Bed (and bad habits) rituals...

When I asked my girls this morning to make their bed ... this is what I find after they leave:

One side is made ... the other isn't.  My children sometimes are nice & thoughtful to each other -- like one MAY make the ENTIRE bed for the other, but usually not.

Take this next picture... instead of putting her clothes away, Maddie dresses her rabbit in the shirt she should've folded and put away.  Daisy DOES have clothes ... Maddie just usually resorts to putting all her clean clothes back in the dirty clothes hamper to be washed... AGAIN.  (I have told them multiple times that I will throw said clean clothes away if I find them in the dirty hamper -- I will start following up on that soon).  If Maddie does clean the room, I can always count on her putting clean clothes in the dirty hamper.  Every.single.time.

Now for the person who sleeps on this side of the bed.... this has always been a mystery to me.  Katie goes to bed with socks on.  She wakes up always with one sock on, one sock off.  Always the same foot.  The other sock is always at the end of the bed.  ALWAYS!!  Here in this picture there are five pairs of socks.  Usually when I do laundry and I find the girls are missing socks, I will change the sheets and there are a good number of socks to be found at the end of the bed.

Can you just scream with me here???  ::AUGHHHHHHHH::

What I've been doing.....

Last week was a busy week for me!!  Mike went out of town to go visit his parents in Missouri.  So I was a single parent for 5 days ...  and managed to get a lot done! 

On Saturday I made about 80 of these babies .....

Saturday I played the role of "awesome mom" ==  Katie & Maddie had friends over that afternoon, while I scrambled around making a Texas sheet cake for our church's Christmas party that afternoon (completely forgot to make something until about 1 1/2 hours before we were supposed to leave).  Katie was part of "Santa's Workshop" in which all the children in our church "shopped" and had their gifts wrapped for their parents & siblings.  All of the gifts were made possible by donations from people in our ward.  (used items, some new, etc).  So, Katie helped little ones shop & wrap presents!  Unfortunately, I get the big horrible "Mom wasn't thinking" award that night.  I didn't get her a plate of food -- and by the time she was done serving, only turkey was left for her to eat.  I felt so bad.  :( 

Then one day last week my friend Mandi popped into town for a quick visit -- and I was able to love & smooch on this baby girl for a few hours!!  I love this Roxie girl!

Isn't she just the cutest thing ever?

Saving cookie dough one bite at a time!

I made a recipe the other day that makes a TON of cookies (like 8 dozen!).  I didn't want to bake all of them, and wanted to freeze the rest.  When I tried to roll it in a log shape one year, this particular cookie dough just crumbled everywhere when I tried to defrost it.

This year I decided to scoop individual balls of cookie dough, and place them in a mini muffin pan to keep them separate so they wouldn't freeze together.

It works!!  Now I have individual balls of frozen cookie dough that I can just pull out whenever I want to bake a few cookies and not eat 3 dozen in a day!

just playing around with my camera....

I wanted to play around w/ my camera one morning to see if I could get that same blurry look of lights, etc....

My friend Liza gave the family these beautifully wrapped gifts here.

If you look closely, she put letters cut out from Cricut spelling out our names!  Brilliant!

I increased my aperature here == and look!  I have hexagon shapes for my lights!

and this is back at a low numbered aperature...

Making a village....

Every first Sunday of the month, a group of families get together and have dinner after church.  The first Sunday in December all the families were treated to make this amazing village.  My dear friend Katie (who adopted my girls for the past year when I worked) worked hard to pull all this together, and let me tell you -- all the kids & moms enjoyed it!

I'm so grateful for friends who take the time to do this for my kids.  The last time I bought a gingerbread house kit, my kids were LITTLE.  (We were in the first house we bought, and we moved when Maddie was 2 -- that's how little!).  I gave up after 30 minutes, and Mike came in and saved the day (and the house).  So, you can tell I'm grateful for friends who love this kind of stuff and who invite us to join them. :)

Here is our creation afterwards.  (I will blog about the actual event when I get the pictures off of my other camera..)

