Merry Christmas from the Nelsons!!

Merry Christmas everybody!

I did not know we actually caught this on film!!!

This was at breakfast last fall, and I just found it on our computer!!

Happy Birthday Sista!!!

Happy 25th Birthday Heather!! We are so lucky Dean has such good taste and we now have such a wonderful sister as you! We love you very very much and look forward to seeing you soon!!

In the Church Nursery

Last week our friend Jona was taking some pictures in the church and she sent these along to me. She's good!!!

At The Butterfly House

Juneau, Willow and I went with some friends to the butterfly house in Grand Rapids. I was a blast! There were butterflies fluttering everywhere and little nectar trays full of feasting butterflies. I was surprised to see that there were also small colorful birds in the same greenhouse. I would not think these two would be compatible!

Juneau was so gentle and was successful into luring a butterfly to sit on his finger! Later (after my cellphone memory was overloaded) a butterfly landed on his pant leg and he started to freak out!

We went with our friends Katey and Rachel, and their girls Kallie, Cassey, Lucia and Caco. All the kids were so wonderfully behaved, even when we took them into the art museum section! It was great!!! Good idea Katey!! Thanks for inviting us along!

Willow got her ears pierced!!!

Willow had her fourth birthday party last Saturday and the whole gang migrated into the mall and watched Willow and rooted her on while she got her ears pierced!!! She had the biggest audience in the history of ear piercing, it was great!!!

Also, big cousin Taylor joined in and encouraged Willow by bravely enduring her ears getting pierced as well! Willow got to watch and cheer her on and tell her it was only going to be "a little pinch"!! Too funny!!

Nonno saves the day!!!

Nonno has averted our second housing disaster within two weeks!!! Last week he came out and diagnosed our 'drain-field' issues with professional investigative sleuthing skills, and this week fixed another incident that was threatening to flood our basement, yet again.

Last week we had a septic/drainfield guy and Nonno come out to diagnose why nothing was draining into our dranfield. It was just creating a pond in our yard every time we took a shower. Without dad here to diagnose the issue and determination to uncover the entire septic tank and find the second door, we would be digging up our entire front yard right now and 12k would be down the drain (field).

Post-traumatic Septic/ Drainfield.. all fixed!!!

And today, after picking up a sea monkey kit at the store, I read the directions that specified the need for purified water, so I decided to go down to the basement to find the Brita pitcher. When I got down there, I found a fountain spraying out of a pipe in the corner of the basement, and the floor about 3" of goopy, puddled mud.


I immediately called John and my Dad and they both rushed over here as fast as was legal. (Of course, this would happen the day before we are to have Willow's birthday party) Within two hours and a trip to Lowe's everything is back to normal. I don't know what we would do without ya Dad!!


Here is Juneau doing his very best to keep Nonno from leaving the premises!!! This is a ritual around here. He loves his Nonno. and so do we!!! We cannot thank you enough.

Crap I Like

I like heroic engineering.

Danielle Bear and I have been watching a series called "When We Left Earth" about the space program. We got the the part about the successful failure of the Apollo 13 mission and so we took a break and watched the movie, which I hadn't seen since it came out, in 1995 I think. Anyways, the second half of the film is a series of improvised engineering feats to save the astronauts' lives with unbelievable time and materials margins. The best example is when a team of engineers has to build a filter to remove carbon dioxide from the ship before the astronauts are poisoned, using only scrap materials that they know are on the ship (a sock, for instance). Anyways, here is the famous let's build a filter scene...

Thanks, Shaws!

Thanks, Shaws, for Willow's rockin necklace making factory! They are going ape crap over it!

P.S.... and for the awesome princess stamp kit! We have not gotten past the necklace making yet to experience the coolness of the stamp kit, but we will... Oh,will we ever!!!

It is Safe to Totally Die Now

Danielle got revved up last night filling out a LegalZoom form for our will. She was reading a book whose chapter was something like, you could die at any moment. And she got to thinking about how unfair it was to our kids that we didn't have anything in place in the event of our mutual tragic severe deaths.
Anyways, she filled it out and I learned that her funeral wishes include burning her corpse until it is rendered into ashes. Well that makes sense. Also, she's not too picky about where those ashes are scattered, as long as they are not scattered in snow (seriously, she really hates snow -and I tried twice, unsuccessfully, to move the Nelsons down to Florida) or flushed down the toilet. The toilet thing makes sense, but on second thought I wonder about her assumptions about me and the kids if she felt she actually had to make a legal statement forbidding us to flush her carcass down a toilet. Anyways.
And, from time to time, I think about what my tombstone might read. After spending the better part of two summers as a graveyard caretaker in Massachusetts, I've seen some cool ones and some really freaking old ones. And it got me thinking, at a young age, about my own mortality and the options that might be available to me to communicate a very short message to some kid mowing my grave grass 200 years from now. Really. And the best tombstone I've ever seen was that of the fictional character, Royal Tenenbaum, which read "Died tragically rescuing his family from the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship" which is only true metaphorically -and even then it's a bit of a stretch. Anyways, that's a hell of an inscription and I'd like something like it for myself.
Then it was my turn. I felt rushed because I have always wanted to have a pretty awesome finale and some kind of cool tombstone inscription. She said that I could always indicate that specific instructions for the handling of my totally dead body could me specified at a later date -so now I'm formulating a plan. Ideally I would be ground up and put into the municipal water supply but that wish would, obviously, have to be off the record (did everyone read and comprehend this sentence in its entirety? Wink, wink).
In summary, Stephen Tait is runner up for the executor of my will (is that ok, Steve??). Seriously.

So goodbye seatbelts and healthy living, we can play fast and loose!