Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Our first Christmas!

So, a year ago this Christmas day Harrison surprised me in my East Asian apartment and proposed! I was beyond shocked and still find myself wondering how did I get so lucky to marry him every day. So now, having been married for almost 5 months we were able to celebrate our first Christmas of being married and having to split our time between the families. And what a joy our Christmas has been this year!
Our first Christmas cards!
Decorating our house with Christmas cheer began early since we celebrated Thanksgiving early....
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, we went Christmas tree scouting to compare prices around town and there is a produce/plant store less than a block away from our house that we went by to see. We had bought mums and pumpkins there in the fall and love supporting our local community, but knowing how much traveling we would do we thought they would be too expensive. Once we arrived we met the owner and began explaining our story when asked what he could do to get us to buy a tree, haha. So, he knocked $15 off the tree price and all of a sudden our first stop in our tree shopping led us to committing to one!
Now, the best part was that since we lived so close, one of the workers walked our tree to our house for us!!! Now if that isn't a sight rarely seen in America!

He walked it all the way up to our front porch for us!

Our tree stayed undecorated until about the 10th of December after our trip to Selma for Collins' birth and a wedding
In addition to a tree, I also got crafty for many of our around the house items, such as our Christmas wreath...
This wreath I made with wired ribbon, pins, and a crafting wreath, all from Michaels!
I also made a Christmas tree skirt and our first family STOCKINGS!!!
Here is the tree skirt! I used felt, buttons and quilting stuffing. Drew the trees on paper and then used them as templates to cute the trees all out.
Here's an up close of the trees....
The stockings I made all from scratch.... using different color felts, snowflake sequins, buttons and small ornament type beads. I will do a later blog on these....
So far, we have had 5 family Christmas gatherings, all of which have been such a treat, having been away from family Christmas for 2 years.
First, we had Christmas with Harrison's parents and brother and sister in law. This I had the overwhelming joy of hosting myself!!! Got to put all my Christmas China to use!!! That was by far my favorite part!
We celebrated with Harrison's immediate family on a Friday night, then we did Christmas together just me and Harrison on Saturday morning!

Santa came early!
We even had our Christmas morning breakfast that my mom has made every year!
sausage swirl biscuits! My favorite! And so easy to make!
 Then Saturday night we had Christmas with all of the Smiths, dirty santa style! I got a target gift card and Harrison a chick fil a gift card so we definitely racked up!
After the family get together we went to Lights on the Neuse for a hay ride through a Christmas farm!
Lindsey also joined us for the weekend!

We also had a tacky Christmas sweater party with the youth on Sunday and Harrison and I were once again dressed from Memaw's closet along with several other youth who borrowed clothes from us!
Then, on Thursday we were off for Christmas in Bama. Here we had Christmas with all of the Bambergs on Sunday and then Christmas morning with all of my family (10 people all staying under one roof) and another great helping of Christmas morning breakfast and she crab soup Christmas Eve!
Harrison and I made a gingerbread house rom scratch using cookie cutters and cookie mix. Of course it fell in because we didn't cook the cookies until they were crisp. Now we'll know for next time!
Evelyn rocking infront of the Christmas tree at Gimmie and Papa's
Annual family pics at Gimmie and Papa's #alwaysroughlooking
our greatest joy this Christmas is Collins! She came home from the hospital just in time for Christmas!
Opening presents with Evie!
Harrison and Ron with some of their presents....
One Happy Hoddie right here!

Friday, December 21, 2012

Oh Gretta

As a newlywed couple living in a home with a yard, we thought we just might would like to have a dog. We knew that owning a dog, or even a pet, in our life stage right now wasn't possible due to the fact that we might have to leave it behind in a year. So, we just dreamed of the idea until we heard of this awesome program deal. In Johnston County where we live, they have an animal protection league that offers a dog fostering program. In the program you foster a dog from the shelter until it is adopted. They provide you a crate, food, leash, all needed medications or vet visits, all you have to do is love the dog and care for it in your home and take it each Saturday to Petsmart near our house for the adoption fair. We heard about it from a friend and immediately I was excited for a new playmate at home while Harrison is working during the week. So, we completed all the paper work and background checks and were so excited to get a new puppy. I went out of town for a bachelorette weekend for one of my friends in Savannah and Harrison went to pick out our dog that Saturday afternoon while I was gone.

