Lovely Evening

 We had wonderful weekend celebrating Spencer's birthday.  We finished off last night with a family party with cake and presents.  First we opened presents outside because it was the most gorgeous evening. 

 Then we sent Spencer and his cousins on a treasure hunt around the house and yard.  After gathering clues they put them all together to figure out the last clue. 

 The first letter of each clue led them to the treasure in Spencer's closet.

His own motor scooter, no more fighting over the one we have!

And of course ending your birthday with a wad of cash is always a good thing.  Thank you grandparents!!

Eleven

Painting Happiness

 I love the aqua blue in my living and dining rooms.  It is so calming and bright and happy.  I still need to add some more touches to the room, but I feel good about what is happening so far.  I forgot how good it feels to do a little renovating.  Refreshing.  This painting has been inspiring my color choices.  Love. 

Easter Boys

 Love this picture of Spencer!

 Nathan was so happy hunting for eggs.

 Matthew seems to do everything in costume!

Egg Time

Peter Parker what are you doing?

We had Spring Break this week.  I feel good about how the week went, which is a huge relief.  I feel excited for Summer actually.  But not so excited I won't enjoy 2 more months of kids in school!  Wednesday was a nice lazy, stay at home day.  Late in the afternoon I turned on the tv to browse the channels since all the boys were upstairs.  A rare moment to enjoy a few minutes of a show for me in the middle of the day.  I found one of my favorite movies, Sea Biscuit.  Before even 5 minutes had gone by, three of the boys were downstairs with me.  Whatcha watchin' Mom?  What is this?  Wait, is that Peter Parker?  Yes, that is the actor who plays Peter Parker.  "No Way!!  I've go to go get Spencer he will want to see this!"  That was Sam who is always looking out for Spencer's best interests.  He knows that Spencer loves anything to do with Spiderman.  So, we all watched the movie together.  After awhile, I started getting some funny questions.  Why is Peter Parker riding a horse?  Why does Peter Parker have red hair?  Why is Peter Parker wearing boots?  Where is Mary Jane?  They watched the whole movie with me, but I think they were waiting for Spiderman to make an appearance the whole time! 

Lego Guys

We have a LOT of legos at our house.  As records go, we might be setting one here.  Jeremy brought a giant tub of legos into our marriage, and it has grown by leaps and bounds ever since.  He builds amazing lego creations for the boys to play with.  All the boys love them, but Nathan has been a lego enthusiast from the start.  This was a lego house Jer built with beds and all.  Love it!

Blanket House

My sister reminded me today how awesome blanket houses are.  I have fond memories of making these houses and playing in them all day.  I am starting to think that maybe I was not the engineer behind our fantastic houses.  I redeemed myself with cookies!

We will find you snow

We went on an a family outing on Saturday to find snow after morning chores.  Somebody forgot to bring boots for the baby.  He wore his crocs, but that was not going to stop him from stomping around.  The only bummer is that we did not plan enough time for them to play.  They could have lasted hours.  It was a gorgeous day, and reminded me that boys need to be outside to roam free and discover.  It was lovely.

Resolutions??

Well, it is that time of year where everybody is depressed.  You know it's true.  The January blahs.  I always start the year feeling so inspired.  If you could see my thoughts they would scream, "This is going to be THE BEST YEAR EVER!!"  And then 2 weeks into January I am already done with this year.  Well, not done totally, the summer still looks promising.  Anyway, I would like to tell you about two resolutions I am making good on.  First of all I have launched my food blog again, using that term in the loosest kind of way.  Not that I ever really had a food blog.  But, still, it is now gluten free/dairy free, which I'm sure all of my 10 blog readers could care less about.  Oh well.  It was a personal goal, and let's call it good.  If you are interested, I will be posting recipes that fit my son's diet, but some are just regular meals everybody can enjoy.  Enough said.  Wait one more thing, I might stop doing this after about a week.  Let's keep those hopes nice and low where they belong. Also, two weeks ago when I was still shouting about the best year of my life, I bought blue paint for my dining room.  I decided to go blue walls, gold curtains.  Those are much easier to come by, I might even be able to find the sparkly shade I have been dreaming of.  If it turns out, I might post pictures.  Painting is scary.  How are you doing on your resolutions? 

