The bad news? Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow.

The good news? We were there to see his prognostication!

I've wanted to spend Groundhog's Day in Punxsutawney since seeing the movie Groundhog Hog, but due to Larry's crazy schedule, we've never been able to go. This year Groundhog Day fell on a Saturday and Larry actually had the day off, but I wasn't sure I was ready to drag Creed along on the journey. Late Friday afternoon, we decided despite the icy weather and baby in tow, we'd better take advantage of our last chance to go before we move west. Larry was more confident that we could pull it off than I was, and I'm so glad that he convinced me to go because it was awesome!!!!! I'm not even sure how to begin to explain this crazy weekend.

We arrived around 11:30, which was not a problem as many of the Punxsutawney businesses stay open all night to accommodate all of the visitors.

We checked out the official gift shop, which ended up being a wise choice because the next day there was a line winding around the block to get into the shop. Punxsutawney has so many things going on to entertain visitors. They had things going on all night so it wasn't necessary to find a place to sleep. The Shadow Scavenge ran from midnight to 2 am so we saw teams scurrying all over town.

We opted to catch a little sleep before heading to Gobbler's Knob to see the ceremony. We knew all the hotels around were long ago booked, but for $5.00 you're welcome to bring your own sleeping bag to the Community Center Crash Pad, where there were playing the movie Groundhog Day in the old theater and people were sleeping along the rooms and hallways in every nook and cranny. It was very ghetto, but Larry says he's glad we did it to get the true Groundhog Day experience, and thankfully the ladies signing people in took pity on us and gave us our own little room so Creed's cries wouldn't disturb anyone else.

Gobbler's Knob opens at 3 a.m. for the celebrations to begin. The night of they determine whether or not you can park in the hills based on the weather. With all of the ice parking wasn't open this year, but there are always bus stops all over town and for $5.00 you can get a roundtrip ride to Gobbler's Knob. With so much traffic, I would recommend doing this even if you could park your own car.

We slept until 5:30 and then bundled up and got on a bus around 6:00, which was perfect for us because we didn't want to spend too much time in the cold with Creed. I have never seen so many school buses lined up and organized in my life. It was amazing!!!!

Things were in full swing when we arrived at Gobbler's Knob. It's a big clearing in the forest in the hills on the skirts of Punxsutawney. There are bonfires around the edges of the clearing for warmth, but the crowd kept things warm enough for us. They also sell hot chocolate and snacks. Starting at 3 a.m. they have live performers and big fireworks show, keeping the crowd fully entertained.

You know Larry can never resist an informational sign!

The movie Groundhog Day wasn't actually filmed in Punxsutawney, but they got a lot of the details right like the event being run by the Groundhog Club's Inner Circle, local dignitaries dressed in top hats and tuxedos with tails. We met one in the crowd (Ed whose official title is
Storm Chaser, this is the home of the Meteorological Society hall of fame after all) who was handing out official Punxsutawney Phil Beanie Babies. He was friendlier than he looks in this photo.

After some time dancing with the rest of the crowd, the sky got later and it was time for the ceremony, we just happened to be right next to the aisle that the National Guard cleared to escort the Inner Circle members to the stage.

All eyes were on the stage, waited for Phil.

The crowd was HUGE I felt like I was in the middle of Times Square on New Years Eve or something. It was estimated that there were 30,000 people in attendance and 10,000 stuck in town because they couldn't make it up on time (they stop buses at 6:30). I'm told all of the college students in the crowd can get a little wild, but we didn't experience any of that because we opted to watch from the family section. The bigger pictures are ones that we took so you can see that we ended up with a pretty good view of the festivities, but I borrowed these from the official Groundhog Club site so you could see a bit better.

The whole crowd chants for Phil until his handlers bring him out at dawn (around 7:30). He speaks to the Groundhog Club president in "Groundhogese"(a language only understood by the current president of the Inner Circle). His proclamation is then translated for the world.

This year he proclaimed, "As I look around me, a bright sky I see, and a shadow beside me. Six more weeks of winter it will be!" And the whole crowd broke into boos. You can watch it here but it's nothing like seeing it live.

Creed thought the whole thing was highly entertaining.The crowd cleared out quickly after the announcement and headed back to town. Many opted to walk back to town as the lines for buses were huge, but the wait was surprisingly fast.

I have never seen a town so dedicated to something. It was amazing, but it was cold so I didn't bring out my camera a lot so you're only getting a small taste of the Groundhog obsession. There are Groundhogs decorating the whole town.

Can you see the ground is covered with thick ice? You could slide down the sidewalks. At one point we even saw a stick of chapstick hidden, frozen in the thick ice under our feet.

There's an art project right now with these sculptures EVERYWHERE and each one is decorated differently.

