I'm out of here...

I'm still sick but I'm on the tail end of it and I'm not contagious anymore, at least I don't think so, so I'm taking a break. Yes folks, I'm breaking loose and leaving tonight! I'm going on a short overnighter to Caldwell and I'm so excited. Mom and I are going to shop like we've never shopped before. Well maybe a not that hard since I'm wheezing and waddling and it's not the day after Thanksgiving. The fabric, the Target bargains, a real mall, and the craft stores... wait while I wipe up the drool will you- thanks. I should be able to grab enough stuff to keep me busy for the summer- as if 4 2/3 kids wasn't enough ;o).

Speaking of kids- I got a great buy on diapers this morning and thought I would share for those of us with 1 or more still in them. Maybe you've already discovered this but it's new to me. Diapers.com has several different brands of diapers including Huggies and my personal favorite Pampers that you can buy by the humongous case and if you spend $49 they ship them super fast for free. They also have a coupon code for $5.00 off- BRBAX285.

I ended up getting 2 big cases of diapers for Kaci and Kennedy for much cheaper than Wal#Mart (seriously the only store here on the edge of the earth) and they're shipped to my door for free. With gas at $4 a gallon and it takes me $12 just to get to the store the free shipping alone is worth it plus the coupon... I'm in diaper heaven. If Pampers would pass out the coupons every now and then that would be great to!

Searching for fungus

I wanted to post a few pictures today of the crafty things I was doing yesterday. The problem? I got my crafty stuff out and started designing some new labels for myself when Cody came home early to spend the day with us. Not really a problem because I was so glad to finally get to spend some time with my love (stop gagging that's what I affectionately call him) but I didn't get a single crafty thing done not to mention I seem to have caught a weird chest cold thing. My head feels almost fine but my throat and chest are killing me. Oh my voice, I couldn't even talk this morning- NOOOOooooooooooo!

We spent the day yesterday traipsing around the wet soggy woods in the rain looking for fungus. There's fungus among us in these parts (supposedly) but we didn't have any luck. I'm not a mushroom fan and I'm not a "woods" fan either and I was sick so I deserve a nice wife award for yesterday, and a ding dong.
Cody would live in a hollowed out tree and never see another human for the rest of his days if I weren't as adorable as I am. I love the forest and I love the trees and I would never live in a place that doesn't have either, I just don't like to be in it. I just want to glance at it from afar- a clean afar would be best ;o). Like this picture from the comfort of my car. Look at those pretty trees and wispy little rainy clouds. Aren't they pretty from inside a suburban?

The kids had a blast and got muddy and wet and played in what's left of the snow and Cody got his forest fix for now.

So maybe later this week I'll have some cute-sy stuff to blog about because if I can't talk on the phone all day I should be able to get something done. Have a fantastic talk-ative Tuesday!

My boy knows me well.

I get to teach the lesson in RS tomorrow and while cleaning out my church bag looking for my lesson stuff I found a mom questionnaire Jeremy filled out about me on Mother's day. I was surprised at how well he did. He got just about everything right, the boy can hear!

Here it is as he wrote it, punctuation and all with a few of my correction in parenthesis-

The color of my mother's hair is Brown
My mother is 27 years old.
My mother's shoe size is 10.
My mother likes to sew
My mother is happy when I clean
My mother is sad when I fight
The funniest thing I ever saw my mother do was Tickle my sister.
The funniest thing I ever did with my mother was go to Joan's (I remember that trip to and for some reason jumping off the isle ladders and tripping other shoppers just wasn't funny to me).
I like when my mother cares for me.
I like to Clean for my mother.
My mother's favorite food is Meatloaf.
My mother does not like to eat Holemade Mac'n cheese. (hole-made, ya that's about right)
If I could give my mother anything I'd give her a ring.
My mother works at Home.
The first thing my mother does when she wakes up is make breakfest (sure bud, you remember it that way forever okay!)
I love when my mother cookes
I love my mother because She's speacial.
The color my mom likes best is Pink. (red, but oh so close)

I just love him to pieces, don't you just want 2 of him- sorry girls he's mine and I wish I could fill the world with more handsome sensitive little guys like this one but apparently I'm a girl baking factory. When he turns 16 I'll have him fill this out again and see how well he does.

I think I've procrastinated enough for one day and I really have to get back to my lesson before I get to give it tomorrow. I'm working on a really fun project for a contest I hope to enter so I'll show a sneak peek for that next time.