Maddie 'n the Nutcracker

At Maddie's school, the 4th and 5th graders reenacted the Nutcracker -- complete with songs they sang, dances they made up, and everyone was in charge of their own costumes.

It was quite a neat thing to see and watch!  She was a Chinese Dancer.  She came home w/ a picture of what the ideal Chinese dancer was to look like, and I laughed.  Yeah... no.

After viewing all my pictures, I had to laugh at all the red & twinkling eyes!  Now we know what it means when they say "she had a twinkle in her eye!"

We have a basketball player!!

At Katie's school, she is in Athletics -- which means she has to play two after school sports a year as well as taking gym classes and working on those sports during school.  She did volleyball.... and last year she found out that even though she is fast at running, she isn't as fast as some of these road runners at school -- so this year she opted for basketball as her second sport.

She's never played basketball in her life.
Her coach picked her to be point guard.  :)  However, she found out that she loves the left wing.  Why are these basketball terms changing?  It used to be guard, forward, center!
Here are some very fuzzy pictures of her playing basketball.  I have a crappy zoom lens apparently that doesn't do squat for me.  Time to possibly save up for a $650 lens?  I dunno....

This girl was on her like peanut butter on white bread!  In fact, this said girl pushed quite a few point guards -- some in the face!  I didn't think that was allowed... but since they changed the names in BBall, maybe they changed the rules as well?!

Altogether, I thought Katie did EXTREMELY well for having played her first game!  She needs to get a little more aggressive and actually attempt to steal the ball.  She was quite the gracious lady on the court when she played her quarter.  (there are four quarters... 19 girls .... 5 girls play at a time, so they all only get one quarter to play).

Building a cabin... part 7

While we were on vacation over Thanksgiving week, Mike managed to finish a few things on the cabin. 

The bathroom is about 80% completed!  Sheetrock went up, texture was added, and he painted!  Add a sink, and we have water to wash our hands in rather than in the bathtub!!

Mike and my dad also put up siding on the outside of the cabin.  I can't remember if we did cedar or pine .... but whatever we used, there is a rough side to the wood, and Mike placed that on the outside, so it gave the cabin more of a "cabiny" feel.

Few months ago, Mike dug up two pine trees and planted them on our property.  One died... and the other seems to be alive.  Wahoo!

It's ALIIIIIIVVVVEEEE!!!  (Frankenstein voice, of course)

This is Walter... he hung out with us all week on this box.

This is Walterina... we realized we had two walking sticks at the same time, but she hung out on the outside wall of our cabin.

The Thanksgiving Finale post

Better finish up w/ Thanksgiving vacation...

We made an entire Thanksgiving dinner in our cabin!!  Cheated a bit, we did ... but we did it!  I bought a boneless turkey breast from Sam's Club, my mom make mashed potatoes & a cranberry salad ahead of time -- and at the cabin we made green bean casserole, cranberry (relish?  jelly?), and burnt rolls....  pecan pie & pumpkin pie were dessert....

Earlier that day on T-day, my parents drove the girls & I out to where they went to college (and met).  The college is literally right down the road from our cabin, maybe about 15 minutes away?  I had been there several times, and many of my close friends went to college here as well.

My parents stayed in these type of housing while on campus ... they called it "Booth City", and they are TINY!!

On Friday, it was the anniversary of my grandpa's death, so we placed an order at the wonderful hamburger restaurant for a peanut butter pie.  My grandpa made a mean peanut butter pie!  It was delicious, and even my dad commented on how similar it was!  So, our first bite we toasted to Grandpa.

Yummm....

Mike had a huge stack of wood to burn, but we had a fire ban in place.  It was removed the day before (but it rained like crazy for a few days...), so he wasted maybe 10 gallons of gas trying to get a fire started.  (OK, maybe not that much, but it was a lot).  Finally, my mom managed to keep one of the fires going, and we had FIRE!!  we decided to keep her in the tribe after all -- she was a great fire girl.