Loving Life

Before I get to our cookbook challenge, I need to catch you up on all that's been going on over here. I have written about four posts in my head, but haven't had the time to actually get to the computer to do it. We've had some sick kiddos here the past few weeks. The older girls got sick first - Abby missed almost a whole week of school with fever, colds, and ear infections. Once they both started feeling better, Keilah got sick. Her breathing got pretty rough and ragged early on this week. Yesterday we went back to the doctor as she seemed to be having a harder and harder time breathing. Her O2 levels were really low and we were almost admitted to the hospital as she wasn't responding to the treatments they were giving her in the office there. Thankfully they gave her 10 final minutes to see if the treatment would work and they got her O2 levels up to an acceptable range to where they felt okay letting us go home - as long as we brought her back in the morning. After ...

I had a great weekend full of all sorts of fun things.  Spent yesterday at my parents house once we got home from church.  We celebrated Father's Day there along with my Grandpa's 89th birthday.  I didn't get a picture of the birthday boy, but I did get a picture of my ever adorable grandma along with my absolutely gorgeous sister.  Table ping pong is back!  We upgraded at the end of last year from using books as paddles to having official ping pong paddles.  However this year, only one paddle can be found.  David lets Ana have that while he uses a book.  Abby decided to help out with a bigger paddle and tried to use the white board to help.  They all thought it was pretty hilarious.  David ran a 5K race on Friday.  He did better than he did in his last one.  He ran the whole way without any walking.  He was happy with himself and even happier to find out he won his age group (not too many 9-13 year olds wan...

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...

I had a lovely day yesterday.  School was finished quickly in the morning and then after lunch, Aaron's folks took the kids up to the Children's Museum for the day.  What a treat for all!  The kids had a blast hanging out there with Grandma & Grandpa while I got to have a blissful afternoon all by myself.  I didn't do anything too spectacular.  Mainly just hung around home getting things done and making supper.  One thing I did allow myself to do was to watch TV while folding the mountain of laundry.  I don't watch TV much at all because usually I'd rather be doing something else than sitting down all day long.  I especially don't watch it during the daytime hours as the moment the TV gets turned on, all of my children seem to have this magnetic pull towards it and must stand there with half-glazed eyes as they inhale all that's being fed to them from the TV.  It's much easier to keep the TV off than to police what they watch.  The m...

Hmm... I haven't posted for awhile.  Sorry.  Things got super busy and I just haven't had the time.  Hopefully this week will be a little slower - which means more posts.  Or if I procastinate a lot, then I post more.  : )  Aaron's folks have been in town since Thursday, so we've been having lots of fun with extra grandpa/grandma time.  They came with the kids and me to a field trip to Des Moines on Friday.  We went to the Science Museum.  It was a lot of fun with lots of different activites.  They have a special Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit that we went to see.  All I can say was that man was an absolute genius!  Truly amazing ideas and observations well before his peers.  Wow.  I could have stood around and looked at everything there at great length.  However, a 4 year old and a 32 year old find different things fascinating, so we had to move on at times faster than I preferred and linger in places where I'd rathe...

We travelled out to Indiana this past weekend.  Aaron's side of the family all got together for Christmas.  We stayed at a bed and breakfast type place - a little more than that, but more comfortable than a hotel.  It was a fun time.  The cousins all enjoyed hanging out together again and everyone got along quite well for the most part.  I guess that's what happens when you grow up.  : )  I took along my camera and gave it to Aaron to take pictures since I have the bad habit of toting it around but never taking any pictures.  (This blog has definitely been helpful to my picture taking issues.)  We had presents for the kids that they got to open up on Saturday morning.  Here are pictures of my three beautiful children.  Excuse the red eyes on Abby - I'm too lazy to edit at the moment. David likes to decorate himself with all the discarded Christmas trimmings. I think I look kind of nerdy here, but I thought I'd include it here ...

