Travelog for: Cutie

Hey Mom!

Today is Thanksgiving here in the United States! This holiday is always on the fourth Thursday in November and not actually on a set day like Halloween and Christmas are. It is a holiday where you are supposed to be thankful for the things you have.

I found a good website that explains the history of this holiday! If you want to learn more, you should go here.

I woke up this morning to a home cooked meal! This meal included biscuits and gravy, bacon, and scrambled eggs. Biscuits and Gravy is a very popular dish in the Midwest, South, and Northwest of the United States. The gravy is usually made from pork sausage grease, white flour, milk, and pieces of sausage. It may sound kind of gross, but it is in fact REALLY good!


After breakfast, we decided to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on television. Macy's is a HUGE chain of shops in the US and they host a Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City every year. This was the 83rd parade that the store has held. 83! Mom! That's WAY older than me! 


Since it takes place in New York City, there was many Broadway productions that perform a song for the parade. One of them was for Shrek.  Apparently it's a musical now!


Next came the Radio City Rockettes. These ladies are known for dancing in the US during the Christmas holiday. They are well known for line kicks they do, like what they are doing in the photo.


In the Macy's Parade, there are also many marching bands from high schools all over the States! Here's one I  found, but I don't remember where they were from. I was too excited watching to notice.


Another big part of the parade is the balloons! They are MASSIVE and there are a lot of them in the parade.  I caught a few that you might know...

Spiderman (he was 78 feet long!)


Kermit (he weighted 515 pounds!)


I don't know if you know him, but here's Pikachu from Pokemon. He's chasing after a PokeBall!


They had these pilgrims with big heads in the parade! Apparently they are a replica of ones from the very first parade.


The Sesame Street gang also sang us a song! It was cool to see Big Bird and friends on TV.


Here's a funny looking fireman balloon I thought I'd show you. I just thought it was cool.


They had many floats, too! Here's one with the Statue of Liberty. Riding on it was Miss America 2009 Katie Stam and the 2009 NYC marathon winner Meb Keflezighi.


Ronald McDonald was also part of the parade! He was not only in his shoe car, but also a balloon.  His balloon is one of the biggest balloons in the entire parade.



Here is a float that represents New York City. It's often called "The Big Apple", hence the big apple that makes up most of the float. The Chrysler Building and a taxi cab were also on the float.


The end of the parade came, sadly.  Steph said that the parade ends every year with Santa Claus.



Once the parade was over, it was time to eat Thanksgiving dinner. Steph's family has a very typical Thanksgiving dinner. It includes turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn, green beans, brown dinner gravy, and dinner rolls.  I didn't get to get a photo with the food, but I did get a photo of our meal for you! 


After dinner, it was time for dessert. Steph's family has the traditional desserts, too!  They had a pumpkin pie, which I ate most of. Don't worry, Mom! I did leave a little for them to eat.


After I ate all that pumpkin pie, I noticed that they had apple pie, too! I had to have a slice of that as well. My, this food was REALLY good!


Once I ate all of my pie, it was time for yet ANOTHER tradition of Thanksgiving: watching American Football.  The Dallas Cowboys play football every year on Thanksgiving and since the men in Steph's family are HUGE fans of the team, I decided I'd watch with them, too.



In the end, the Dallas Cowboys beat the Oakland Raiders with a score of 24 to 7. 

Well, Mom, I'm pretty worn out from my events today. I think I may just take a nap. Don't worry about me getting hungry later, though.  We have PLENTY of left-overs for me to eat! 


Love you!

Cutie

Hey Mom!

Last night, we put up all the Christmas decorations!! We got the Christmas tree up. Many people here in the US use plastic trees because they are less of a hassle, but at Steph's home, they use a real tree.


Look at the angel on top of the tree! A woman Steph's mom knows made this for them years and years ago. Isn't she pretty? 


I also helped put this village up, too! I did a good job, didn't I?







Here's a little girl feeding bread to some geese. I was waiting my turn to get some bread.


