March break (and purim too :))

Bonjour,
C'est Lucie :)  Hello, this is Lucie blogging today.

In spite of my papa's wishes, I did not have to spend March break in France but got to stay here in Canada.  Because of travel time, I would only have gotten to spend a couple of days with each of my parents (they live in different cities in France) and would have spent just as much time traveling as visiting.  So instead, I'll go to France sometime in the summer.  Instead I got to go to the Natural History Museum and see a kangaroo named Jack.

He's a red kangaroo :)

At first it looked like we wouldn't get a good look at him as he had had a long day by the time we visited the museum and here he is just barely poking his head out of his safe place, a large animal crate.  He is only  1 year old, so he isn't very big yet.  He will be 7' tall when full adult around 10 years of age, or so the naturalist told us.

komodo dragon lizards:)  The scratches on the guy's arm are from jack the kangaroo, not the lizard.

Here are 2 little snakes.  Not sure what kind but I liked the 2 of them both peeking out at the same time.

Here I am at the museum. 

Check out my fancy hair, it's called a ribbon waterfall twist.  It's not really that hard to do.

And much to everybody's delight, Jack did finally come back out for a little while.  He has a stuffie kangaroo too:)

And finally one purim picture of Emma and Yoko reaching for a piece of hamentashen :)  That's Amaya and Sophia in the middle.

That's it for now.

A la prochaine, until next time.
Love
Lucie  :)

Looking for information about something on Lucie's neck

Hi Everybody,
Sorry to post not from a doll's point of view but I wanted as wide an audience as possible.  Yesterday I discovered some marks on Lucie's neck.  They look almost like an artist's mark but I am not sure at all.  She is copyright 2012 according to her tag but I got her in 2013. Yoko who is copyright 2013 does not have this on her neck.  It looks just like the ones on this preMattel Felicity that is for sale on ebay.   The marks look like this:

And here is a link to the ebay auction:

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/American-Girl-Felicity-1ST-EDITION-Pleasant-Company-Copper-Hair-Red-Lashes-/191084277479?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c7d82aee7

Does anybody know anything about this or what they are?

Thanks!!!
Toby aka doll mom or guardian on this blog :)

ETA:  Just checked all my dolls and 3 others have these marks too.  2 of them came back from the doll hospital with new heads and have these marks.  The other one I got in 2011.

Hinamatsuri 2014

Hi Everybody,
It's Amaya and Yoko.  Yesterday march 3rd was Girls' day also called the doll festival in Japan.  For more information, check this wiki link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinamatsuri
and also our post from last year.
And for extra check out the amazing superinky's blog post about this.  We love her hello kitty hina dolls and are trying to get a set ourselves from the internet :):)
http://www.superinky.com/
scroll down if she has a new post by the time you see this.

Here yoko is telling to stop using my laptop and help her clean off the dresser so that there is somewhere to put our hina dolls.

 Cleaning off the dresser together.

Our hina dolls are stored in a beautiful japanese wrapping cloth. 

More set up.

Our dolls are a wall set.  Here they are.  This kind of set is very easy to store.

We made japanese food to celebrate.  These are inari (the pouch ones) and onigiri, the ones in between the 2 rows of pouches.  They are rice wrapped around filling made with molds.  In Japan these are often sold in convenience stores or vending machines as well as restaurants and grocery stores etc.

These are the molds for the onigiri.  There is an awesome japanese ikebana store around the corner and we bought the molds there.

That's it for now.  We were going to add some pics from Valentines' day that we never got around to posting but there are so many great ones that we decided to do an entire (very belated) valentines' day post after all.  Look for that sometime soon.

Amaya and Yoko  :) :)

Giveaway has ended

Hi Everybody,
This is Sophia and Emma.  We are rather disappointed to have to post and say that not one single person entered our giveaway even though some people liked the announcement on instagram.  We don't feel much like blogging just now, so look for us on instagram and we'll be back a little later when we get inspired or do something interesting.
That's it for now.
Sophia and Emma :) :)

100th post!!!! Giveaway!!!!!

