have yourself a mary little christmas

i hope you're all having a fabulous christmas. i know we are. it seems mary has really started to grasp the concept of christmas. last night we went to Richard and Julie's for Christmas Eve dinner and other such festivites. all the kids were able to play together, dancing and running around like crazy. mary has so much fun with her cousins.
Santa came to visit. Mary was just so excited. she sat on his lap and got a stocking full of goodies.
mary got an especially awesome gift from her younger (notice i don't say little because they are in fact the same size -if anything, mary's probably smaller) cousin, faith. she got an awesome beach barbie and the cutest dang hat you've ever seen. we took several pictures of her wearing it, hoping to catch the perfect shot of her smiling at us. she kept turning every time we snapped one though...of course.
when we got home, as Koz tradition dictates, mary opened her present from the family gift exchange. it was pure good luck that gpa koz drew out her name. unfortunately, mary had seen her present earlier and so when we brought it out she didn't squeal with delight like she did the first time. she was still so excited. mar was giving kisses to her horsey: then, when mary was down for the count, we sat down to wrap. and by "we" i mean, just me. i sat down to wrap because...well...i'm better at it than brent. no offense brent. :) he did assemble the table and chairs gma and gpa lub gave mary. notice the chalkboard top! we painted it so that mary could draw (and draw she has...it's already covered in her doodles). we stayed up way too late getting everything down. *yawn* i'm still tired from it. but in the end, we were pleased with the results. mary woke up earlier than normal today. as if she just knew what was going down. when we got her out of her crib she was cranky; crying and rubbing her eyes as if she were still tired (which indeed she was). the only thing that consoled her was the promise of present. when i asked if she wanted to go out to the living room to open presents she said, "OK!" and ran out there. upon seeing the tree she shouted, "there it is!" What's really funny is, she had to get her things (doggie, teddy-that's the panda-, and blankie) down before going to the tree.

ok, that's it for now. brent and i are wiped. in fact, so tired were we that after mary opened her gifts and we had breakfast, brent and i passed out on the couch together. mary either a. didn't notice. or b. didn't care. she had enough cool things to play with.

so expect some more videos on youtube this weeked (aren't you amazed they worked correctly here?!)

let it snow,let it snow, let it snow

oh my *expletive deleted*

i just spent an hour on this post...then my computer froze. after rebooting i come here only to find....IT'S ALL GONE!!!!!!!!!!!! *head desk* i am close to crying because all that hard work is gone.

i don't even have the heart to include the lengthy explanations that accompanied the pictures before. oh well...here goes again.

we got boots today for mary, along with half the population of utah county, thanks to the still continuing snow storm from late last night/early this morning. mary is in love, despite not being able to get the boots i preferred because of inadequate sizes.

putting the boots to good use:

then mary threw some snow up in the air and got me right in the face. surprise!trying to catch a snowflake on her tongue. so adorable:

this is what brent did for the majority of mary's snow playtime. after awhile, mary decided daddy had done enough work. she went to go get him so he could play too.brent decided it would be a good idea to teach mary to throw snow at me. good thing it didn't pack well or else...

i'm not even going to attempt posting a video on here because that was right about when my computer decided to go all kablooey on me. i'll save those for youtube.

and in case you're wondering...it's still snowing. mary is all cuddled up warm for her nap after wearing herself out. good times.

ho, ho, ho, i'm hu-hu-hungry

sorry, but everytime christmas rolls around, i think of that fruity/cocoa pebbles commercial where fred flintstone and barney rubble are singing and whatnot. do they even still air that one? they should.

so it's christmas time. we didn't even make it until after thanksgiving before the christmas decorations went up.

please try to ignore the fact that mary is pantless. she refused to wear any with her awesome onesie, courtesy of Kara (that was gifted to mary over a year ago). it says: "dear santa, i've been good all year. just ask my mommy"

videos, as usual for me, are not uploading. so we'll try it again later.

that and pretty sure mary has croup. again. i can hear her coughing herself silly in her room *cries* my poor m&m. i must go and comfort her...

oh my goodness!!!!

