Clay Greys Wishlist

I desire custom ornaments! It's on the mind all the time. Maybe I can find wiggle room in the budget to get one a month until I have all the ones I want? Hah!

Here's a preliminary list of ornaments I want by pet.

Past Pets
Myriah - German Shepherd, first canine love of my life!
Flash  - Miniature Pinscher

Ally - An albino parakeet that I hand-raised
Prettybird - Blue parakeet -- first bird we ever had and Ally's mate
Alyssa - A speckled parakeet

Living Furry Friends
Phantom - Tuxedo cat

Jessie - Black/White border collie
Josie - German shepherd/lab mix
Pussycat - Domestic long hair white kitty with gray splotches

Sophie - Black domestic short hair

Booger - Black domestic short hair -- the first pet Brandon and I got together

Scout - Traditional coat shetland sheepdog


Some depictions of favorite memories:

1. Phantom laying in a pot of catnip to guard it from Booger
 
 
2. Josie sleeping in a laundry basket
 
3. Puppy Flash tugging on adult Myriah
4. Myriah chasing her tail
5. Adult Flash laying annoyed next to puppy Scout

6. Adult Scout laying next to kitten Phantom
 
7. Kitten Booger with Adult Pussycat -- assault on the cat tree

8. Josie, butt in the air, peeking under the patio fence
 
9. Flash sharing his bed with Josie -- this was a huge social issue for him
 
10. Pussycat, pink cast on paw, snuggling up to a ball post-neuter

11. Pussycat meowing over a miniature cheeseburger (although he appears to be snarling)

12. Kitten Booger covered in a thin dusting of flour -- naughty kitten!

13. Kitten Sophie hanging off a scratching post
 
14. Kitten Sophie getting the smack down by Adult Booger
 
15. Booger drinking prim and proper from a cup of water by dipping her paw
 
 
16. Kitten Phantom with a flower
 
17. Ally and Prettybird snuggling
18. Alyssa
19. Jessie looking pretty
 
 
20. Young Jessie and Young Scout snuggling

I'm starting to think I'm going to have a small tree dedicated to pets and I don't mind the thought! I'm going to have to round up photos of some of them to fulfill this. Almost two years' worth at one ornament a month, wowzers!

Christmas Gift doubling as a Etsy Review

My family is large and continues growing between the children and the significant others'. Our core family is six people large. There are now three grandchildren in the family. Three of the children (myself included) are in relationships. One of those relationships has two children which totals out to five children, nine adults.

My family opted to buy each of the children a gift and do a secret santa between the adults. This saves money at Christmas and enables each of the adults to funnel more money into a nice gift for one adult rather than a bunch of small gifts over all of the adults.

But I still wanted to get my parents small gifts so I decided to give them thoughtful gifts from my children. My dad is hard to buy for but my mom is much easier. She has a Shetland Sheepdog and she is absolutely, irrevocably obsessed with her dog. I made her a plate with his silhouette for Mother's Day years ago.

Additionally, she has a cat. The cat and dog are often cute together although less often now that they're both grown. I wanted to give her a memento now that her dog is getting much older. I stumbled upon ClayGreys etsy shop.

Emily does custom ornaments of dogs and cats. She's even done turtles and hedgehogs. I sent her the following photos.

Scout

Phantom

Them together when we first got Phantom.

And again when they were a little bit older.

The instructions I gave her was to have Scout laying down with his head up and Phantom sleeping between his paws.

This is what I received.

Isn't it just perfect?

I mean the long fluffy fur would be hard to replicate adequately, but the coloring and markings are spot on.

I couldn't be more pleased. I am especially in love with the shiny, "wet" nose.

My communication with Emily was very comfortable, professional, and friendly. Her pricing was fantastic and reasonable. I felt that the item arrived in good time given it was a custom order. I'm already itching to buy more from her and wishing I could somehow reason it away with Brandon. I'm itching to have custom ornaments made of our past pets and our current ones. It's definitely on my to do list in the near future.

You can find Emily's etsy shop here. Her facebook page is here. It has so many more photos of her work and it's always beautiful. I'm especially in love with her little Scottie.

