Bake Day

One of my favorite Christmas traditions we had growing up was baking tons of different types of Christmas cookies and then making treat plates to pass out to our friends and neighbors. Once I went away to college I continued the tradition with my roommate Jill and now am sharing it with my own family. Jacoby is usually my bake day helper (he's a good sport). But now that the boys are a little older they love to get in on the action (although how much of "helping" they really do I am not sure of!). Coby's favorite part are the sugar cookies. He loves the cookie cutters and of course the frosting part. He likes to frost the same cookie multiple times and just keep eating off the frosting. This year we made sugar cookies, russian teacakes, m&m cookies, candy cane cookies, and homemade oreos. I think it ended up being somewhere around 300 cookies:) Yummy!

GRE

I (Jacoby) have been applying for a Department of Defense scholarship called the SMART scholarship that would pay me half my salary to go back to school for a graduate degree for the next year. My work will be gracious enough to let me work part time so in essence, I would be making my full salary and getting a graduate degree at the same time. However, in order for me to actually receive the scholarship I need to be accepted to graduate school. And in order for me to get accepted to graduate school at the school I would like to attend (UCSD - its close so I could still work part-time and it has a really good robotics branch of their EE department) I need good GRE scores. Last year I prepared a few months for the test and when I took it, I was very dissappointed with my scores. That verbal test is incredibly tough. When you are supposed to pick an antonym of a word, and you don't recognize that one nor 4 of the 5 answer choices, it can be a very difficult test. Here is an example of an antonym question I have seen (not from the actual GRE tests I have taken because that would be a breach of my testing contract):

OPPROBRIOUS:

(A) meretricious
(B) innocuous
(C) invulnerable
(D) irreproachable
(E) ambitious

Do you see what I mean? Opprobrious? Meretricious? When I don't even know what I am supposed to take the antonym of, this gets tough. The answer is D. Opprobrious means "expressing offensive reproach" and irreproachable means "not subject to blame, faultless".

Anyway, so I bombed the test last year and things didn't fall into place to go back to school and get the scholarship. So I am applying for the scholarship again this year and I knew I would take the GRE once again. But this year I have been studying on and off for the last year, mainly studying vocabulary. Its the weirdest thing but I see all these new words in novels and publications all over the place. Its like everyone else is learning and using these new words with me. So I took the test yesterday again with my new-found vocab knowledge and I rocked it! I raised my verbal score by more than 200 points (which either means I got a near perfect score this time or I must have done really poorly last time - ding ding ding ding we have a winner) and my math score even went up too. Still, I haven't even applied to UCSD or for the scholarship and I don't know if I will be accepted, but I have a much better chance than I did last year, and I know I won't have to take the test again.

Coby's 3rd Birthday

It's hard to believe that Coby is now three. At least it will clear up the confusion at the grocery store when the clerks ask how old he is and he says two and they say no you are too big you must mean three and he says no two! It is rather funny to watch since it would happen to us at least twice a week. I am sure he is thinking these adults just aren't so smart that I always have to tell them twice how old I am before they understand.

Last weekend we had a Thomas the train party for Coby, or as he calls it a James party since James is his favorite train. I think it ended up being a ton of fun. We bought three different used train tables and set them up with trains and cars for the kids to play with. The one is the middle is actually the boys Christmas present. We told Coby that we rented them from a train store so they could just stay for the day. Then afterwards we packed the one we were keeping back in the garage and sold the other two. Coby was in heaven with all the trains but I think a little overwhelmed with so many people in our small house! We had 17 kids and 18 adults. A little crazy huh? Sometimes I tend to get a little carried away when I get an idea in my head! It was a wonderful day!

Need I say that someone was not too happy about putting on his train gear???

Halloween

So I am finally attempting to get our blog going and keep everyone informed on the Larson Happenings. This year for Halloween we were the Toy Story gang. I made costumes for Jacoby and I and then ended up just buying the boys used costumes since they were cheaper than making them. Little did I know when I started them that my costume would have to be completely hand-sewn since I was sewing on already made clothes. It was very tedious and a lot more hours than I had anticipated. Thankfully, Jacoby's costume was a lot easier to create:) In the end it is all worth it as I love the feeling of accomplishment when they are finally complete. I also added our last two years of Halloween pictures just for fun.

Well now we have a blog