Thanksgiving Memories

We hosted again. I don't really mind. It is actually mostly fun. I just don't like the clean up. But what was funny about that. We put away the food that would have gone bad and we ALL went on a food coma cleaning strike for a couple of days. I have to admit it was SUPER nice! It is hard for me to look at clutter but I REALLY love spending time with my family. You can never re-do it and the mess with always be there and if you are anything like us. Messes just keep coming back and back and back.

So..... we invited T's family over and a woman from church that wasn't going home for Thanksgiving. It was really fun. T's dad provided the Turkey, homemade mac-n-cheese and greens, J brought a pie (unfortunately didn't turn out though and she may be salty at N for awhile because he made her feel guilty about doing a different dessert other than apple pie) and I made sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, stuffing and homemade rolls. We ended up having some snacky stuff too.

This year J really wanted to get into decorations. This year I didn't get a cloth tablecloth but a plastic one. It was great though! J helped make place cards and wrote names on the cups etc. We had some markers set around the table. Everyone took time during the meal to jot down their blessings! Next year for sure, we will get a cloth one that we can keep using over and over again. That was a fun tradition!

After we were WELL fed but not yet in a turkey induced coma, we played some Wii Lego Rock Band. We have the regular Rock Band and Guitar Hero but my kids haven't really tried it much. They always seemed intimidated by it for some reason. Oh my, my kids LOVE Lego Rock Band now! I like it because of the songs for them and that it has SUPER EASY so they can really practice and get confident with it. I never thought that I would buy a game system but I enjoy the Wii alot. We have our limits and we have games that at least most everyone if not all can be involved it. I like that!

Then we snuggled under our blankets and watched UP. It was a cute movie and then we all hit the hay feeling VERY VERY blessed!

It was a really enjoyable Thanksgiving for sure! :-) Here are some pics of the festivities. N was the photographer of the evening for the most part too! He loved that! ENJOY!!

"The TABLE" (Before)

J getting her game on.

F playing a game of patty-cake with Auntie J.

Just CHILLIN' before they get their GRUB on!

Weird that I always knew that N resembled T's family more. It is obvious here!! :-)

Good ole' POPS!

Here are a couple of photos of the THANKFUL tablecloth.

Enjoying Lego Rock Band!

Kids LOVE Uncle M!

Mesmorized by UP!

TURKEY COMA! ;-) Nuff said.

Giving Thanks!

Now I can rattle off a mean list of what I am grateful for. I can even do a pretty good pretend I feel blessed list sometimes. Seriously though. I feel like I have some disorder of some type. I can feel EXTREMELY blessed and positive one minute and then the next I wonder if we will see the light at the end of the tunnel. I have seen glimpses of it. I know it is there. See.... that is the hopeful part. Sometimes I will act as if I never saw it though. I see people around me and some really close to me abundantly blessed. (FIRST big boo boo) COMPARING myself to others and their lives. As I am a talking in my mind about what so and so has and why is it so hard for us to just have a short break here, this neon sign inside my head goes on and it let's me know HEY YOU!! YES YOU!! Your lights are STILL on, the bank hasn't come to steal away your home yet, there is food in your fridge and the list goes on. You have an AWESOME sister and family that have rallied around us. I have friends that have talked to me and told me that YUP it sucks and feel free to scream and throw a fit all your want. Hey, whatever will make you feel better! And those friends are such blessings as well. It is nice to know that even though I have really worked hard at perfecting the put on the happy face look while saying, "Everything is FINE!" Just fine!! :-), I have some people that I can let my guard down just a tad with.

The one thing that always comes popping into my head when discouragement, doubt, fear, anger and all those OHHHHH so positive emotions arise is the best blessing I recieved this year!!!

Around this time last year I was about to embark on one of the scariest moment of my life! I was going to undergo MAJOR surgery. This had come after several other very hard trials in the last few years. One of which was finding out about the tumor itself. I didn't know if I was going to make it through the surgery alive. No I DO NOT SUFFER FROM ANXIETY!! LOL Paranoia either!! ;-) I had just had had our 4th baby. It was amazing that I was able to make it through childbirth itself. That was a HUGE miracle. But on Dec 10, 2008 I received a blessing from my father along with my sweet dh. It was one of the most amazing blessings I have been given! After they blessed me, I went into the hospital feeling stripped of everything I had(in a good way) and knew that the only thing that I could do was to rely on my faith and that I had been blessed to know that all would be fine. Now one year later, I am typing this post I am MORE than fine. I am freakin' ALIVE! ALIVE I tell you! I am typing this post with a liver that is now mostly all tumor free and I am ALIVE!! Maybe it was always meant to be that I was to live, but I didn't know and I was scared. This is one of the BIGGEST blessings I have recieved in my life other than the gospel of Jesus Christ. I am certainly blessed with a wonderful, loving husband, children, parents, siblings and friends as well!