Yum!

It's been rainy and sprinkly almost all week and there's nothing better on a rainy and sprinkly (yes I know sprinkly isn't a word but it's fun to say) day than a good filling soup that's not too heavy. I found a new favorite I thought I would share because it's too good not to. I've had the recipe for at least 2 years and never tried it until last month and I feel bad that I let 2 years slide without ever making it, where have you been all my soup making life? Meet Cheddar Ham Chowder-

It's basically a really good corn chowder with ham and cheese in it. Ham, a cousin of bacon- need I say more? It cooks up really quick, it takes me about 30-45 min. from start to finish. My family loves it but I did make a few changes. I add an extra cup of carrots (frozen sliced), used super sweet white corn, added an extra 1/2 cup water (to cover the extra carrots), decreased the celery because celery is a waste vegetable but I still like a little celery flavor, and I increased the ham because one just has to.

I love this soup with homemade rolls and a side salad. Last night I made corn bread to go with it like the recipe recommends and it's not my favorite side with it, rolls are better. I do have a kick butt corn bread recipe that needs to be shared. It's a sweet corn bread that's really moist (the first day anyway) and we love it with chili. I've used yellow or white corn meal and it's great either way although white makes it a little more moist for some reason.

Here's the link for it- Sweet Corn Bread

This is why I gain 11 pounds in less than a month!

Growth spurt

It seems that my kids aren't the only ones who need new jeans and t-shirts this summer. I seem to have had a huge growth spurt over the last 4 weeks, 11 lbs huge. Who gains 11 lbs in 4 weeks? That's almost 1/2 the the weight I'm supposed to gain total. That puts my weight gain at a whopping 33 lbs with 3 months to go. Not looking pretty my friends. Where's my Jillian or Bob to tell me "put the ding dong down and no one gets hurt".

I might have to return those cute shorts a few posts down and get a larger more "baby got back" size and they haven't even come yet. I feel like the blueberry girl on Willy Wonka. I should know her name but I've always hated that movie. Willy always terrified me, a freaky guy who lures children with chocolate. Am I the only one who thinks there's something wrong with that? What was I talking about... oh my backside.

Well anyway I normally gain at least 45 lbs per pregnancy so this doesn't really shock me but somewhere in the little perfect world in my brain I told myself that I would only gain 25 this time. Mom, stop laughing!

I always hear "it's all baby weight", "you don't look it", "you can lose it later" and other feel better phrases but nothing can make you feel better when you look down and can't see your feet and when you look back all you see is back side and more back side. I need a ding dong.

The rains came down and the flood came up

I swore to myself I wouldn't post about weather because it bores me but I can't help myself today. It was unseasonably cold for May here and then it has been super hot for us the last few days, around the low 90's Sunday so the snow in the mountains has been melting really fast all the sudden.

With the spring run off of snow usually the water in our little creek is flying by as fast as it can in April and the beginning of May and then it tapers down to a nice little creek that the kids can play in no problem by the end of June. Well not this year. The creek has been roaring full of mud for the last few months and the last week or so has been especially bad with the water rising high enough that they've issued a flood warning. Wonderful.

What makes me worry is that that it's also supposed to rain all week. I can see the water getting higher and higher just a few feet away from my living room window. I stepped out this morning and this is me standing on the back step of our back door looking towards the creek. I'm not good at estimating measurements or anything but it's not that far from eeking into my basement- maybe 7 feet but if the water rises another foot or so it'll flood into my yard.

Normally you can see the creek but if you want to reach the water you have to go down the bank a good 4 or 5 ft. When the kids stand on the bank of the creek I can't see them because the little hill of our yard is higher than they are. The trees are normally not in the water. No bank today, it's watering my flowers for me- yikes.

The nose bead and the benefits of puffy middles.

I like to keep the people I know in the know and I can't keep this little story to myself. I probably should keep this one to myself but I also probably shouldn't have had doritos and lime sherbet for lunch either. Oh well...

So Kaci had a bead in her nose, a pretty big one according to Dr. Harrison. Everything went according to protocol for bead removal or at least I think it did since this is our first nostril as an entrance incident. Dr. Harrison had to grab a huge pair of plier looking things to grab the sucker and if that didn't scare Kaci into never doing that again I don't know what will. I get a little grossed out by the entire medical scene and when her nose started to bleed I just about lost it but it did come out. This is where the story gets... well I don't know where it goes but I have to tell.

