nor has Mika been studying under David Blaine.

It's simple the result of loads of natural light, a 1/2500 sec shutter speed and our fearless leaper, caught in mid flight. Regardless it made for an interesting composition ripe for a humorous caption..

So add yours below and the wittiest entry will receive an AMAZING FREE GIFT !

(12.1 meg pixel - click to enlarge)

Wordle Renaissance tease!

So we went to the renaissance today and the kids had lots of fun despite little sleep the night before. They rarely get much sleep the first night at papas house, but we risked it and went today anyway. Of course we took loads of photos which will follow. But since we're here in St. Paul for a couple days, so I'm not sure when that will be. Anyway, I found this cool word art generator on the scrapbook site I frequent (scrapbook.com) and thought I'd share it and the art I made with all the stuff from today. Here is the site.
art created by wordle.net

Jasper turns 2

Well is was a big event in our household and we had lots of guest which makes us all happy around here. We were especially delighted to have both Alana and Wendy stay with their significant others! It was wonderful to have Joel and Bob here, of course it was kind of crazy so we can't wait to have everyone back to visit one couple at a time so we can devote more time to them. They'll have to come soon before the snow drifts cover the highways leading to our home. Nancy, Bear, and Papa were flown in by uncle Jeffy so that was quick and easy for them. OK, on to the birthday activities!


Matt made super yummy (so I'm told) fried chicken which was served picnic style and I made buckets of potato salad. We also had some fruit and pb & j's for the kids. Of course I have to mention the dirt cake, which in the dump truck seemed to amaze and confuse Jasper all at once! The look on his face seemed to say, "Can I eat it? Do I play with it or in it?" He did almost roll the truck off the table at one point! Seeing his face and his sisters made all the work worth it. It was a joy to have so many of our family and friends gathered and we are truly lucky and blessed to be surrounded with such love.

(click collage photo to enlarge)

Family Photo

Click on photo to enlarge.

OK, I'm way behind on posts. I need to put photos from Jaspers birthday party up, but instead, I'm doing a quick post with a couple of photos from a family photo shoot at Camden State Park today. Matt did a fabulous job of taking photos and I took a few cute ones as well. As anyone with two little beastlings can tell you, it is a complete miracle that we got a family photo and we only took 2 shots. (Utilizing a tripod and our camera with a timer.) It was past their nap time and Jasper only wanted to play in the stream and Mika only wanted to play in the park. Overall it was a very successful day!

Photo note: Jasper was looking at the ants on the tree very closely in the first photo therefore, I felt it important to include the macro photo of them!

Decorating by Debra

Since I painted the living room, which was about 2 months after we moved in, I felt as though something was missing on the tv wall. Over the weekend we finally remedied that problem. I came up with a design and Matt checked out the proxima from work and we penciled in the design on Friday night and I painted it in on Saturday morning. We are super happy with the outcome!


Now I have to do Jaspers' wall. My plan is to paint tracks and cars to match the not yet bought Pottery Barn Kids bedding. I've looked all over for other car bedding but it is all I have found that is graphic and not "cute". It will go great on his new twin big boy bed from Ikea he got for his birthday. Land of Nod also has some cool traffic signs I'd like to get or replicate sometime in the future.

Even longer overdue update - by Matt

Quickly and without really thinking, I snapped a picture of my crisp, new ACF Certified Executive Chef certificate that arrived today. Upon review, I noticed I had unconsciously produced a collage like composition that incorporated the beautiful smiling faces of my wife and children.

The picture above illustrates the forces that motivate me to a better person in life and to excel at what I do so that I may have the means to make their lives better. It's at times like this, when I zoom out and see the bigger picture, I feel infinitesimal small yet enormously proud at the same time.

OK, enough of the Hubristic postings! What else is new at H.O.M.E you ask ?

Well since I suck at transitions and I'm to tired to form complete sentences, I'll wrap up this update via bullet points.

• Mika ends day 1 of no naps. Mommy drinks Bailys from a tumbler.
  

• Debra's hand made scrapbookin' table has been installed in the basement and actually looks pretty spiffy! Google 'Mise en place' and you see this picture now:

• After several moments of excessive rubbing, Debra realizes that the dirt spot on Jaspers face is actually a new mole.

• According to Babycenter.com Jaz will be 6' 6" tall (if we keep feeding him)

• Matt (random switch to 3rd person) has joined the social networking bandwagon via Facebook and is shocked to find a group named "People named Matt Horn" with 12 members. (not kidding go look!)

• During the making of breakfast a wide eyed, panic stricken Mika looks at the egg in her hand and says, "HURRY UP DADDY, IT'S ABOUT TO HATCH!!"

• Matt loses 45 minutes of productive time at work today snickering at Cake Wrecks