VBS week

This week is VBS week at the local church here on the island. The kids know a bunch of the other kids there so we decided to take them. They are having a blast. Today was 'water fun day'. They played out in a sprinkler and slip -n- slide even though it was a bit chilly and overcast. We'll be back there for the rest of the week so I'm a bit behind in my blog reading (and laundry). Maybe the weekend will be slower paced, right now I feel a bit like road runner.

Recipe Swap

Gayle has come up with a neat idea...a recipe swap! I love reading recipes and gathering new ideas so I'm visiting all your blogs!!

Here is my contribution for the week.

(It might be best to pair this with a salad.) I like it because it's easy, and the recipe is easy to remember. It's called:

Pound, Pound and a bottle.

The ingredients:

• a pound of hamburger
• a pound of Velveeta
• a bottle of green taco sauce (I like the small La Victoria one)

The directions:

Brown the hamburger; drain.
Cube the velveeta and add to meat in pan, when it starts to melt add the taco sauce.
Stir well and serve with lots of chips for dipping (I prefer Doritos or corn tortilla chips).

It's surprisingly filling. Not health food but if it's occasionally who cares, right? If you make it I guarantee your kids will LOVE you! :)

Da, da dada, da da dada,

Anyone remember that movie 'Untamed Heart' with Marisa Tomei? There's this scene where the song is playing, "Da, da dada, da da dada, da da dada da da da-da..." remember??


I've had that song stuck in my head for days now and I just thought I'd share. I'm nice like that.

Things are picking up and getting busy for the next couple of days. Sometimes this is nice and sometimes it's...uh...stressful? I'm praying that it all just turns out fun. Today we are off with some friends to spend the day at the beach. Then tomorrow we get to spend the day out again. We leave mid morning to cross the ferry and try to navigate downtown Seattle to find parking by where my Dh works. Then all of us get to go up in the big tall skyscraper building to get to go see where he works. We've never been before so this actually sounds interesting to us! They are celebrating all the new babies for the people in his office. So, not only are we bringing 7 kids into a quiet office, but they are going to be feeding them cake and ice cream too. Yeah, sounds really relaxing. Oh, and don't tell anyone but it's my birthday tomorrow too. :)

My baby - a video edition

I haven't posted new photos of this guy for a little while. So, I thought I'd give you all a small video glimpse of the cutie I get to snuggle everyday. (Please try to ignore the silly commentary of his big sister)

A couple weeks ago I snapped the following photo. One of these feet belong to my two year old and one belongs to my four year old. Can you guess which is which?

My Weekend

I had a good weekend.

Today is Monday but, I wish I could go back and start at Friday again.
It's not that we did anything super spectacular it was just pleasant.

We had family over for a BBQ on Saturday and had a very nice time. Then Sunday's church service was refreshing. The message really hit home with me and I love it when that happens! After church we got to go to my friends house and see her new baby boy! (and their new pool, my kids LOVED that part :) )


Oh, and do you remember the Safeway deal I posted about last week? Well, I went again on Sunday because their ad this week had hot dogs for sale. (We tend to eat a lot of hot dogs around here) I had 2 coupons for free peanuts if you bought 3 Oscar Meyer products too, so here's what I bought:

25 packs of Oscar Meyer hot dogs $1 each
2 jars of Planters dry roasted peanuts

I gave them my $20 coupon from last week and the peanut coupons and paid...

$5.00!! And I got another $20 coupon to go again.

I walked out smiling. :)

What I did today (so far)

We've moved twice this past year and each time I realize that we have lots of stuff. Stuff that I'm not sure why we keep and stuff I just haven't had the time or energy to go through. Well, a couple weeks ago I decided to go through the boxes in our spare room. I got pretty far, weeded out a bunch, made piles of yard sale items, give away items, and trash. Unfortunately something came up (like "mom are you ever going to feed us?") and the project was left like this:

A HORRIBLE ugly shameful mess!!

Today I made up my mind that I better get it cleaned up. (We have company coming Saturday, always a good motivator!)

In about a 1/2 hour it looked like this...


A couple more minutes and...aaah, that's better!

With all these little kiddos around, something else we have a lot of are shoes. I hadn't come up with a clever way to keep them organized so they all ended up in a bin

then when anyone wanted to find their's it required searching and mostly, dumping out the bin.
A new plan was desperately needed.
I came across another blog that led me to the IKEA store online. I browsed a bit and then just for fun searched to see if there was one near us. I was excited to find there was!! So we checked it out. Now, if you've never been there (like I hadn't) I must warn you the place is massive. Very cool, but you must allot yourself more than the 30 minutes that I had.
Okay back to my shoe problem...at IKEA I found:

for $6.99!!