Here I found some VERY large twin TVs.  They said they don't travel though. I thought that was kind of sad...but I guess it would be hard to send those two anywhere.


Here I am with the cast of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. It is a VERY big holiday movie here in the US. I can't wait to watch it!


And the last part of the tour of Christmas decorations is me with these two angels. They both gave me a kiss on the cheek, it made me blush a little, Mom. 


Well, I hope you enjoyed the pretty decorations. I worked REALLY hard on them. I'm definitely getting into the holiday spirit now!

I love you!
Cutie

Whew! I FINALLY caught up my travel log for you! You'll have to all the way back to October 24 to catch up, I'm afraid. I'm sorry it took me so long, but Steph and I were both sick and now I've been helping her study for her finals this week. I hope she does well on them! I really tried to help her.

It's been pretty cold here. It's been sleeting every now and then and even spitting snow at times. I hope I get to see a big snow while I am here.
But since it's been so cold, I've been drinking a LOT of hot chocolate.



I'll update soon, I promise! It won't be as long as last time.

Cutie

Hey Mom!

Today, Mystery arrived at Steph's house.  I'm so glad there's another tv to celebrate the holidays with! 

We all decided to take a photo in front of the Christmas tree. Here I am with Mystery as well as Steph's two toyvoyagers Blue Boy and Izzie.



I noticed he had a key around his neck, so I asked just what it was for.  He told us that his brother Mercury had left it behind when he became a toyvoyager.  He had left a note for Mystery, but the part that explained what the key was for was torn away.  Now, he's on a mission to not only find where the key goes to, but to find his brother as well. We all agreed we'd help him with his mission.

Hey Mom!

Today, Eisa arrived.  She's originally from Japan, but she came to us from North Carolina, USA. She's a very fun little pineapple and I hope she has a good time here with us!



Well, I've gotta run! I've gotta help the others show Eisa around!

Love Love Love,
Cutie

Today, Mom, we decided to bake some holiday cookies! They weren't home-made, though; Steph said the home-made ones will come closer to Christmas time.  These you just buy the box and put them on a cookie sheet and bake them.  These were very neat, though, as they had reindeer and Christmas trees in them.


Here we are looking at the dough so we could put them on the cookie sheet and into the oven. Aren't they neat looking?


First batch in progress in the oven!
\

Here's the finished project! They smell sooo good and look VERY yummy!


Well, I've got to go and finish cooking/eating the rest of the batches! 

Miss you,
Cutie

Today, we made a gingerbread house! Again, like the cookies, it wasn't homemade, but it was still a ton of fun! It didn't taste too great though, so we skipped out on eating it. 


Afterward, we all settled in (well, except Chance. He wanted to get to bed early) and watched Elf and Four Christmases. If you have not seen either of them, I would reccommend watching one of them, especially Elf!


Well, it's VERY late and I need to get to bed! Only 8 more days until Christmas!!

Cutie Xx

Today, there was a little bit of snow here. Not much really, but it's the first bit of snow that's been seen all winter so far! 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Today, we gathered around and listened to Blue Boy play his guitar. It was very beautiful. He's VERY talented.



We were a little curious and wanted to learn to play as pretty as he does, so we asked him if he could teach us. Boy, you should have seen his face light up at that!

He said he had to teach us the basics of guitar first, but we would get to play soon enough.

Here's the diagram he showed us:


The guitar is made up of three parts: Head, Neck, and Body.