Harrison went to Petsmart and this week they only had one dog left that desperately needed a home. She was a rotweiler mix dog about one year old. She had recently been rescued from where she wasn't being properly fed and was just the cutest thing. So, we got her. Now, Gretta had just been fixed so she was still in her recovery stage from surgery and all she wanted to do was lay in your lap and snuggle. We loved having her crawl up in bed with us and she brought so much joy and laughter at the silly things she would do. But then, everything seemed to change one instance after another...
After having her for about 5 days, we noticed her surgery area swelling and she stopped wanting to eat and just became lazier and lazier. We took her to church with us that Wednesday night for our friend who also is fostering a dog to look at her and we made some calls. Thursday we took her back to the vet school at NC State where they had fixed her and found out her surgery area was infected. They gave us medicine and sent her home to come back the next day for another check up. She progressively got better each day and after her adoption fair on Saturday where she wasn't adopted we took home a much more livelier Gretta than before.

Now, let me first remind you all of our living conditions. We live in a house next door to our church that they own with plans to tear down in the future for a needed church expansion. Our back yard is not fenced in and so we can't let Gretta run free on her own. Plus she is new to us and we know no history as to if she would run to the road or stay close by. So, she's constrained to being close by to us outside or inside most of the time.

Tired at her playdate with Princess
So, Sunday we put her in her kennel and headed to church. We returned to a crazy discovery. This livelier Gretta had forced her way out of her metal kennel and had proceeded to all but maybe 3 window in our house jumping up on the blinds and ripping them right down the middle. And so we discovered she goes crazy when left alone.
Guest bedroom blinds took most of the hits

She even took over the bed whenever one of us would get up
And that was just the beginning to a crazy week. On Monday, she began showing the puppy side of her and that consisted of chewing things up. We have some great friends who gave us a bunch of old puppy toys which she knocked out one by one chewing up. But hey that was ok because I would rather vacuum up strands of yarn from a puppy toy than shreds of my favorite house shoes, which she got ahold of when she got bored from her shoes. We did venture to a local dog park where we didn't know if she would go crazy rotweiler and attack the dogs or not and luckily she was a fun playful dog playing with everyone else there.

Now without a dog kennel due to her Sunday escapades we now had to resort to taking her everywhere we went or barricading her in to specific areas in our house. Now an interesting thing about our house is that there are no doors from the den, through the dining room, kitchen and into the playroom/laundry/pingpong table room. We wanted to constrain her to the 2 rooms with no carpet to prevent accidents on the carpet and in order to do that we attempted many options which she would destroy as if it were a game all the way until we used our kitchen table which seemed to work quite well. We just had to resort to eating our meals with our food in our laps.

kitchen table barricade
This constraining her to two rooms only brought about boredom to her which led to what things in here can I destroy.... She could knock our guest bedroom door open to give her a bed to jump on and lots of Harrison's shoes to find and pull out of his closet. Luckily we got to the shoes before they were destroyed every time.

On about Thursday of our second week with Gretta we did some Christmas wrapping paper shopping and put together two packages to send to our friends in EA from both of our two cities we lived in. Now the typical Christmas packaging consists of things like Christmas tree scented candles, candycanes, apple cider mix, cookie mixes and candy. A particular candy we had gotten for one of the packages was the movie theater box style candies with sweet tarts and reece pieces. All of our shopping items were placed on the pingpong table as we were headed out to the first UNC basketball game that night. Yet when we came home we would discover something else.

Gretta had now jumped up onto the pingpong table where she had destroyed yet another set of blinds, chewed up 2 rolls of wapping paper and started to work on chewing on a fire starter log before realizing that it didn't taste good. And that was the last straw for me! We had just received our official acceptance to join staff and head back overseas in the next year or so and were about to be traveling a lot for weddings, Christmas, conferences and money raising and this was not what I wanted to come home to every night in addition.
fire starter log...


So, we spent our last day with Gretta on Friday playing at the doggie park, going over to Harrison's parents house and playing with their dog and destroying more doggy toys. Then, Saturday I took her to the adoption fair and explained we would be out of town too much now and couldn't keep her anymore. It was sad driving off and watching her bark and pull towards me but I knew that we couldn't do it anymore. Now, I arrived back home to finally get to spend the afternoon cleaning up all of her mess and as I cleaned off the pingpong table and finished packing the boxes to go to our friends I discovered something was missing. I searched and yet all I could find was shreds from the box it was in. Not only did Gretta go to town on a fire starter log and the blinds and wrapping paper, she also ate an entire box of reece's pieces! Oh Gretta, how you are still alive, we do not know. We love her and miss her but she's not coming back to this house!
and this was her please don't make me leave face.... sorry

Note: for those of you concerned about my blinds.... I have now duct taped them all back together with white duct tape.... We are also excited to report that Gretta has now since been adopted by a family and has a home!