Middle of March Update

Many a sunrise has came and went since I last blogged.




Here's a little of what we've been up to...

Basketball
Jameson played on the Twin Rivers league and really had a great time

Connor is now one of the taller boys on his team

Snow

yes- that is up to the top of our grill

and more snow


puzzles





a puppy who has lived on the top step most of the winter b/c it was too cold for him to be in the garage


Connor's 12th birthday


(It's pretty cool to see both of my boys passing the sacrament each week.)

A fun date night to the play Little House on the Prairie where Melissa Gilbert played Ma. Bad picture taken from a moving vehicle while it was raining


Jr. High 80's dance


Valentine's Day
chairing Genna's class party at school

stack the sweethearts game

dinner at the Outback and then to the Stake dance with my sweetie

Our family dinner~
The table was set despite all of our cloth napkins and tableclothes being in storage


Fondue after our family dinner

I sure love these kids!!

Card Genna made

Connor's note

Jameson's made these



Put an offer in on this house- sniff, sniff, they wouldn't accept it with the contigency of selling our house


February Decorations

Couponing~

my system

after a shopping trip where I spent about $14


getting a stockpile

We watched Troy's sisters kids a few times and had a ball with Seth- he is such a cutie!

Currently reading: The Mitford series and the Percy Jackson series- on the last book of each of them


March "decorations" I think I am going to paint this table black

I can't tell you how happy these 2 little flowers made me when I discovered them today


that and some blue skies are doing wonders after a long gray winter


Thanks for reading this whole post- and sorry about the lack of big pictures

Book List

I saw this on Amber's blog and thought it would be fun to see how many I've read.

"The Big Read is a National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six."

Here’s what you are supposed to do:
*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Star the books we LOVE.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte*My all time favorite
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling*
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (reading again right now)
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger*
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis*
34. Emma - Jane Austen*
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen*
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini*
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown*
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery*
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility- Jane Austen*
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Today...5.29

Outside My Window... there is a little patch of blue skies. I hope it sticks around. It was a long, stormy night.


I am thinking... of a millions things I need to get done. But a big priority today are my card group cards and some reports I have to get typed up from my Stake Primary visits.

I am thankful for... a solid roof over my head. Like I said, it stormed all night long and I kept thinking of just last weekend when we were camping. We had a good time, despite the thunderstorms, but I am very grateful to be home again.

From the kitchen... I am thinking about a piece of 7 grain bread with some brambleberry jam that I got at the farmer's market yesterday- yum! Add a couple of eggs and it will be the perfect breakfast.

I am wearing..... still in my running clothes- I did 3 miles at the track today while the kids were at swim team.

I am creating..... hopefully a cute appliquéd onesie and burp cloths for Troy's cousin who is having a baby shower tomorrow.

I am going... to get some shelves for my basement. It is in desperate need of some organization. I am hoping to get my food storage in order.

I am reading.... I Capture the Castle. Just barely started it. I finished The Eyre Affair and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral recently.

I am hoping...the baseball fields dry up enough so the boys can play their games this weekend. It's always nice to have a night off from ball, but I don't like all the makeup games.

I am hearing...nothing- ahh!! Even though I love sleeping in and having my kids home for the summer, I think I will get up early all the time because this peace and quiet is heavenly!

Around the house.... things are about to get messy- I am planning on going through garage sale stuff and my storage room.

One of my favorite things... is checking my garden every day. Seeing how things are growing and anticipating a lot of fresh veggies.

A few plans for the rest of the week... baseball games, an auxiliary training meeting with Sister Lant of the General Primary presidency, and maybe even a date with my husband.

I'll try to do some catching up- but it might be next week at the soonest!

Enjoying...

Popcorn that doesn't come from the microwave...


A favorite game that takes me back in time to my Grandma Koski's house...


This peanut butter granola recipe- thanks again, Tammy! It is a big hit.


Homemade tortillas with melted pepper jack cheese...yum!


The fact that spring isn't as far away as it felt earlier this week.


This book, I'm not sure why I never read this growing up- but it reminded me a lot of Anne of Green Gables. I quite liked it!


Mooing at the cows out the back door. Yes, we really do open the door and moo at them.



This kid. My nephew Xander just turned 3 and he totally cracks me. He has got the cutest little personality!


I wanted to get a crayon roll up done for him- but it didn't happen.


A day off tomorrow...I've been subbing a lot and I am thankful that tomorrow I get to stay home and get some things done around here.

Tuesday's Tasks

Ok, after a week or more of channeling all my energy into perusing fitness blogs and websites, I got back into making a few things today.

First, I finished up a couple of scrapbook pages. Not fabulous, but they are done. And I am sorry, I am too lazy to scan my 2 page layouts.


Next, I decided to try out Jessica Seinfeld's brownie recipe- you know the one with spinach and carrots in it. I made these before Genna got home. They are supposed to cool completely before you eat them, otherwise you can taste the spinach. Wanna know how they rated? 2 not so goods and 3 yes, make them agains. My boys were the ones who didn't like the taste of them. They are not super sweet, although they are extremely moist. I had a small taste and thought they were pretty good. I decided I will try and make them again, after we do some serious sugar weaning around here.




Then, don't fall over with shock, but I made something with one of my vintage pillowcases. It's a reusable grocery bag made from this awesome tutorial! I have been trying really hard at my local store, to request paper instead of the plastic, but I need to make quite a few more, before I could handle a trip to Walmart. Here is another tutorial. I really liked her produce bags too.



And lastly, while perusing more of Deceptively Delicious, I found her meatball soup recipe. It is similar to this one I'd bookmarked to try someday.


It was a big hit with everyone, well, except Genna. She didn't love it, but she ate it all without making a trip into the bathroom to toss what she didn't like into the trash. It cracks me up when she picks up her plate and heads down the hall. Of course, I don't let her get very far and she still has to eat her food, but I think it's kind of funny that she doesn't think I'll notice.

Anyway, the more I've looked at this book, the more I like it. Not because I think I need to hide vegetables from my kids, but because it has so many ideas for encorporating more nutrients than some of the other recipes I would normally make. My kids are actually pretty good vegetable eaters, but it never hurts to figure out a way to get more veggies in them!


Hope you all had a great day!