WE'RE FAMOUS!
ok, so not really, but check us out on the gabbafriends.com site. scroll down a few pictures and you'll see us in all our YGG glory, including a little blurb i added in the email to the gabbafriends people. hehe

click here!

just an fyi

i've been trying to post videos on the blog for awhile. valerie gave me the tip of using windows live writer or some such thing that i'm trying to figure out. until then, brent and i have created a youtube account and i am uploading some there. here's the link, which i'm hoping works. go check it out if you have the time and inclination. i know we enjoy watching mary's antics. you might too.
http://www.youtube.com/user/koz80usa

spook tacular halloween

i count this year as mary's first "real" halloween because she was able to walk door to door and say "trick or treat" and "thank you" for all the candy she got. as far as first halloweens go, it was close to perfect.

despite mary not wanting to nap and being cranky for half of the day.

and when she refused to put on her foofa hat and let us take pictures of her.

or when she yelled and cried at the poor lady who tried to give her a bag of microwaveable popcorn instead of candy (seriously, she yelled and refused to thank her for something that was definitely not candy, despite her love of popcorn.).

or having bruises on my thigh from where the box rubbed against me (i think i bumped into something to create those tho...i did have to waddle a lot to move around).

here are many pictures to take a gander at. notice mary has two ba

gs with her. she refused to leave the house without both. i think she was hoping she'd get more candy that way. she was right. after hitting up great gma koz's house and getting half the bowl of candy, she needed the second bag. the first was too heavy to carry

brent felt a little awkward about being dressed up in the orange dj lance rock get up, but the following day, i was sent this:

i showed it to brent and now he feels better. in case you don't recognize him, that's brad pitt. and if the great brad pitt can suck it up and sport some fabulous orange wear, so can brent. plus mary loved it. a lot.

i gotta feeling...

that tonight's gonna be a good night.

Black Eyed Peas hit the nail on the head. being mary's favorite band (yes i think it's weird. but you try changing the song whenever BEP comes on and you are in for an earful of mary's yelling). It's halloween and we are so very excited. mary already made an appearance at work in her Fufa costume, which everyone loved. and i was half dressed in my boombox outfit (sans box since it won't fit through doorways). brent is working right now, but he's getting off early so we can wander around the neighborhood getting candy that mary will eat (and probably us too, i won't lie). so you'll have to wait until tomorrow at the earliest for some awesome pictures of the greatest yo gabba gabba (YGG) family you've ever seen.

in the meantime, feel free to ooh and ahh over our pumpkin carving skills (or in the case of mary, painting skills):

blogger is being a bit basic and not letting me move around the pictures. so they are kind of out of order. oh well. you get it. mary painted. brent and i carved. mine is the owl, brent's the bat and jack o lanter, and mary's the painted goodness.

i tried to post a video of mary dancing to the BEP song mentioned in the title but it won't upload. curse you blogger *shakes fist* i'll try again later!

happy, happy birthday, mary dear

happy days will come to you all year.

if i had a wish then it would be:

a happy, happy birthday to you from me!

monday was mary's 2nd birthday. the terrible twos started out...well not terrible, but not as planned. that's for sure.

the day dawned bright and warm, despite the weather calling for rain later. after a breakfast of cupcakes and some barney watching, we got moving on birthday festivities. first on the list? cornbelly's. we get there and the lot is completely empty. Brent kept saying, "i think it's closed." to which i replied, "how can it be closed?" because really, does it make sense that it would be closed at noon? of course not.

too bad it was really closed.

seems cornbelly's doesn't open until 4 pm on weekdays. what is that nonsense? i mean really, why wait until 4 pm when the little ones want to take advantage of early day sunshine and warmth? *sigh* we took some time to snap a few shots of mary since they had a big sign on one barrel of hay about birthday girl parking.

sometimes i wish we could just have a professional photographer follow us around so that there wouldn't be several of the same shots, just with different parents standing with mary...:
mary was captivated by the candles for some reason

then we moved on to pumpkin pictures. mary was already getting restless at this point. and the dainty behind that emits gases like a grown man did not want to touch the hay. i just love how she picks and chooses when to be a girl.