Family Ornaments

We try to make an annual trip to Apple Hill. It's a circuit of apple farms in Placerville, California. Honestly, there are a lot of great farms but there are some that are less impressive. Brandon, Cole, and I have a favorite farm. There are lots of private vendors selling various crafts there.

When we went after a Christmas tree in 2010, we found a vendor that makes these custom family trees. She has ornament bases or stand-alone bases for her craft. There are probably a hundred different heads with tons of different hair colors and skin colors across female and male bodies. They come in four different sizes. She even has pets!

When we visited Apple Hill again this year, we knew we needed to get an updated family ornament.

Here it is. She told us she could do glasses and bent the little wires on the spot for us. We got blue for Cole as he wears blue glasses and black for Brandon.

I love her ornaments and I want to make a little family tree for both Brandon and my parents next Christmas. She does large scale family trees so this is a possibility.

This time, I grabbed her business card. She said she takes orders by phone or e-mail.

For reference, on the tree ornament -- Brandon and me are a large sized head. Cole is medium and Collin is small.

Her name is Lila Anderson. Her phone number is 916-944-2255. Her e-mail is lila_bill@yahoo.com. I've never placed an order by phone or e-mail so I can't speak for how smooth that is but she's always been very easy to work with in person. In my experience you pay by piece with a flat rate on them. I feel good about the quality of these and love supporting a crafter! I'll continue buying our family ornaments as we change and grow.

Feeling Inspired

I'm feeling inspired to do something extra special for our Christmas trees. I absolutely adore all sorts of goodness about our small one, Cole -- who has just turned four years old. We have another little one on the way, expected to arrive in late April.

I think a fabulous way to touch on how fast their interests and personalities change is to buy or make one ornament a year that represents the personality of that year. I might extend this to a "firsts" ornament for later on.

So far, I have five ornaments to work on with Cole alone. And I'm floating with ideas!

1 month old (2007) – birth info + picture
1 year (2008) – Why are you upside down?
2 years (2009) – T-Rex or Snoopy
3 years (2010) – Baby Bird
4 years (2011) - Armadillo, Volcano, or Mummies

At one month old, there's not much of an interest, or personality to work with. I want to do an ornament that announces his birth specs. I'm thinking including a picture would be amazing.

I love this ornament for inspiration. Found on etsy.

I love this picture of my small baby, although there are so many it's hard to pin down any one.

For one year, there's plenty of personality and love. I think a commonly enjoyed thing by Cole and in our family was Brandon flipping him upside down and saying, "Why are you upside down?" We have many, many pictures of this!

This is one picture of the cuteness at his sister's wedding back in May of 2008. My inspiration for this picture is having a sketch done of it and resizing it to a smaller size with the catch-phrase "Why are you upside down?" I'd love to put it into a miniature frame for safe-keeping and turn it into an ornament with a string.

These are two etsy artists I'm considering: here and here.

Cole's first "big" word occurred the day before his second birthday. It was dinosaur. No lisp. Clear as day. Dinosaur. He impressed his aunts and grandparents with proudly shouting dinosaur at his birthday party. That was the root of the obsession that still carries on over two years later!

I stumbled upon this ornament on etsy and it inspired me to create an ornament with one of the many plastic dinosaurs Cole has already.

I recalled a plastic animal ornament project that young house love completed this year and will likely use their tutorial for making my own dinosaur ornament. You can see that here.

Finally, I'll paint it green because that was and still is his favorite color.

Around the time that Cole was working towards three years old, he was obsessed with baby birds. I think it's interesting because his first real word was 'bird.' Even to this day, he role-plays as a baby bird.

There was a heart crushing moment where he happened to catch the speed-camera clip of a baby bird's body decomposing on "Creation" and flipped because the bugs were eating the dead baby bird. He is not Cole, he is baby bird.

I love this bird on etsy, although I could make a baby bird in a nest with a mushroom bird -- but this chickadee is so adorable and for $10, who couldn't want it?