The Head is the part above the neck where the Tuners are. Depending on the guitar, the number of tuners vary. Some guitars have six, some have twelve. You turn the tuners to tune the strings on your guitar.
The Nut is a piece of material that holds the strings in place. If you were to take the strings off of a guitar and look at a Nut, you would see little grooves where the strings should go.
Below the nut is the Neck, sometimes called the Fretboard/Fingerboard. The Neck extends down to the Sound Hole. On the Neck, you will notice that there are little piece of metal all the way down. These are called Frets. You place your finger near them, but not on them to play a note. The closer to the body you get, the higher the note.
The big fat part of the guitar is called the Body. The Body can be made out of many different types of wood and comes in many shapes. Toward the middle of the body and at the end of the neck is the Sound Hole. The sound hole is where the sound is projected out. Next to the sound hole is the Pick Guard. The pick guard is there to protect the finish of a guitar from being scratched up while playing with a pick.
At the end of all the strings is the Bridge. The Bridge is attached to the guitar and the strings go into it by using Bridge Pins to hold them in. Above the Bridge Pins is the Saddle. This acts just like the nut does and has grooves in it to hold the strings in place.

After we finished with the anatomy of the guitar, Blue Boy decided it would be best if we talked about guitar picks too. He dumped out his bag of guitar picks and showed us how there were many different colors, designs, and brands of guitar picks.


Blue Boy also told us that the picks vary in thickness. The white one of the left is only .38 millimeters thick, the yellow .73 millimeters, the black one at 1 millimeter thick, and the purple at 1.14 millimeters thick. He said the thickness of the pick is up to the guitar players preference. He said that he likes to play with ones about the width of the yellow one, but we were free to choose.


Sometimes, the picks don't give a number of the thickness and just give you a word. For example, the three picks in the top row say L, M, and X-H. The L stands for Light, the M stands for Medium, and the X-H stands for Extra Heavy. The bottom two were much simpler and said Medium and Heavy.


Once we all had this information floating around in our heads, it was time to start learning how to play a real guitar.


Well, almost time. Blue Boy decided to explain to us what a Capo is. A capo is placed on the fretboard directly behind a fret. It raises the pitch of the guitar without having to tune it.


NOW, we were ready to play guitar! I was up first. I grabbed my pick of choice and got up to play. I thought I did an excellent job, though it was a little difficult to play since I was so tiny.


Blue Boy noticed that the guitar was a little bit too big for us, so he went back to his room and came back with a surprise for us. He had a little electric guitar for us to play! It was the perfect size for all of us!


Well, Mom, I must go. I need to continue rocking out some more. I think I could be a guitarist in a ToyVoyager band, what do you think? 

Today, we got another taste of snow. It was atleast a few inches deep, but not anything major.

Today, we all wished Stephanie a happy birthday. I remembered that your's was yesterday and I didn't get time get around and say Happy Birthday to you since I was baking a cake. 

So, Happy Belated Birthday, Mom!

Today, we all woke up to see 7 inches of snow on the ground. It was very shocking, even though is did snow from about midnight on Friday until 6 AM this morning. 



We decided we'd all go out and build ourselves a little snow man. Isn't he cute? 



We would have gone sledding and stuff today, but the building the snowman froze our little TV bodies and we need to drink some hot cocoa.

I miss you a lot,
Cutie Xx

Today, we noticed that our snow was melting quite a bit.  We knew that today would have to be the day that we would go play in it.



Since the snow keeps melting and refreezing over night, it ended up being very nice sledding weather. We were going to use the wooden sled, but we were afraid it'd take us too far.

Instead, we found this nice pink plastic sled that Steph said she's had since she was a kid. We all climbed on it and found a nice hill.


Here we go!!!!


We had a little bit of a rought landing at the end of the hill, but it was definitely fun and none of us got hurt. We went down this hill for hours. 


Before we went inside, I asked Steph if we could go ice skating on her pool. She said she was too afraid the ice would be too thin and that we would ultimately fall in and get lost.  I decided getting lost wasn't in my best interest.


Well, I think I need some more hot cocoa!  Will update again soon!

Love,
Cutie

Wow. Well, I FINALLY got caught up with my updates once again. Us TVs have been VERY busy helping Steph out with all of her college homework. We're not doing ALL the work for her so don't worry, she's still earning all her good grades by hard work.  \



I hope we get to go visit some place soon. I'm itching to get out a little bit.

Love you lots and lots, Mom!
Cutie