mary's new fascination moved to rocks. and since the entire ground was gravel city, she kept bending over to add to her collection (which i somehow convinced her to leave there)after the picture taking, gma koz and uncle ty-ty met up with us for lunch at the cafe at thanksgiving point and a quick tour of the dinosaur museum (which is kind of expensive fyi). we vowed to come back after 4 and play at cornbelly's because it all looked so awesome.

mary was super tired by this point and unfortunately fell asleep on the car ride home. that means no napping. because for some insane reason mary thinks a quick 20 minute nap is sufficient. you're not a cat mary. no cat naps. we tried to get her to go back down for a real nap once at home. she kept jabbering away, until eventually falling asleep. only to wake up about 45 minutes later. i kept thinking of that one disneyland/world commercial with the little boy, "i'm too excited to sleep." that's our mary. too excited.

during her nap i had a mini melt down of sorts over her cake. see, i decided to take on a rather large challenge and use fondant...for the first time ever. to explain accurately, i need to go back a bit:

kara let me peruse her book of recipes that turn boxed mix cakes from drab to fab. i chose a rather simple chocolate cake, made tastier with the aid of chocolate pudding and chocolate chips (mary likes chocolate like her mommy). and then decided to go that extra mile (as if i wasn't already) and make a banana filling for it. oh em gee, i took a little nibble and it was good. if i do say so myself. all of sunday i spent actually making the cake while brent was away dealing with car fail (more on that later). anyway, i got the fondant on easier than i thought, especially considering lack of "proper" tools and knowledge. i chose which colors i wanted and how i wanted to design it and went to work. it was all done, except i needed to "finish the seams" or clean up the bottoms of each tier, or however you say that more succinctly. in hindsight, i should've done that first. i was in such a hurry. i told myself, i'll go get the rest of the supplies on monday morning to fix it.

well, monday morning came and went. i was planning on going during mary's nap, which proved to be non existent. so as i was rushing to the store to buy some premade icing and be done with it, i accidentally picked up red that looked pink on the front. and of course i didn't notice until i got home. ugh. ugh. ugh. i had to improvise. i wasn't happy. i freaked out. brent tried to console but really, at this point i am inconsolable. i just am. this is why i try to stay away from any kind of crafty thing. i am, in the words of somebody on the cable guy movie i've never seen but hear brent quote all the time (sorry run on), perfectionish...perfectionish...perfectionist (this will make little sense if you haven't seen the movie. i apologize for the lame quote). anyway, see for yourself. ladies at work were very nice about it. i almost want to make the picture super tiny so you can't see it well.

it really wasn't supposed to look that bad. it was supposed to be awesome. awesome as in, "we at foodnetwork love your cake so much we want to give you a show all about making them." okay, so not really.

when mary "woke up" we headed out to lehi for cornbelly's. again. we get there and guess what? it starts raining. and the temp dropped. i was so MAD. because it looked so fun and mary would've had a blast. and i missed out on so many photo ops. can you imagine the cuteness that is mary playing in a cornmaze? oh well.

off to pirate island...only mary fell asleep. and we were running late for cake, though some people that we planned on weren't able to make it anyway...so we decided to just order some pizza and do pirate island later, when we'd have more time to enjoy it. alas, no yars from mary that day.

when we got home, brent asked me, "is it ok to pull out the b-u-b-b-l-e-s since it's mary's birthday?" you dont' mention bubbles unless you expect mary to play with them for hours. pretty sure she learned that from cous brendan or something. but being her special day, how could i say no?

then it was cake time. mary was feeling a bit overwhelmed. too much pressure to perform while we all sang:she got over it when presents appeared

mary didn't want to stop playing with toys in order to eat cake. she was enthralled with the kitchen set from gpas koz. she did take a few bites, though only after being allowed to use her new plate and flatware first. tomorrow mary and i are gonna go pick something nice out thanks to gpas lub. they insisted i get her something she wants and not needs. but mary wants everything. how do we narrow it down? it should be a good time all around.

um...this has gotten completely too long. so i'll explain car fail on a later date. besides, i dont' want to taint mary's bday post. just know that brent's car is dead and gone. may it RIP. thanks to all who wished mary a happy birthday and gave her cute little loves in any form. she thanks you, and so do we :)

this is completely random. but you need to watch it. like right now. quite literally the best thing ever. you'll thank me later.
kittens inspired by kittens