So....... when I start looking at Polly Perfect, Heather Happy, Rich Rachel..... LOL I need to remember that this is MY life and I can choose how I react to it! I can still have trials and be happy. I can still reach within myself and find the blessings when I can't seem to think of them. They are there! We may not be out of the woods yet financially due to our employment situation and there are still some physical issues but we are STILL being taken care of. We are not without our basic needs. Things are looking UP for T in his new business ventures. I am so happy for this not only temperolly but as a whole. As you can imagine this employment roller coaster has done wonders to the mans ego. Things are going great working for my sister (chuckle chuckle...she has always enjoyed bossing me around!). It is great to be able to homeschool still admist all this. I am learning through this that again, I must REALLY need to learn faith over and over again. I am trying to let go and believe!!! I have said many, many times and I just may say it a million........

The most important things are the things of eternal nature. Everything else is just bonus! LOL

Enjoy one of my favorite songs about feeling blessed click here.

Big Catch All- I gotta get back in the game!

Well after my sob story about how neglected my poor wittle blog. Notice any difference? NOPE! I kept thinking, oh yeah I will post all those past pictures etc. I wanted to have some fun, witty posts to go with the pictures of course. Then I decided that I needed to get off that fairy tale idea. What is my goal with the blog? The MAIN purpose is to share my everyday moments with family, friends but mostly to have a place to document some of the highlights and some of the lowlights (if need be) of our life. Prepare yourself for a bit of photo heavy posts. I will be back with themed posts and fun things here and there. For now, it's all about the documentation baby! Enjoy!

Here we are at the local Sugar Grove Nature Center Fall Festival. I HEART this festival. This is only the 2nd year of us going. It is a must for every year though that we are here. One of my favorite seasons is fall and I love the outdoors and enjoying nature. As you can see it it a place that makes me very happy.,My kids love it too!

At the end of the festival the kids highlight is that they get to make these fun pumpkins. As always they were very creative.

There was a ward temple trip organized already this year but the fabulous primary also organized on this same day an event that the children could participate in too. While we were able to go to the temple, they were able to visit the sites, walk around the temple, hear a lesson of sorts etc. It was fun for us ALL to be there. Although I am not in love with how I look with the cold wind blowing my hair etc, this is a picture I will treasure of my whole family at the temple!

Well this is the infamous "Halloween" picture.

I thought we took more but I guess not. We usually come up with a theme that the kids want to do or the family does together. Since I wanted to spend little to none on Halloween costumes this year, we got creative. N's costume was a Zombie Pizza Delivery Guy. Now usually I stray away from having my kids do anything too goorey. I don't know call me lame but I just don't enjoy that part of halloween. So for many years I have guided my children to pick non-gorey costumes. I told him that really this is as bad as it gets if you are in my house. I think he looked great though and had fun. J's costume came from my sister's pass down halloween costumes. J decided to be a witch. K was not feeling good this week ( I think you can totally tell, look at those eyes! Poor guy!) He decided on being a scarecrow. We did end up spending money on F's costume but it was $2. We found a monkey costume for her. Since one of her many nicknames is Chunky Monkey. The kids saw this at Goodwill and BEGGED me to get it. It was $2 so I couldn't pass it up. We hosted a small gathering on Halloween at our house and had Hot Cocoa and Smores. It was fun. Neither of us dressed up this year either. Oh well, there is next year! I am already coming up with some fun themes. A friend of ours whose wife had quints a couple of years ago dressed up as the 5 little monkeys, the doctor and the momma! I want to do something fun like that. I love a good reason to dress up, have fun and party!


Auntie J had her birthday this last month and while she was here we shot a funny video of F. F LOVES to dance! Watches closely as she is directed to go faster, faster! Too funny! (Or so I think).