Dr. Harrison held the bead in her plier thingy and kept trying to hand it to me as is- AS IS. I didn't exactly hold my hand out for it. She asked me if I wanted it and I said "oh, that's okay, we can just chuck it. I'm sure we have plenty more at home." Dr. Harrison is not our usual Dr. and I find her to be way too serious and quite frank and not very nice. Anyway, she takes the bead into the hall to show the receptionist (they must be hard up for entertainment) and comes back into the room asking me if she can add it to her nose trophy case. I told her sure, as long as I didn't have to touch it I didn't care where it went.

She left the room again and then came back with the bead in a test tube in some sort of solution. As she's shaking the bead around she asks me "Do you mind if I keep it? My purse has a beaded key pendant hanging on it and I recently lost a bead. This bead is sort of pretty and it sparkles, I think it will look good on there."

Once again- sure as long as I don't have to touch it. So if you see a female Dr. with a key fob that has one bluish green sparkly bead on it just know that that bead once resided in the nose of a 2 year old. Makes me wonder what else they use that used to be a part of someone else??? No I'm not going there- as fun as I could make this post I'm leaving it alone ;o).

The bead incident of 08' kind of started my weekend off with a bang and it's been all down hill from there. I was supposed to skip town kid-less among other things but things just aren't working out so I did a tiny bit of retail therapy. The upside to my cr@ppy weekend is that my belly has gotten sooooo large I can't see my feet, my lap, my knees (which are starting to resemble pudgy bunny faces) and do you know what that means? Well, I can wear what ever bottoms I want because I can't see what I look like in them of course! So I purchased these-

I'm a little scared of how I'm going to look in them but you know what? I can't see them once they're on so it's all just peachy. For some reason I can't find my summer maternity clothes and with it being in the higher 80's today I'm in desperate need of some warmer weather gear. Desperate enough for pink plaid ;o). So if you see me in public in these beauties don't tell me how I look.

It's a whale, it's a plane...

No, it's super scrapbook mom. I found my hidden scrapbook power yesterday and it felt so good to flex my paper muscles. My goal was to get one page done while the girls watched a movie but I couldn't put my supplies down. I finished one page then I wanted to just get a quick one done for Jeremy before I needed to pick the kids up. Before I knew it we were eating dinner picnic style so I could finish the third page. It takes me forever to do one page so I'm so proud of myself that I got 3 done!

This is a scraplift from Maggie Holmes page in Creating Keepsakes May issue pg. 85. Credit where credit is due ;o).

This page still needs something but for now I'm calling it done. I'm thinking flourishy stuff in the blue circly part- yeah something like that.

I'm tempted to do more today but we really need spoons. It only takes me a few minutes to load the dishwasher though and I can throw a hat on to take Ashlyn to school... maybe I'll catch up to my goal for the year. Watch out evil house cleaning villains- super scrapper's here to save the crafty day!

*ETA- My scrapbook plans for today are shot. I just noticed Kaci crammed a bead up her nose that I can't seem to get dislodged so the afternoon will be spent at the pediatric clinic blue bead fishing. Maybe tomorrow, sigh.

Back in the trenches

My Mother's Day was fantastic. I had breakfast in bed including bacon that was cooked to perfection, and you know how much I love bacon. I would marry it if it had a longer shelf life. The kids brought me cards they made with me drawn as a stick figure. Me- a stick right now, I automatically put those amazing pieces of fine art right next to my bed so I could see them every morning when I wake up and see what the kids think I look like. They are sweet, sweet angels.

Cody volunteered me to speak in church so I had that to worry about but the bacon euphoria helped and it wasn't that bad. I'm just a terrible public speaker. Cody's brother was conducting and gave my intro before I got a chance so I had to wing it, and I'm not a good winger as far as speaking is concerned anyway. I wish I could have brought bacon, then no one would have noticed my stumbling around my talk ;o).

Today is the real mother's day. The day mom has to get back to work and clean up from yesterday. Without mom today my house would look like it did yesterday. My bathroom is nuclear. Seriously it's glowing green and feeling the side effects of a lazy aiming 8 year old boy. What do you do for that? He knows better and he knows how to aim, at least he did when he was 3. Short of getting one of these suckers and lining the walls in stainless steel I don't know what to do...

other than clean my bathroom every day.

Can I rewind and do yesterday again, a do over? I promise to give a better talk.

