Ramblings

I'm in the mood for a project.  The only problem is that I don't have one.  Starting one on my list involves going out shopping - something I just don't have the time or energy for.   If you have some ideas - preferably something which doesn't involve a trip to a hardware store or craft store, let me know.

In other news...

It is "mid-winter break" right now...whatever that means - so there's no school for some of my kids, and lighter school for the rest.  It's a nice thing.  Yesterday I was not home.  I was busy running my older kids to and fro.  Today I am home and they have friends over.  Tomorrow I will be back to running kids to and fro.  It's crunch time for Odyssey, so everyone's having extra, extra-long practices.  Oh joy!

Making our Valentine's Day dessert

We are introducing Kenna and Natalie to the best Disney movie ever - Beauty and the Beast.  They have been fascinated with Disney princesses lately (or any princess) and kept asking about the dark-haired beauty in their princess book.  Shock!  Can they really not have seen that movie?  Alas, when we switched from VHS to DVD, not every movie in our collection made the leap.  So I went and rented favorites that we have not seen since Hannah and Brynne were young.  It's been fun.

Familial love and support

We are watching Psych with Brynne, Logan, and Hannah in our spare time.  Which means that in the past several weeks we've made it through exactly TWO twenty-minute episodes.  We have that much free time.

I am reading all the Betsy-Tacy books to the kids.  We are loving them.  Betsy just started high school.  It's been so fun.  I usually read after dinner while the kids are clearing the table and we squeeze in as many chapters as we have time for that night.  Even Kenna likes to sit in and listen.  In fact, one night as I tucked her into bed, she said, "Mom, you are not going to read that Tacy book tonight without me, are you?"  And I had to promise that I wouldn't.  They have such great illustrations, so she sits by me and waits for those pages to come up.

Josh brought home roses for me today.  So sweet.  I married a good man.

Natalie is getting toilet trained still.  She's got it down pat about 80% daytime and about 30% nighttime.  I haven't ventured to actually leave her diaper off at night, but she can take a nap without an accident, which is a great first step.  She's been acting so much older.  I can't believe she'll be three soon.

I asked Natalie to smile.  She said, "I am".  This is what I got.

On Fridays I like to take the kids to the Botanical Garden south of town if the weather is bearable.  It was lovely this past week, so we went even though we only had an hour.  In our last storm a tree fell and smashed a gazebo where they have weddings in the summer.  We watched the man dealing with the tree (chainsaw chuck) and then Kenna wanted to know what he was doing with all that wood.  I showed her the nearby bark on the ground and explained that he was going to turn that huge tree into a huge pile of bark (I guess).  For the rest of the walk she pointed out the bark that "that man is making more of ".  I had never noticed before just how MUCH bark they use as ground-cover there.  But Kenna helped me see.

Shannon inspired me to break out of a cooking rut yesterday.  She was making some tasty food for her family and I thought, "I should make tasty food for my family".  I've been having such a hard time because my dinner prep time is much more rushed than it used to be.  I've been relying on the crockpot a lot, which is fine, but that tends to be mostly soups and stews.  Anyway, if you have any good recipes that are not over-the-top expensive, I'd like to try something new.  Preferably something that you've actually cooked and can say, " I know for a fact that this is tasty because I've eaten it".  Yeah.  That'd be nice.

Brynne's new fashion look - the blue beanie

Found a blog with Easter ideas.  It bothers me a bit that Easter is sort of the second cousin to Christmas in our lives.  I mean, I don't want it to be commercialized to the depth that Christmas is (although it's definitely getting there), but I don't concentrate on leading into Easter the same way that I do Christmas, and I want to change that.   Luckily, the brilliant Jocelyn of "We Talk of Christ, We Rejoice in Christ" has done the blog searching for me.  Love this girl's blog.  She posts good stuff.   Do you have any favorite Easter traditions?  Maybe other than the empty tomb cookies?  I love food traditions but I need to have fewer desserty ones and more healthy ones.  ;-)

Brynne, Hannah, and I are persevering through our running program.  We are on week seven of nine (that is so awesome - who else knows who "seven of nine" is? - star trek reference), which is running for 25 minutes straight.  The hard thing for me is that my knee gets aggravated and I need to build up time/distance pretty slowly.  But we have 6 weeks to get through about three weeks of the program, and then we should be ready to take on that 5K in April.  Sometimes we go run around the gym at the Church when it's just too dang cold, wet, or windy at 6am to run around town.  Remember our gym is half-sized.  The smaller half.  So we basically run in really tight circles.  Sometimes to liven things up I take the basketball and dribble from hoop to hoop and make lay-ups.