After I came home I transformed this messy closet


Into a better organized space for the shoes!

I labeled each cubbie with the kids names. Now they know where to put their shoes and they aren't digging through everyone else's to find them. :)

I feel pretty productive today. Although, now everyone knows I'm messy and disorganized, hmmm, well at least I'm working on it right??

Safeway deal

Yesterday was my big grocery shopping day for the month. (I shop BIG once then semi-big later on) It's always a bit crazy, as all the kids come with me and we have to cross the ferry so it just becomes a whole day ordeal. I found out that Safeway was having another one of their promotion deals where if you buy 25 of the selected items you get $20 off your next purchase. This can be rolled into 25 more items to get $20 more off...on and on until the sale ends (July 29th)


So I just thought I'd try it out.

I bought:

4 bottles Sierra mist
1 bag Chex mix
2 Brownie mixes
1 bag Cheerio snack mix
1 tub Frosting
2 Jolly time popcorn
3 Ragu past sauces
4 boxes pop tarts
2 Peter pan peanut butters
1 6 pack Sprite soda
4 Snickers marathon energy bars

I chose my items based on the coupons I found.
I paid 38.18
and got a $20 coupon for next time. :)

If you include the $20 coupon, then I got all those 25 items for 18.18 (if you're really into math that's an average of $0.72 each!)

If you have a Safeway nearby I'd recommend you give it a try.
Go here for more great deals people have found!

I'm going to pick up a paper today to see this week's ad and start my plan for round two, hopefully it will be healthier!

(Just in case this left you wondering, no that isn't all I bought. We went to Costco next for the real bulk of my shopping.)

Happy 4th Birthday Sweetie

Yesterday my sweet little girl turned 4!

We got up and went to church in the morning and were planning to come home to just have a relaxed day. Instead we decided to stay in Seattle after church and check out a local park. We'd heard that this one had a wading pool. So we parked and started walking in. We passed a sign that said pool so we followed it. We walked down this path, walked, walked more (1 mile maybe?) and came to a pool. A full size public swimming pool. Not a wading pool. Now we got to walk some more, yippee ;) The park kinda makes a big giant loop and we came down on the slow sloping side. Going back meant walking ALL the way back or almost straight up a zip-zagging path with stairs.

We were pushing a stroller.

Five of the kids were able to walk up. I had the baby in the sling and carried the 1 year old on my shoulders while my Dh got to carry the stroller and all it's contents on his back. It was pleasant :P
But, we made it and eventually found the wading pool. Being exhausted from walking just made it all the more fun to find water.

Next time we know which way to go and where to park that's much closer!

All in all the day according to my oldest daughter, "was a success!"

Happy Birthday Jessica, We sure do love you!

And if you are really bored you can see where we walked here

We basically walked from the lower parking lot at the bottom all around the outside to the wading pool at the top and back. Fun stuff let me tell ya! :)

See, I am still a work in progress!!

***I think I may need to make a retraction to my previous post on margarine.***

Yesterday I ran out of the yucky margarine (let's just call it Parkay) and a few other things so I went to the store. Well, here on this island you don't have much of a choice of stores. There's Thriftway and well, Thriftway, that's all. So I go over by the butter and see 4.99 for one box. Hmmm. Then there's the margarine....1.19. Humph! I just can't bring myself to spend more when the cheaper option is there. I bought more margarine (different brand though). Just call me crazy.

To test said margarine I made the same recipe of muffins (that burnt last go round). I opened the oven expecting horrible results only to find, perfectly golden yummy muffins!

Maybe I was wrong.

I'm okay with that, I'll just stay away from the yucky brand.

See, now I can have my yummy baked goods and cheap grocery bill.

Today's a good day :)

Oh and as an afterthought I decided to look up the whole marg. vs. butter myths and facts.

I found this website and found the following excerpt to be interesting.

i) "Margarine is one molecule away from being plastic"
– may be true, but so what!

Many chemical compounds are closely related without them being identical
or having the same effects.

Take ethanol and methanol, which are chemically closely related. Most people happily drink ethanol in wine, beers and spirits, whereas if they imbibed the closely related chemical compound methanol, they would go blind.