And the Punxsutawney Zoo only has one animal, groundhogs, of course!

I loved the signs in all of the shop windows.

They had loads of fun activities going on: big breakfast buffets at most of the churches and restaurants, a treasure hunt to collect trinkets from the local businesses, and of course everything groundhog related that you could possibly think of.

Even the geese dress up as groundhogs (I had to take this picture for you Lish!)

There were several people in full groundhog costumes wandering around town.

My favorite part was the hundreds of groundhog hats people were wearing. I didn't think to take hat pictures until the end of our little trip, but here are a few for your enjoyment!

Creed was embarrassed to be seen without a groundhog hat so he disguised himself in my sunglasses and hoped that no one would recognize him!

We drove home through Pittsburgh with a brief stop for lunch at Ikea and made it home around 7:30. We count ourselves blessed as my car broke down at the entrance to our development so we know we were being watched over because I needed to teach in church today and Larry had to work at the hospital and I can't imagine what would have happened if it broke down in freezing cold rural PA! Ironically my car was in for repairs from Monday through Wednesday last week because I thought it just hasn't been running well since it was repaired after our accident.

Did you know?

Did you know that when you upload photos to Blogger, you are actually uploading them to a separate Picasa account, that Blogger automatically created through your Google account?

And did you know that while Gmail has a limit of over two gigs of storage space for free, Picasa limits you to one gig of storage for your photos?

And did you know that Blogger no longer just resizes your images and keeps a small image file like it used to when I just started blogging, it saves the whole file to Picasa (which can fill it up quickly if you have a camera with gianormous file sizes like mine) so if your house burned down or something, all the high res files you ever posted would still be saved out there somewhere in the cyberworld for you? (another Fabulous reason to blog!)

Well, I learned all of that the other night when I went to add a photo to a post and got the message, "You have exceeded your photo upload quota." Yikes! Originally, when I joined blogger they had really limited photo storage, which I should have exceeded a very long time ago, but I never checked to see what the deal is and now I know. Don't worry, for an annual fee you can upgrade your Picasa account size (the minimum is to ten gigs for $20.00/year and that would take me ages and ages to fill).

And did you also know for those of you that have password protected blogs, you still should go into your Picasa account and check the privacy settings there so that you are not sharing your photos, they will not come up in photo searches, and other people cannot download them? Or if you want to, you can share your Picasa accounts and allow all the grandma's out there to order their own copies of pictures of their darling grandkids.

I guess that you learn something new every day!

Focusing on the positive

I haven't been posting a lot of personal thoughts lately because Creed attacks the keyboard tearing off keys everytime he can get his hands on it so I've been keeping posts to a bare minimum, but there are so many things tumbling around in my head right now: all the things we need to do to get ready to sell our house (including finding a realtor, any suggestions?), what to do for the Relief Society lesson that I'm teaching on Sunday and what I'll do with Creed during the lesson since Larry will be working, so many ideas for new craft projects that I don't have time to work on yet, some book reviews that I've been meaning to post, the debate over whether we should head to Punxsatawny this weekend for Ground Hog's Day with Creed in tow, and why does Larry have to work so so much! And really, who wants to hear me complain so here are a few things that have made me incredibly happy this past week.

My mom has started her own blog called "Charmed, I'm sure". I've been telling her that she should for ages because she's always telling me about her projects, but I wish that I could see them, and she finally did it! She thinks that no one will be interested in reading it but her own kids, but I'm betting that's not true.

Then in the midst of teething weariness, I ran out to pick up the mail and lo and behold, Laura, AKA Texas Girl, sent me this bag, even though we have never met in person because it reminded her of the tree quilt that I wanted to make. I LOVE IT! Isn't that incredibly nice? And speaking of incredibly nice, have you read the comments to my request for recipes? Thank you all so much!

And last, but not least, my long lost friend Jay found my blog!

Jay was one of my best friends. I think I saw him just about every day the summer before I moved back to the mainland, and I could say just about the same thing for the summer before my sophomore year of college when Jay moved to Utah too. He's such a great guy and I'm happy to have him back as a friend and the bonus is that his wife seems awesome and they live in Utah now so Larry and I will actually have some friends when we move.

And I'd just like to note that one of the first things Jay said to me is that I craft like an 80 year-old woman! Hmmmm . . . I'm sure he meant that as a compliment . . . Actually that was pretty funny because I'm always telling Larry that he has the vocabulary of an 80 year-old man so I guess we were meant for each other in many many ways! Jay also kept pointing out how old I'm getting so I'd like to take this opportunity to let him know that he's also getting up there! The little guy in this picture, his brother Mikey, is now a senior in high school (yikes!) and Mikey made a very wise decision to go to my alma mater, Kahuku instead of Jay's, Kamehameha (Ha ha!)

