Loving Life

Well, we are emerging from the cloud of sickness in our house.  I starting feeling better by Saturday.  Aaron is the only one left still struggling.  He hasn't come down with it completely, but is definitely not functioning at 100%.  Hopefully he can kick it very soon!  So since I had been sick and was still feeling weak, I got very little done this weekend.  I did get some good naps in, so I guess that counts as getting things done.  As usual, I don't have too many pictures to post.  Here is one of the little snake Ana made with playdough the other day.  I thought it was super cute.  It was even cuter in real life. And here's a gross picture for you.  My swollen middle finger!  I got injured at church yesterday from drumming a little too exuberantly.  : ) I was playing the djembe during the first song at worship and towards the end of the song, I think I broke a blood vessel or something in my finger.  It immediat...

Unfortunately, I have not remained strong.  Despite my best intentions, yesterday I succumbed to the previous five days of being sneezed on, coughed on, snotted on, and layed upon.  It's now my turn to be sick.  :(  On the plus side, though David and Ana are over their sickness and I think Abby might be just about over it too.  I am on day two of the fever.  And sadly, Aaron is starting to feel sick today as well.  He usually doesn't get it, but hopefully he can just have a milder version of feeling a bit yucky and not get the full blown fever with it.  So this whole week of sickness has put some kinks in our weekly plans.  This week, we have cancelled:  a dinner with friends, horn lessons, choir for David, a play date for Ana, a shopping trip for me, the rescheduled dinner with friends, and a roller skating night for homeschoolers.  I had big plans of getting lots of things done today and tomorrow, but I guess it will have to w...

Well, there is still sickness in the house.  It seems to randomly be picking its victims.  Here's the rundown on who had fevers on what day: Saturday & Sunday:  David and Ana Monday:  Abby for the entired day.  David and Ana joined her by 7:30 that night. Tuesday:  Ana & David Wednesday:  Abby & Ana I'm hoping we kick this thing soon!  It's sad to have little ones who don't feel so hot.  We did take Monday and Tuesday off from school.  Today was a low key history day.  We read about Alexander the Great for awhile.  Then switched gears to see what was going on over in the Americas around that time period.  We read about the Nazcas and Olmecs.  Then we did a few art projects.  We first tried making our own Nazca earth drawings.  Here's an aerial view of one.  It's really amazing to think of someone doing this and making them without ever being able to see them.  Since we don't ...

I've had a project that I've wanted to get done since we moved in the house almost 8 years ago.  I finally decided that this past weekend was the weekend to start working on it.  Our stairwell to the upstairs has been needing a little love and attention for awhile now.  It was starting to get worse.  Here is a picture so you can see for yourself. So on Saturday, I tore down the old plaster that was fall apart anyway - it didn't take long and then replaced it with drywall.  I got the tape on as well as the first layer of mud.  Today, I will put on the second coat of mud and possibly the third coat this evening if everything has dried out.  I also want to skim coat the stairwell walls with some mud to even things out over the old plaster.  Probably ideally, I should rip out all that old plaster and completely redo it with drywall.  But it's taken me 8 years to get around to this project that I don't want to push my luck with more.  It sur...

I found this written on the wall of the girls' bedroom last night.  While I don't encourage writing on the walls, I do appreciate the message.  Ana is the author of this note, but she hasn't shown it to me.  I suspecting it's because she knows she shouldn't have done it and doesn't want to risk getting in trouble.  I found it amusing and quite cute.  I think I won't say anything about it for now, unless I see more evidence of do-it-yourself wall decorations.  They like to tape little pictures they draw to the wall and it's kind of a cute way to decorate.  So we'll just keep this little note as part of the room's ambiance for now.  Last night while the Abby and I were sitting on the couch together, Abby asked me why I didn't have pretty glasses.  I asked her what would make my glasses prettier.  She answered, "sparkles" and that it would be prettier if they were pink and purple too.  I whole-heartedly agree with her....

I received a complaint yesterday that after going so many posts without any pictures that when I did finally post some pictures, it was only of my fridge.  So, I took that complaint seriously and in honor of it, I decided to post another picture of my fridge.  This one's for you, Sara.  Notice the shelves teeming with produce?  Makes my heart happy. I could have also taken a picture of the two bags of cutie mandarin oranges I got (though it's already depleted from yesterday), the pile of pairs sitting on my counter, the avocados, bananas and tomatoes.  I'm a happy girl.  Can't wait to eat it all. So I came home from my grocery shopping excursion to a heavenly sight sitting on my stove.  A pot of noodles and chicken.  My friend Kim makes these and since we were having our Bible study group over last night, she brought them over early on her way through town.  If you've never had Kim's homemade noodles before, here's what...