Reading list

I have a daughter who loves to read and I am very happy about this. I also have a son who is a budding reader. So whenever we are at thrift stores or garage sales I keep my eye out for books. Every once in awhile though I find one that I'm not happy with. The hard part though is that I don't have the time to read all of the books before my kids do. This is where I try to glean information from friends about what books their kids are reading. I've gotten a bunch of great suggestions! Anyway, this past week I picked up a copy of Bridge to Teribithia. I remember reading this when I was a fifth grader and my husband and I watched the movie when it came out. It seemed like a good pick, but I was still a bit unsure. I decided to read it first just to be confident in my decision. After about 30 pages and two curse words later I've decided they won't be reading it. Maybe I'll re-evaluate it again later, probably not though. How about you? Have you found any absolute MUST reads? Or have you compiled a list of ones to avoid??

My scrambled thoughts for the day

I've been thinking about family a lot lately. Not my immediate family (Dh, and kids) but more like sisters, parents, Aunts, Uncles, you get the idea.
Also about what it means to be a part of the body of Christ.

I struggle with where to draw lines.

If you have unbelieving family, how much (if any) interaction do you have? What if they even profess Christ but their lives just don't back that up?

I wonder if excluding some members is really the right thing. Do I leave them out of my life because they treat me bad and drag up lots of junk? Or do I put up with the junk and hope that my life will somehow show them Christ? That's what they need. I think I just need to keep on praying because I love them and miss them.

God is powerful and amazing.

One word meme

Gayle over at Life With My Crew had this meme going this week and it looked kinda fun. I have lots of stuff I'm trying to accomplish today so this quick post is just up my alley ;)

Here goes:

1. Where is your cell phone? pocket

2. Your significant other? handsome

3. Your hair? straight

4. Your mother? distant

5. Your father? same

6. Your favorite thing? laughter

7. Your dream last night? vanished

8. Your favorite drink? pop

9. Your dream/goal? living

10. The room you’re in? bedroom

11. Your church? upbeat

12. Your fear? spiders

13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? here

14. Where were you last night? home

15. What you’re not? skinny :)

16. Muffins? yummy

17. One of your wish list items? safety

18. Where you grew up? northwest

19. The last thing you did? nurse

20. What are you wearing? sandals

21. Your TV? off

22. Your pets? NONE!

23. Your computer? using

24. Your life? super

25. Your mood? productive

26. Missing someone? kinda

27. Your car? maroon

28. Something you’re not wearing? earrings

29. Favorite store? outlet

30. Your summer? sunny

31. Like(love) someone? yep

32. Your favorite color? yellow

33. Last time you laughed? earlier

34. Last time you cried? before

35. Who will repost this? someone?


I agree that this was harder than it looks, not adding other comments to explain my answers was terrible! How about you...want to try? Let me know if you do.....

Elephant Ears

After reading Emily's post about food, I couldn't get elephant ears out of my mind. So I went on a search and found this recipe over at recipezaar (great site by the way!) This afternoon the kids and I worked together and enjoyed our yummy treat! Here are a few photos of the process....

First the dough

Here I am rolling the dough out into balls.

Next, my awesome helper rolled them all flat.

I used my wok and deep fried them

Smothered them in cinnamon sugar
handed them out
And they were super tasty!!!

Watch out Dave Ramsey this one's going to be a best seller!

I was clicking around the internet this morning looking at some sights on being frugal and I came across this clip. I thought it was funny so I just thought I'd share.

I'm a work in progress

I'm going to make a confession, I'm not a great cook. Not even close! I do, however, have lots of mouths to feed around here so I've had to learn. Over the years I've improved but I'm still learning. Yesterday I learned something new. Now lots of you will probably just read this and say 'yep knew that already' but for me it's a new lesson. Early on in my marriage I baked/cooked with margarine because it's cheaper than butter. I know it's supposedly not good for you but I did it anyway. A couple years later I made the switch to butter, real yummy butter! The only difference I noticed was an improvement in taste. With baking I didn't think it really mattered. Well.....this week I bought margarine, again, because it was cheaper. Then I made muffins with my new favorite recipe. Exactly the same process as I've made them every time before, only this time they turned on me. They turned....to the dark side!

Burnt!!! UGH!!

Now I'm a firm believer that butter is better!

(this is where you say 'told ya so')

No binkies for this guy

Introducing our newest thumbsucker.....

I think he's just so cute! (I'm a bit biased though)

He is two months old today. :)