Missing....not...I am just in action

My poor neglected pitiful blog! Ohh how I miss you so. Maybe one day there will be a moment that I can care for you and treat you as an owner should. Until then, I will be up to my eyeballs with laundry and general home clean up and food fixin', ohhh and watching the most adorable and plainly the most perfect children (ROFL), homeschooling those adorable children, working for the best boss EVER while teaching her obviously perfect children as well because cumon' we are related ya know! I am also looking into trying to get a part time job on the weekends as well. I go back and forth between making sour lemondade and sweet lemonade out of our situation. This weeks status is: make SWEET lemonade. I tend to be very moody so don't hold me to it. This happy go lucky blog post could self destruct in 5-4-3-2-............................zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Until we meet again, hope all is well with you. When I have a few more hours in the day I plan on uploading some great photos of all the fun things we have been doing. I should even take a picture of myself cleaning. I am sure the mental image is quite embedded into my children's memory bank while trying to sell our house. Ohh well. Sweet Lemonade thought............. " Cleanliness is next to Godliness" Ooo that sounds terrible really. I guess I am not close to God a good portion of the time. But I eventually get there for a brief moment. Then I just sit and watch until I go back to step one again for the 1 millionth time of the day. It is the fact that I get there right. That is what's important.....right. RIGHT!! Lie to me ya'll. But the MOST important thing that I do is be with my family. That trumps it all!

Well, with all this rambling I could have made a good post on our whereabouts and such. Maybe tomorrow? Maybe.............................. don't hold your breath though because you just may pass out!

CYA!

If You Think You Can, You Can! (Yes I am a copy cat and I am proud of it!)

Yes, I am STRAIGHT up pulling a TOTAL copy cat!

The last thing that is actually blog worthy to post is about the harvest of our garden and learning even more about canning.

It is late and I am not feeling creative. What I really want to do is just document the SUCCESS we had with our garden and that we learned how to can.

So without even more aimless and stupid rambling, here is the EXACT post that my sister posted on her blog about our canning adventures! Enjoy!!

If You Think You Can, You Can!
by A.F

My sister and I decided that we wanted to can most of what we grew in our garden. Both of us had watched our mom can, but had never really canned ourselves. (Well, that's not exactly true. My sister did a little water bath canning last year, but neither of us had pressure canned before.) So when our mom was out here last May, we asked our mom to buy us canning supplies for early birthday presents. (My birthday is in August, and my sister's is in September.) So she did.

Here is our lovely new pressure canner.

And then we grew stuff - tomatoes and green beans mostly. We had decided to plant roma tomatoes so that we could do tomato sauce. Well, as you might recall, our tomato situation was mixed. We planted one row of 12 plants in May, but we didn't have many cages, so we lost quite a bit to rot from being on the ground. But we still harvested about 500 tomatoes. In late June, we planted another 10 tomato plants. And then we proceeded to have the coolest summer ever. So we have only harvested a few tomatoes off the second batch, and who knows how many we will get before the frost. We used this squeeze/de-seed/de-skin contraption (It is a Back To Basics Food Strainer. It is AWESOME!) and put them in gallon bags, and then we stored them in our awesome friends' freezer. (Thanks Joy!)

We ended up with about 16 bags of tomato stuff, but it wasn't sauce yet. Because you have to boil the tomatoes and reduce them by 1/2 before canning it. It was a little disheartening to see half of our hard work just evaporating away . . . .

After boiling it down, we put it in quart jars and then put it in the pressure canner. We thought it would be complicated, but it really was easy to use. Each of us ended up with 6 jars. We may end up with a few more if the second batch of tomatoes ever turns red.

Some of our tomato sauce before we put it in the pressure canner

Then the green beans. We planted the beans early on, like back in the middle/end of May. Along with Peas. And they never really grew. So we tilled again, and tried the beans again. The second batch of green beans grew much better. I don't know how many green beans we've picked. We did a hot pack of the green beans, and then pressure canned them for 25 minutes. We have canned 14 jars (7 jars each) green and should have at least 6 more. So each of us will end up with 10 quarts.

Our green beans

It doesn't sound like we harvested much, and part of that is the boiling down that you have to do for tomato sauce, and part of it is that we are dividing the jars between our two families.

But the important thing about this year is not how much we are canning. It is that we are learning how to can.

Homeschooling Adventures and then some!