Yesterday was a full day.  We spent the morning on a field trip.  We visited a nearby museum that featured a display called "Springs, Sprockets, & Pulleys".  It was so cool.  The artist, Steve Gerberich, takes old discarded stuff and repurposes it all into art.  He then attaches motors that that drive a little pulley system he has rigged up to make all his things move.  It's kind of like a giant I-Spy game as you see how he's made various things.  Here is Abby looking at a band playing music.  My pictures really do not do it justice at all.  Way better in real life. Here's another partial display.  The kids really liked it and had fun seeing how everything worked.  It was actually quite interactive art.  I'm glad we went.  After the museum, we had one final lunch out with Grandma before taking her to the airport - it feels like I've made that trip a little too often this past week.  Here's our final hugs good-by...

Here are a few pictures I took while we were home before and after our trip.  These are activities from the advent box .  The first day was a tea party with Grandma.  Since it was lunch time, we went all out with a high tea, complete with little sandwiches.  It was fun.  The kids enjoyed themselves greatly at their tea party. Yesterday, we made easy "gingerbread" houses with graham crackers.  I got this idea from another homeschooling mom/friend of mine.  She did this a couple of years ago with our homeschooling group and my kids LOVED it!  So, here are the engineers busy at work constructing the home of their dreams. And once the house is built, comes the fun part!  Decorating!  They spent several hours on this project, very happy and content as they built and decorated their houses.  Ana's finished product: David's "hotel" complete with a rooftop garden: Grandma helped with the design and Abby did all the decorating work he...

Did you miss me?  I had a wonderful time in Texas this past weekend.  It was busy, but almost all fun!  Here are some brief highlights of the good and bad. The Bad: Feeling Sick on Thursday Travel - I had been feeling vaguely yucky several days prior to travelling.  I felt very yucky all day Thursday travelling.  I made sure I had a puke bag close by on all airplanes - thankfully, I never needed them, but I was worried a couple of times I would.  I did have to stop at all airports before and after flights to visit the bathroom.  Blech.  I did not eat much at all that day.  But I felt mostly back to normal by Friday. Snoring Man - last leg of the airplane journey last night.  Snoring Man fell asleep immediately upon sitting down in his seat.  Our plane was delayed for about 20 minutes.  Snoring Man snored very loudly - without any airplane noise to cover up his very loud snorts and snores.  It was irritating....

Yeah!  I got my picture issue resolved!  So here are some random pictures of my life the last week or two.  Abby has grown out of her shoes, so we went shoe shopping last week.  Despite my desires to stay strong against commercial hype, I have such a weak spot for Abby and her princess stuff.  Buying into the whole commericialism of various products has always irritated me and I've never done it (possibly a reason why I wasn't considered super cool in school - not that I wanted to be super cool, I could care less if I had all the stuff), until now.  So Abby saw these shoes and immediately fell in love with them.  I decided to indulge her shoe love after seeing the look of infatuation on her face with them.  Only once I got them home, did I realize mistake number two.  They light up.  Can I just say now how much I despise light up shoes?  This fact made these shoes all the more glorious in Abby's sight.  I must admit that s...

So here I sit, blogging, when I need to be doing 30,000 other things.  I had glorious hopes to have my house all shiny clean by the time I picked up my mom-in-law from the airport tonight.  Instead, I have shiny clean spots in my house.  For example, my microwave is gleaming inside and out.  My fridge got a good cleaning too inside, should you ever want to look inside of it.  I put up a new shower curtain to replace the highly torn up, rust covered old one.  Other random things got cleaned.  I guess I wasn't dealing with big picture this week - just little projects that have irritated me for the past several months.  I would try to download some pictures to show you, but I'm still having issues with that and don't have the time to figure it out.  Maybe later.  I was grocery shopping at Aldi's yesterday and saw some Thanksgiving pies deeply discounted there.  Deeply discounted as in 25 CENTS EACH.  So I bought three.  I k...