And now we are all caught up and Jay and his beautiful wife have a blog too! We can't wait to meet his wife Sarah and their new baby Adalie!

Mr. Grumpy

Creed's second tooth has decided to make an appearance and the shirt pretty much sums up how that is going. Poor guy! I probably shouldn't have put him down to snap a couple of pictures, but I promise he continued to be miserable no matter what I tried, and at least Larry gets t know a little about how Creed's day went.

A Great Man

President Gordon B. Hinckley, the President of our church, died last night at the age of 97. To say he will be greatly missed is quite an understatement.

Creed's New Monster

I love Uglydolls and I've been meaning to attempt making one instead of buying one since they look so easy to make. I couldn't sleep Friday night so I got up around midnight and decided to choose a project from my crafting To Do list (yes, I have a crafting To Do list! Don't laugh). One hour later I had this (mind you I bought the fleece for this project before Creed was born so I didn't exactly finish this quickly, did I?)

The hardest part was just deciding what to use for the face. I went with some towel scraps that I have from making monster towels because Creed loves to feel different textures, but fleece would have been easier to work with. I finished stuffing the monster last night so now he's finished.
I think this project would be a lot more fun if you had your child draw a monster and turned that into a stuffed monster (in fact, I think maybe I saw them do that in a Martha Stewart Kid's magazine . . .) I guess I'll have to make another one when Creed can draw.

Creed at Ten Months

Creed seems to suddenly be so big! His stuffed doll has become the incredible shrinking Max.

He's also becoming so expressive. He only says mom, dad, dog, and sometimes ball, but he can communicate so much more. For instance, here he is letting us know he wants us.

He's eating us out of house and home and gaining some pretty chubby cheeks in the process. After nursing in the morning, he'll still eat a bunch of Cheerios or goldfish crackers, half a banana, a whole Yoplait yogurt, and a whole stage three jar of baby food.

He's starting to stand so well, but is pretty hesitant to walk on his own

He's also so dang smart. Today he figured out how to push the little lever in to open the back of our TV remote over and over again. He watches everything going on around him in wonder and is pretty amused with just about anything the first time he sees it. Here he is amazed by a wrapping paper tube today.

Creeders still only has one tooth and Larry managed to snap some pictures of it for you.

And I just wanted to add this picture because I didn't want to forget that every night when we peek in on him, he's sleeping all curled up with his little bum in the air.

He's an incredible sweet, cuddly baby (which makes it a little difficult for me to do things at times, but I try to remember that soon he won't want me to hold him all day long). I've started taking him to baby storytime at the library and he's not really sure what to make of such a big group of babies. This week he actually did venture off of my lap with a wary eye watching for any babies that might head towards him while he made a mad dash to pick up a ball and carry it back to my lap.

I think Larry and I find ourselves saying, "He's so cute!" several times everyday. I don't think we could possibly be anymore enamored with him!

Another Reason Why Larry & I Were Made for Each Other . . .

Stephanie and Marissa being "Bag Ladies" in 1988

Larry, Scott, and Keri as the Three Bears

Our Baby is Such a Punk!

Whatever he's wearing, whatever he's doing, he's just so cute!

Got Glasses?

Ok, last night I asked Larry to take a picture of me in my new glasses, and looking over them now, I think they say a lot about us so I'm sharing all of them. First off, the glasses. I'm 100% sure these are not the frames that I ordered, but when I went to pick them up and get my RGP contact lenses fitted, the contacts were totally messed up (I couldn't even read the huge E at the top of the vision chart, which I can read just fine without contacts) so they had to remeasure the shape of my eyes and send them back and I already felt bad about that so when they handed me my glasses and they were the wrong pair, I couldn't bring myself to say anything. I'm pretty sure that I did try these frames on, and they are growing on me, but they are not the frames that I decided on. The ones that I chose were a bit more funky because I almost never wear glasses, so they might as well be fun, right?

Anyway, I knew I liked these, I just didn't love them so I took them home and figured that I could always work up the courage to say something when I go to pick up my contacts if I'm still not loving them by then.

In this first picture I was just watching Larry get ready, and I didn't know that he was taking my picture. Sheesh, I am so awkward in front of the camera!

Then he took this picture and I thought, "Ok, fine. Whatever. Now we're done."

And I was telling Larry something and making faces, which was when he caught this.

And he says this is the look I often give him; sort of amused and a little confused about whatever he's doing or saying

And then you can't take a bunch of pictures without trying the Blue Steel pose, can you?

And I am not the only one in the family to get new glasses! Larry got his first pair! His optometrist told him that he doesn't really need them, but that he could have them for driving at night if he wanted them, and how could he resist when they are free with our insurance? Even Creed admires them!