We are in the 3rd week of homeschooling and my new "job" helping homeschooling all the kiddos and watch the littles (F and F). It is still an adjustment to be all peppy and ready that early in the morning I have to admit. I know mock all you want. I am NOT a morning person. Even though I am doing it, I still don't like being social in the mornings. I function really good mid morning. Maybe by doing this I will become more of a morning person? This is how our day goes:

6:45 am-7am Wake up
6:45-7am Shower and get ready
7am-7:50am Get all kids up, fed and ready. Get J out the door to catch the bus to go to K
8:00am-8:15am try and get all things packed and ready to head out the door
8:30-8:45am Arrive at my sisters house
9:00-9:20 Homeschoolers read classic literature and preschoolers do reading time too.


(I am also feeding F and F during this time)
9:20 Devotional and prayer for homeschoolers.
9:15 Preschoolers do journal and then snack. By 9:30 or so, preschoolers are downstairs with A (my sister).
9:30- 10:30 Story of the World (History) This past week, even though we are talking about Mummies next week. They REALLY wanted to make themselves mummies. Gotta love homeschooling for that! Since we didn't have enough TP for everyone someone was chosen to be the mummy. K was the lucky mummy! They had a great time! So far we have done many projects including building a model of the nile, writing hieroglyphics on clay, making up our own hieroglyphics, coloring things relating to Nomads etc. We will be discussing Mummies and Pyramids this next week. I have several projects planned for this unit as well. We hope to even go up to the children's museum in Indianapolis for their Egypt display and activities.



10:30 Put F (boy) down for nap
10:30-11:00am Spelling
11:00-11:30am Grammer or Story writing
11:30 Feed F (girl) lunch
11:30-11:45am Lunch for homeschoolers and preschoolers
11:45am Preschoolers and homeschoolers do recess and P.E
12:oopm Preschoolers leave
12:30 Homeschoolers go do: Math,


Science, Botany, Music and Art with A
12:30-2:30 I take care of F and F (the toddlers) while A guides the homeschoolers.
Usually during this time F (boy) wakes up and is fed lunch while F (girl) goes down for a nap
3pm Go home to pick up J off the bus, chill out and make dinner prep

Phew! Makes me tired looking at it but it is a good tired! I think everyone is really having fun. A (my sister) hasn't fired me yet either! Yipee! In ALL the things that are goind on in our life, this is a blessing in many ways!!

When I get the camera back, I will post the other pictures as well. I am really hoping to document our journey. Enjoy!

When we asked for a break.....this isn't exactly what we had in mind!

A few weeks ago, (I know I am behind....give me a break why don't you....oh sorry about the pun again! LOL) N was riding his bike outside with his siblings. N just learned how to ride his bike finally after many years of wondering if he would. We didn't want to really push him but always tried to do our best to encourage. Finally his brother K, learned in one day and that set the tone for him I guess. Whatever works I say!! Well, N was riding and then he fell off his bike. He fell hard and then the bike hit him. That is when N's leg broke. J came running in telling us N was hurt. T ran outside and called to me telling me he was really hurt and couldn't move. Ok, that is NOT what a mother wants to hear EVER! I ran as fast as I could. T was putting N in the car and said he was off to the ER. Never have I been this worried....ok I was alittle stressed when J had her surgery but I was just worried. That night for some reason, I was just panicky! I looked at his leg and knew right then it wasn't going to be good! And then I went off and said something really silly too. I told him to not look down. WHAT?! Did I really just say that out loud to a son that was also panicking and hurting! OH MY! T was right. I needed to stay home. Otherwise, maybe they would have had to give me something to help me breathe! LOL Still to this day I don't know what my deal was. Not that I don't care but I try and stay calm in those situations and if I need to freak out, I go somewhere else or I wait until later. So......yup it was broke. He broke his tibia and will be in a cast for 12 weeks. 8 weeks for one and 4 on a walking cast. Really this happened at a good time. After summer was over and before winter. See.....there is always something to help you stay positive hugh! Now fast forward to today. Tomorrow he will have to be put under while the dr. readjusts the bone and manipulates it. He didn't like the way it was healing and wanted to do something now than have to do something bigger later. Tomorrow he will have a whole other cast on. I have been very proud of this boy. He is usually not one to do things that are hard physically...it is just the way he is. This has forced him to do more. I can't carry him and this will give him better endurance and become stronger. Again..... a blessing. I think!

Here he is at the hospital before the splint, with the first splint and then the real cast.









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