So we arrive at year five -- age 4. This one is hard! His newest and longest kick this year has been baby armadillo. He role-plays as baby armadillo more often than baby bird now. It's his first preschool year, he loves baby animals and life sciences. He is obsessed with volcanos, mummies (yes -- the real, not halloween mummies), and information in general.

We're leaning towards an armadillo because it's so representative of who he is. We took photos with Trizza just today and the way we got smiles guaranteed was to have Cole should "baby armadillo!"

If I do an armadillo, I love this ornament on amazon for its' realism -- or I could do another plastic inspired young house love ornament like my t-rex up there.

Whatever the end case -- I'm looking oh-so-forward to hitting Michael's tomorrow to find my plastic little guys (Armadillo? T-Rex?) and depending on Brandon's feedback -- possibly a nest and mushroom bird.

I really love this idea and cannot wait to see what a variety I'll have on Cole's Christmas tree by the time he's an adult.

Christmas is in the Mail

So, you remember that we bought Brandon a TV and stand for Christmas? Well, our DVD player decided to stop working the day before Thanksgiving. Nice.

So on the evening of Thanksgiving, we ordered a new player on Costco. It's a blu-ray player that has a lot of cool perks to it and it was $20 off. Shipping was under $5. To save us from having to go to the store and pick it up, the $5 was well spent.

Last night, it was my turn to purchase my Christmas present. Since I decided to give my little sister my Canon Rebel xs for Christmas (at her request), I upgraded to a Canon 60D. I bought just the body since I have the nifty fifty that I got as a birthday present and it's compatible.

Since I'll be giving my sister the stock lens that came with my Rebel and I'm not thinking the lens is worth $150 to buy separate, I decided to get a lens that is better than the Canon stock but also compatible with the camera. I picked the Tamron 18-270mm.

Then we decided to finally figure out what to give Cole for Christmas. We knew that we wanted developmentally friendly toys, as we're trying to push away from media influenced or electronic toys. Initially, we thought to buy him a postman outfit so he could deliver letters (encouraging writing).

But we settled on a vet kit and a vet outfit from Lakeshore Learning.

Finally, I wanted to get him some interesting new books. He loves books and cannot get enough about animals. I decided to go classic with some of my favorite childhood books. We got him these four by Ruth Heller.

How to Hide a Crocodile (& other reptiles)

How to Hide an Octopus (& other sea creatures)

How to Hide a Butterfly (& other insects)

How to Hide a Meadow Frog (& other amphibians)

The last book we got was related to American Indians. The history and culture of how they lived over various tribes. Cole is American Indian through Brandon and we've really wanted to start teaching about that diversity.

The Very First Americans

I'm undecided on if we'll be doing a stocking for Cole at our house. My mother always over-stuffs and is planning a stocking for the grandchildren already. I'm thinking we'll skip it this year.

For my side of the family, there was a drawing. I got my sister, Crystal. I had it on good authority that she has been coveting these shelves.

I bought her one of them (mostly because they have to be shipped and to buy two, I was looking at $18 in shipping alone!). I'm sure she's going to be thrilled.

On Brandon's side of the family, I drew his father. His father is into all things fishing and I'm going to keep my eyes out for something related that he doesn't have and would enjoy.

We have to get gifts for the kids under 18 on both sides of the family. We also visit my Aunt's house on my Dad's side and there are three children there.

For my 10 year old cousin, we got Mars Sand. It doesn't get wet and makes sculptures under water. Very cool!
For my 6 year old cousin, we got some Littlest Pet Shop Lambs (they raise sheep).
For my 17 year old cousin, we're going to gift him with cash. As a teen, there was nothing I loved more than getting cash to buy what I wanted.

For Brandon's side:
Niece #1: A disney princess outfit for the princesses she got for her birthday.
Niece #2: An ice dragon webkinz (she's a collector and let it spill on black friday dinner that she wants this one very badly to marry her boy webkinz dragon).
Nephew: A lego-style Transformer kit

My side:
Nephew: We heard he's very into spy things. I bought him a pen that has invisible ink for writing secret messages. He has a special light attached to the pen to read his message.

Finally: My Parents. They're getting family photos with all of their children done professionally. And with that, I conclude our Christmas shopping. One present to go!