It's time to get some groceries.  Things are getting pretty bare in the fridge.  With the exception of condiments and a container of juice (not shown), I have in my fridge at this moment:  a carton of cottage cheese, a bit of leftover chili, a small bit of applesauce, a container of hummus, a grapefruit, 5 hard boiled eggs, 2 1/2 dozen regular eggs, one apple, one lemon, three peppers, and one beet.  Here's proof: Apparently I didn't judge my produce properly the last time I went grocery shopping two weeks ago.  I usually try to last three weeks in between shopping excursions.  Aaron and I have greatly upped our fresh produce consumption this past month and I am still learning just how much we need to buy.  I will not last another week without fresh fruits and veggies.  I'm even out of things like potatoes and onions too.  Makes cooking a little difficult since we don't eat a whole lot of meat either.  I guess we could eat eggs fo...

So my weekend was awesome.  I started it being unusually social (for me).  I spent nearly 7 hours in the coffee shop with several different people at various points throughout the day.  My cheeks hurt from smiling so much.  I also had an evening out with some long-time friends at their house.  Definitely got my socialness in for the week all on Friday.  On Saturday, I woke and had a quick workout in the morning and then got the kids ready to go to Grandma's house for the day.  Aaron and I were going on a date for most of the day!  We didn't have huge plans for the day.  We mainly drove around Iowa and made a couple of stops here and there.  I did convince Aaron to stop at a coffee shop/soda fountain (yeah, I'm addicted to coffee shops) like place in Oskaloosa that looked promising.  Aaron was skeptical that it might be too girly for him with what he terms "girl-food".  But, there was enough "man-food" there to satisfy him and...

Tomorrow I spend almost my entire morning and part of the afternoon at the coffee shop.  I think I have a problem.  I have an early morning meeting there with some friends.  Then I will run home and pick up the kids to take them to their Friday class.  Abby does not get to go to this session of Friday classes, so we promised her some coffee shop trips in order to help ease some sadness.  So I think she and I will spend some time there mid-morning while the other two are at their Friday classes.  I do have a few other errands to run, so we won't spend the entire time there.  Then I have one more meeting there around lunch time.  So I will be doing my part tomorrow to keep the place in business.  I think I'll have to try out other non-caffeinated beverages though so I don't jitter my day away.  Once I get home from my day at the coffee shop, perhaps I'll have to go for a run or something to break up the sedentary morning.  I...

It seems that I don't feed my children.  Ever.  They eat a meal and within 30 minutes of finishing that meal, they appear near death's door from hunger.  I'm not sure where they put it.  Ana has been especially hungry lately.  I definitely don't know where she is putting the large amounts of food she has been eating.  She must be getting ready for a growth spurt.  I do know that I am back into the phase of despising the words, "I'm hungry.  Can I have a snack?"  I hear them at least 30 times each day.  It seems that my kids would snack all day long if I would let them.  But I try to have times for eating/snacking and times to suffer from starvation/malnourishment (at least that's how they feel).  I do not want them to get into the habit of grazing all day long - it's a habit I've had to break myself from.  It's really easy to do when you are home all day long and spend lots of time in or very near the kitche...

On Friday, the kids were supposed to have their Friday classes, but they were cancelled since not all the snow had been plowed yet from the snow storm.  So we stayed home and decided to have a fun day in school since Friday classes are a highlight for the kids.  We've been reading about the ancient Greeks in history, so we tried our hand at building the Parthenon from gingerbread.  They had a lot of fun doing it (I did too).  But I think they had the most fun playing with the remaining dough and making various creations from that for me to bake.  We ate the Parthenon for dessert that night.  We also tried our hand at "stone carving" after looking at some of the amazing statues the Greeks carved.  We used Ivory bar soap.  It's nice and soft and can be carved with toothpicks and butter knives.  It made the house smell quite clean.  Here they are hard at work. We still have plans to make a Trojan horse at some point. ...

I'll start first with some pictures of outside yesterday.  We shoveled a path up our back steps.  Here is Abby standing in the snow path.  David's comment about all the snow was that it was the most he's ever seen in his life. Ana going down the slide into the snowpile at the bottom. Abby was excited to be so high up in the trees. After this picture, Ana hopped the fence to play on the other side where there was a huge mountain of snow from Casey's parking lot.  The simple joys of life. I realized I don't have any pictures of David outside.  He was in the process of hunting for his glove when I was taking these pictures.  My hand got cold holding the camera (hard to push buttons with mittens on), so I took the camera inside before we played some more. We went down the street to a friend's house.  He shovels his driveway all winter long into a huge pile on the side of his yard.  The kids use this pile to sled down and occasionally snowb...

We got a good snow last night.  We woke up to a fairly large pile of it on the ground.  Since we live in town, we're nice and protected on all sides of us and don't get as much as those out in the country where major drifts can pile up.  But we still got a lot for us.  This is out our back door.  There's a good six inch step to the little deck area from the door, so it had piled up above that as you can see.  Need to shovel those steps! Here's the view out our front door.  Sorry for the poor quality of pictures.  I didn't want to go out and get a nice one.  This was just a quick shot from the front door.  Probably piled up over a foot in areas (I know it doesn't look like it in the pictures).  Our awesome neighbor came out this morning and used his snowblower to clean off our sidewalk and also our entire driveway!  What a great neighbor we have! So what do we do on a snow day?  Why school, of course!  We have no reas...