Hi Everybody,
This is Sophia and Emma.  We cannot believe that this is the 100th post on our blog.  In honour of that we are having a giveaway.  What we are giving away is the following items:
1- 2014 AG mini calendar from the AG magazine (we have an extra copy).
1- Learn to draw mini teach you how to draw book/mag?
5 personalized postcard.  That means a blank postcard with a photo of one of us glued on it.  We had bought a package of this kind of postcards to use during our trip to Montreal in 2012 but didn't end up using them.  We will be posting later in this post a selection of photos.  We'll be doing a names in the hat draw for all the prizes and each person who wins a postcard gets to choose from those photos which one they want (we can do multiples of any photo).  Each person can only win one prize.  We can ship prizes world wide as we picked ones that can go by letter mail. (yes we checked with the post office).  In order to enter you must leave a comment on the blog.  We will pick winner on february 1st:)
Here are the pictures of the prizes:

The blank postcard is the blank white thing in the middle:)  by the way, it is a regular postcard size in case you can't tell from this photo.  As for the photos for the postcard.  We had so much fun picking awesome photos from our archives that we are going to have to list half of them today and the other half tomorrow,  so if you win one of the postcards you will have to view the photos in both posts.  Sorry!!!!

Jadyn by the ocean (2012 we think).

Emma and I playing on the trampoline, not sure when this one was taken.  Yes we seem to like the summery photos (we would love to pass on there being bugs around though).  Hmm, maybe the piles of snow, too cold weather and lack of sunshine are getting to us afterall!!!

Well, one rainy day photo after all we do live in the maritimes:)  Here we are being detectives, taken last year or the year before.

Here we are chilling on the trampoline.  Twins forever :)  This photo is from the photo shoot we did to choose a blog icon, so it's from 2012.

And a recent one from our birthday earlier this month.

Finally this last photo is not for the giveaway but was just too funny not to share.

Sophia getting up to trouble as usual, hanging poor Becca from the bookcase (what really happened was that one of our mom's older brother did this while we were out).  This photo was probably taken in 2011 before Emma's time).  Sophia wants everybody to know that she would never actually hurt Becca).

Well that's it for the first lot of photos.  We hope you will enter our giveaway:)  Remember if you want to do that, you must leave a comment before february 1st.

Sophia and Emma :) :)

p.s. We decided to let people enter by commenting on instagram too.  Link to our instagram account was in a previous post.  Our user name is hfxgirltoo.  Just to be clear, you can only enter once, not once here and once on instagram.

Happy Birthday to us :)

Hi Everybody,
Emma and I had our birthday on January 4th.  We had a great birthday even though we only got a few presents.  Our mom was kind of holidayed out, we didn't care as we got lots of solstice gifts not very long ago.

Here we are about to open our presents.

Playmobil blind bags:) Sophia got a hairdresser with pink hair and Emma got a bride.

Winx club minifigs:  Darcy and Stormy, recurring villains of the show.  We're still on the hunt for the third witch mini fig: Icy.

No birthday would be complete with out cake :)  We each got our own layer cake, Sophia's is a heart and Emma's is a star.

Blowing out the candles, yes we are now 15.

Tasted as good as it looked :) :)

Asking Lucie if she wanted a piece of cake.

She found it to be delicious too!!!!

That's it for now.
Sophia and Emma

p.s. we are closing in on 100 posts on our blog, still coming up with ideas on how to celebrate that 100th post.  Do you have any suggestions?

New Year's Eve 2013/New Year's Day 2014

Hi Everybody,
I know we're a few days late getting this posted but here goes anyways:)  This post is by 6 of us:) (and 2 mini dolls too:))

Eating homemade sushi for supper, yummy!!!!

Watching the new Wolverine movie on New Year's Eve (movie watching is a traditional activity around here on New Year's Eve:))  Amaya and Yoko liked that most of the movie took place in Japan.

Eating soba noodles at midnight, a Japanese good luck tradition for starting the new year.  In Japan, the calendar new year is a very big holiday even though they also follow the chinese horoscope years.

This photo is from New Year's Day and we're eating mochi in soup called Ozoni, another traditional food for good luck.  The mochi is either square or round depending on what part of Japan you are from.

GOTY minis, 2013 and 2014.  Our guardian's pics of mini Isabelle were featured on Doll Diairies as she was one of the first people to get mini Isabelle (she got her in December!!!!!).

Here are 2 bonus pictures:

Happy 15th birthday today to Sophia and Emma, more pics of that coming soon:)

Atlantic Canada like a lot of the eastern US was slammed with a blizzard, lots of snow and very cold weather yesterday.  Here is Lucie not enjoying the snow and wanting to come back inside NOW.

That's it for now.
Happy New Year Everybody

Sophia, Emma, Amaya, Yoko, Lucie and McKenna (and mini Saege and Isabelle) :)

p.s. Here is a contest that you can enter to win some exclusive items that were given out at AG stores for Isabelle's debut:
http://dolldiaries.com/giveaway-isabelles-debut-souvenir-t-shirt/comment-page-3/#comment-242443