Les and Riley can’t help being so adorable all the time…here they are on the first day of december.
christmas swan!!!
mom and i went to hobby lobby at the beginning of the month and were were about to check out but i hurried back in to pick up some candles. I glanced up and saw three beautiful white swans on the tip tip top of a shelf and i thought I MUST HAVE THEM.
i hurried over and got a worker to get a ladder to get one off the tall tall shelf…and it was styrofoam. hmm. ok, styrofoam, didn’t matter, it was still beautiful. and then i looked at the price.
it was half off…for forty bucks. good grief. for styrofoam? no way, i wasn’t going to pay that. no sir.
i got home and described the swans to kevin and decided that i could make my own styrofoam swan. i started looking online and you can buy styrofoam forms for all kinds of animals – horses, bunnies, cats, deer…you name it. but no swans. hmm, maybe i couldn’t make one after all.
so surely, surely somebody must be selling one online cheaper than $40?
my search resulted in a similar swan, except the beak was glittery and it had some brushed gold on the tips of the feathers and quite frankly i didn’t like it nearly as much as the one from hobby lobby. and it was from Harrod’s. And the price was about $175 pounds. around $230.
I quickly realized the Hobby Lobby swans were a steal. I looked them up online but online hobby lobby was all out, so i sweated it out til the next morning and i rushed back to the store when it opened and bought all three. One for me, amy, and mom.
i added embellishments to mine – a few ornaments, a few flowers, a festive green poinsettia cap.
i love my swan. i just looked up the one from Harrod’s so i could show you what it looked like but it’s now nowhere to be found. No fabulous white swan photos on Pinterest either, plus they no longer exist on the hobby lobby website .
valuable lesson learned – when you see a magical swan you must buy it. I’m sure my white swan will be worth gobs of money, a styrofoam collector’s item, but i’ll never part with it. When xmas is over i’ll take off the xmas embellishments and display it all year round.
here’s sweetie, happy to sit in the living room with us for a little bit.
we’d almost decided to get rid of this cat bed so of course riley decided it was the perfect spot.
and of course les is always happy to sit in or on top of a box.
here he’s saying , “ssshhhh, kevin, you talk on and on way too much.” which is funny, because kevin is a very quiet fellow.
even better than a cat bed, of course, is a big wad of shipping paper.
saturday the 7th, before mom and i left for NYC, i was looking for some xmas thing or other and i kept getting stuff out and putting it on the dining room table. this is what it looked like. nightmare. piles and piles of stuff.
i stayed up late trying to put things around but i just couldn’t finish before we left.
i was ravenous, so randy and i had dinner at steak-n-shake. I went crazy and had a nutella shake, a kid-sized one. it was pretty good but didn’t really taste like nutella.
sweetie was calmly sitting on kevin’s lap when i got home. she’s been a little more skittish lately but hopefully she”l continue to get happier about living here with us.
when i got back from new york i was determined that the first thing i’d do is clear the dining room table of extra decorations. i did put up a few of them but unfortunately there are some really great ornaments that don’t have a home. i know it’s too late to build an addition to the house to put them up somewhere and i keep thinking i should put them all away for the year. so today is really, really the day when i figure out where to put things and move on from the whole decoration thing.
many things to do. luckily none of them involve going outside because it’s dang cold out there. and oh yeah, i do have that 6.5 million gob of new york to sort through and post…it’ll happen.
ok then,
mrs. in the christmas mood hughes.