Yes, once a year Steve digs out the tights and pointy ears and dresses up as Santa’s number-one elf. It makes for a long day once I get the Halloween walls (which double as Santa’s workshop) put away in the garage. But it makes for a great

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Check out Animoto for making free 30 second videos like this one. I think I might start using these on McClellandfamily.com.

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Office Max understands viral marketing. Less-so this year since they’ve dropped about nine-tenths of their holiday marketing site. Nonetheless, neighbor Staci pointed out this deliciously fun site last year (unfortunately we only have a screen-grab to show for it) and we loved creating our own elf’s…ahem…elves. We only wish they would

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I’m in first grade now. My teacher is very nice. She has yellow hair and bright skin. (Click the picture here to see a larger picture with her in it.) Today she gave me Otter Pops and I like them. When I first come into the classroom, I hang up my back back and then I do a lunch bug. That’s like a little white board that has bugs on with the kids names on it that we move to what kind of lunch we want; hot lunch or cold lunch.

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This is top-Secret Video of Patrick showing us his latest dance moves. At age 5, he can really bust a move. We tried to sneak up on him, but he didn’t really start the moved until the camera was locked and loaded.

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At age 5, Patrick’s in his inquisitive phase. He expresses his curiosity with multi-part what-if questions that just seem to come out of thin air: What if there’s a cookie that you really like and there’s chocolate inside and you don’t even see it? What if your face was really big and you had three eyes and all of them were on the side of your head?

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Picasa is a free software download from Google that helps you:
* Locate and organize all the photos on your computer.
* Edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks.
* Share your photos with others through email, prints, and on the web: it’s fast, easy and free.

Plus I can create albums directly from iPhoto on my Mac. Sounds great, right? Well I’m not 100% sold. I may have a new method of posting photo albums on the web. Click on the photo on the left to see one of my first Picasa albums. It may not be quite as slick as the ones I’ve been serving up at McClellandfamily.com, but I spent quite a bit of time on those, and this one took me all of about 5 minutes. Using Picasa to create some pretty vanilla albums I should be able to get these babies up a lot more often.

Picasa is a free software download from

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We opened gifts leasurely and then made our way to Grandma Mary’s grave to pay our respects. From there is was off to church so we wouldn’t have to listen to Les call us heathens, and then we spent the rest of the day at his house. Here’s a small photo album from Christmas morning. (Click the photo to the left.) We were awakened early Christmas morning with the kids’ discovery that Santa had made it down the

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Things can get a bit chaotic with a decent-size crowd in our smallish house on Christmas eve, and we might be forgiven if we don’t manage to take a kazillion pictures. We only took a few, but we did want to share them here. Click the link or the photo on the right to see the album.

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The weather was agreeable with only a smattering of rain, and overall we had a great time in the two parks, and the kids will remember this trip for a long time to come. We’ve posted photos on the McClellandfamily.com/Photo Albums page.There’s a reason there is no 4-day park hopper pass at Disneyland: Three days is enough! Admittedly we didn’t cover everything in the park in our three days there, but nonetheless we were burned out on the crowds, the stress, and mostly the

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