creighan christmas!

stayed at aunt maggies house and played games/painted nails with cousin christine! admired cousin bryan's feminine snowsuit that he wears to steeler's games to keep warm! obsessed over baby nick who is actually the cutest child in the world! no contest! exchanged gifts! santa made an appearance! ate a lot of food! caught up with everyone and tried to sum up the last four months of my life in a few easy sentences! laughed! generally made merry!

i love my family. on both sides. so blessed.

weigel christmas!

first christmas with my foster cousin marcy! (her birthday also happens to be christmas day!) hung out at my aunt karen's house! opened presents! ate delicious foods! fell asleep on her big comfy chair! everything was warm and cozy and wonderful!

and then it was christmas!

and as always, christmas morning involved some elaborate present coding system. this year it was fruit loops. each package had a little loop of string with colored fruit loops on it and you had to find the package with a label on the outside featuring the corresponding color combination. my father might actually be a crazy person (he's the one responsible for the yearly game). he already has an idea for next year. love that nerd.

highlights on the haul included a pink opera wig, pink ostrich feather boa, a bubble machine, a glass milk carton, beautiful new tights, pushing daisies on dvd, a canning starter set (pickles! bbq sauce! apple butter! can't wait to get started!), and 101 cookie cutters.

since i have eighty bajillion pictures of christmas, i'm actually splitting them all up into section. so this is christmas part 1: the immediate family. get ready for christmas weigel side and christmas creighan style. (the latter features a baby!)

christmas eve

highlights:
1. wore a beautiful green dress i kind of forgot i had. i bought it for a history project in 9th grade. still pretty sweet.
2. annual weigel/bradley/gensimore christmas eve party was pretty off the charts.
3. lots of wine & dancing were involved in the festivities. we started out singing songs from our catholic school days and somehow the whole thing morphed into us dancing to rap hits from 2004. 'get low' was played numerous times.
4. mr. gensimore made some classic faces. did you know homeboy was voted 'best looking' in high school? they even pulled out the yearbook to prove it.
5. reconnected with shanbrad. we go wayyyy back and i missed that lady.
6. my mom tried to play the spoons. failure musically but total sucess in the sense that it made for some hilarious pictures.
7. my dad let his facial hair grow all week! he looked super handsome. i miss facial hair dad. he used to rock a mustache back in the day. it died circa 1998.

christmas eve was glorious and had all of the necessary elements (family, friends, foodstuffs, lil jon). i would like a repeat of it everyday please.

murry chrisssmassss

like some sort of small child, i am awake at an ungodly hour this christmas morn. i blame last nights merry-making. so far i have received two gifts- a glass head and a hand stenciled sweatshirt with the mighty boosh moon on it from baby bro- and am already reeling in the awesomeness of my family's gift-giving abilities. today promises to be all around baller.

so merry christmas dear blog. i hope you sleep in late and wake up to find all the things you've ever wanted under your cyber tree.

people i love wednesday

so i started to write this wednesday, then walked away from the computer and now it's thursday. i still think it counts.

my ladies this week are liz & truc. aside from just being generally awesome and down for adventures and fun to hang out with and hilarious, they both told me some baller, lady-power stories at the christmas party a few days ago.

while i was catching up with truc, she was telling me about how she broke up with her boyfriend. now, we both agreed that homie was mad hott, grade A stuff. but she told me it occured to her at one point that she was putting in all this effort and it just wasn't being reciprocated. she figured out that she deserved so much better. so she dumped his pretty ass. a major boo ya to my lady truc for that one. liz junior told me another sweet story- her boyfriend (another good looking dude) got all kinds of clingy and was talking long term stuff. and liz, realizing she's an independent woman, and doesn't want to deal with that crap at a time in her life that's supposed to be about her and having fun, kicked him to the curb as well.

i thought these were both such good stories. there are so many girls who continue to go out with jerks or feel that they have to be the ones responsible for the upkeep of a relationship. and if they don't exist in real life, they certainly do in popular media- girls are always depicted as craving commitment and clinging on to men. i'm so glad that i have ladies in my life who keep it real and take care of themselves. love those two.

i'll make it up to you bloggy

my dear sweet blog. i am so sorry. i feel like i write these apology posts all too often, but seriously. i've been swamped. first off, i'm back in america. then i went to philly to get things in order for next semester, then headed to new york to visit cool people. and now i'm back in the 717 but the madness is far from over as christmas closes in on me like preteens on justin beib at a mall appearance if he were to fall off the stage covered in hollister coupons. i don't mean to say i have no time for you, but i simply have no time for you. once the hype of home and holiday wears off, it's going to be you and me all the way baby. clear sailing. but until then, while there are still gifts to knit, friends to hug, and claymation to watch, i'm afraid we'll have to take a break. brief though it may be, this is hurting me as much as it's hurting you.

as a consolation prize, i'm giving you old photobooth pictures. from top to bottom, these are the captions: 1. i drank some cider with pretty woodpeckers on the can! 2. i knit a braided headband thing! 3. i bought a new cardigan from salvation army!

i'll be back before you know it.

liberty of london

so remember when the liberty of london collection came out at target and everyone was FUHREAKIN' out? well, i'm a dummy and i thought i was just some weird design house place. i didn't realize it's a massive friggin' store that's actually in london. so when i read about it the other day, i smacked myself on the forehead ala homer simpson and decided to check it out. went there today and oh. dear. god. it is BEAUTIFUL. beautiful in the kind of way that makes you want to reverently touch things in hope that their beauty rubs off on you.

i was so enamored of everything in there. they have these beautiful journals and day planners and as i was lusting over them, i figured it couldn't hurt to check the price. who knows- it could be within my range (please note, that i often find target expensive so i was pretty much setting myself up for disappointment) and maybe i'd treat myself.

wrong-o.

i literally made gasping noises several times while in the story. their prices are ridiculous. the smallest notebook that looks like it was made for an infant? £32. (that's around $50 for the folks back home.) like, what? seriously? for a notebook that would seem small even by elf standards? does this notebook have some kind of cancer curing property? was it handmade by god himself?

at what point in your life is it okay for you to spend that kind of money on a notebook? how do people get that absurdly rich? it's so frivolous, it makes my head spin.

i continued to make my way around the store, letting out snorts and bugging my eyes out as i glanced at the tiny white sticker on the back of the wares. beautiful beautiful place for sure but also the most ludicrous. (also note, when i first typed out 'ludicrous', i spelled it like the rapper's name. cool.) i must marry a millionaire so i can burn my money on aesthetically pleasing objects.