No, then wish me luck and hope I don't die of toxic fumes (and that's before I get out the cleaning products). My goal is get my entire house clean today- spider webs and all, Ha!

Today

Being pregnant and hardly wearing make-up in public anymore I keep getting asked the age old question "how are you feeling?". We'll folks, let's just say I'm no spring chicken. I'm this chicken... only more tired ;o).

Evolution

Sometimes I get so obsessed with my fabric I forget about all my piles of paper stuff. I did do scrapbook and I really feel the need to get it out and play.

It all started with Jeremy's dinosaur project for school. Never mind his late night finishing my project in my p.j.'s attire. This is his first project that he's had to do at home and he picked a T-Rex to make an environment for. Most of the other kids cheated and bought a dinosaur, well they didn't really cheat but how fun is it to have a home made environment and put a plastic dinosaur on it. It's a pet peeve of mine. If you go to all the work of making something from scratch, do it all. Kind of like making pie filling from scratch and putting it in a pre-made roll out crust- tisk tisk. Anyway, we found a great printable 3-D paper dinosaur. It took me (parents were encouraged to help) a while to cut it out and fold all the million little folds but it started a paper itch. He did great by the way, he said everyone loved it.

Then Ashlyn got to bring treats to school yesterday. Her birthday is the day after school gets out so we planned to bring treats early so she could be included. She wanted princess frog cupcakes and I'm a little cupcaked out so we made frog ice creams. To make up for the fact that I didn't have the time to make 32 little crowns I struck a deal with her and I made little paper matchbooks with frog princess and prince papers and a plastic frog inside. I forgot how fun and easy matchbooks are and then I really wanted to play with paper.

So my paper itch evolved from the Cretaceous period to frogs to this....

anyone want to play with me? Who needs a clean bathroom anyway and dishes- what dishes?

P.S. If you're itchy I highly recommend Quilt Taffy (fabric), Happy n Scrappin -oh, I'm happy, and thanks Hilary for the ice cream frog link .

Grandma's brag book...

I have to post a little recap of Kaci's birthday happenings for the grandma's that didn't get to come. A little "brag book" post if you will.

The cupcakes.

You can't have a birthday without bloated little sheep. Don't they look like they are stuck in a fence or something?
Kaci was just interested in eating the "cream" so she scooped out the faces on two of them and threw the rest away. What can I say, she doesn't like cake... she's her mothers daughter.

She kept making a Popeye face when she was blowing out her candles, so cute. I love this face. This is the look she gives me when she wants to give me a kiss. This face with her repeating over and over again "tiss tiss".

Two of her favorite presents where her new washing machine and her bubble whistle. Apparently the whistle was extremely dirty and needed to go through the tumble cycle about a million times. Do you know how loud a bubble whistle is when it's tumbling- VERY.

All in all she had a great day and after she adjusted to the fact that it was her birthday she kept saying "fo me... burt day!" and "cream".

We just love her!

She's 2!

Today is Kaci's 2nd birthday! My baby, yes I can still call her that for another 3 months, is 2. I would love to say "I can't believe how big she's grown" or "they grow up too fast" but I can't. I enjoyed her- every last second. When she was born I was so sad that Mary was only 21 months at the time and I felt like I hadn't spent enough time with her before Kaci so I vowed that I would enjoy Kaci. I would spend as much time rocking, loving, snuggling her as I could. I still cuddle with her and hold her before she goes to bed and pick her up when she wants to be held. You see- I baby her still and because of that in my mind it's time to let her turn 2. She has been my most cuddly, fussy, picky baby ever but you know what? I wouldn't change a thing and I'm gonna do it again dang it! Look how sweet she is-

She is getting older and it shows everyday. She loves her milk and would rather have a straight milk I.V. than eat food any day. I've been restricting her sippy cups so she would actually eat something. It's been hard on her and she whines and asks me for a cup all day- "Ina cup peddy pease" (I want a cup pretty please). I tell her "not right now, in a minute" and usually she goes off to play and forgets about it. The other day I told her that and she told me in her sweetest I'm talking to a baby voice "tum on mom, you tan do it, tum on". It was so sweet, I don't know if she thought I needed a pep talk or if she thought that would get it for her but she's definitely 2.

Soon she'll be on to bigger and older things like undies, a big girl bed, eating food instead of throwing it, coloring on paper- not wood, and hopefully more hair...

Happy Birthday Kaci!