Enjoy

So, I made it to the gym this morning before the Snowmeggedon began.  While there I happened upon a cooking reality show.  Yes, I sometimes watch cooking shows while working out.  I'm sure there are some deeper issues there, but mostly I just like to pick up cooking tips wherever I can get them.  Anyway, I am watching this show and they are throwing a party for somebody.  This somebody is wandering around and getting annoyed why they haven't started serving the food at her fabulous party yet.  Then it happened.  She said something AWESOME.  It went somethuing like this.

Where is the food?  I'm starving!  In fact, now I am just hangry.  You know, like, angry hungry.

What?  Angry hungry?  Yes, I do know.  I have been to the angry hungry place.  My kids go there all the time.  You can actually see the hunger turn angry.  It is not good.  But I just love the idea that she was talking about it.  There you go, as you embark on all your new diets this year, don't get hangry.  It is not pretty.  Well, unless you are on a reality tv show, and then it is still pretty because you have a team to keep you pretty.

Two is Magical

We had such a fun birthday celebration with Nathan last night.  It was so simple, and so lovely.  We had nachos, his favorite.   Everyone got their own bowl of salsa and a mini bottle of sparkling cider.  What a hit! Matthew made him a hat, Jeremy put two red lines on the cake and called it a baseball, and it might have been the best party ever. 

Keep Reading for Resolutions

Hello all!  One last post of 2011.  How was your Christmas?  Mine was hectic, and lovely, and food-filled deliciousness.  I played a killer game of uno with my boys, lovely walks with my Mother-in-law, dates with Jeremy, and I got a Kindle.  I am in love.  I have to eat a little bit of crow because for the past few years I have experienced some bitter feelings about books going digital.  How can you not hold a book?  I wanted a kindle as soon as my local library signed up at the end of November to let you borrow books digitally.  What?  That is crazy!  I don't even have to go to the library?  This is astonishing to me, and I am still giddy about it.  I "borrowed" my first 3 books last night, with several more on hold.  With my kindle I have read 5 books since opening it Christmas morning, along with several samples of books I hope to read in the future.  I am an obsessive reader anyway, but now I might become worse.  Poor children, poor husband.  I did make sure to get dinner on the table last night and keep up with the dishes to give the impression I had been working all day instead of reading.  Today I again did the dishes and cleaned a bathroom.  That should fool them all.  This morning I finished reading Tina Fey's book.  I told myself I wouldn't get it, because I knew it had some questionable language.  Oops.  The sample had me laughing out loud, and I might have accidentally pushed the purchase button at the end.  Oops. Today I am reading a book about the first ladies and the florist that worked at the white house.  Intriguing. 

Now, onto resolutions.  Well, besides maybe not reading so much.  I am happy to say that I accomplished all of my resolutions from last year.  At least I think I did because I can't find where I wrote them down.  But, I am sure I did.  Why wouldn't I?  This year I am excited about some new projects.  I am switching my cooking blog over to a gluten free/dairy free blog.  I want to try and post regularly.  But I'm not sure my heart is in it mostly because I don't like taking pictures of the food I cook.  What a pain.  Because they need to be really good pictures, and I don't have time to cook the food, feed it to my family, and take amazing pictures.  Ok, so scratch that.  That is not a resolution, just a thought.  Next, paint my living room wall.  I have been thinking about this for at least 2 years. I can't pick a color.  I wanted blue, but my sister in law convinced me to try gold. It is really hard to find gold.  I want actual gold, sparkly gold on my walls.  Is that too much to ask?  So, don't count that one either.  I don't know if I have the stamina to find the right gold color this year.  Let's see, eat more vegetables?  Pinterest keeps shouting at me to go on a 60 day juice diet.  That could be interesting.  I don't have a fancy blender.  So, forget that.  I guess I will try again next year.  Good luck to all of you.  See you in 2012!

Card Me

A friend gave this card to me for my birthday.  I love it so much I can't even stand it.  Obviously we are BFFs.  She totally knew how much this would crack me up.  Do you love it?  Wait, don't answer that.  No really, do you love it???

He comes back every year

Samuel the Lamanite always makes an appearance in our nativity scenes.

Holiday Cheer for Me

I bought this for myself today at Target.  Because, well, do you know how much time I spend shopping in the boys and mens departments?  Holy cow, it is unbelievable actually.  I mean really, really.  When I think about it, and how many more years I will spend shopping for these men in my life I just have to run directly to the girls section and throw things in my cart.  There was a sign above this nail polish.  You know how I love a sign attached to my product telling me how to use it, because I don't have time to figure these things out.  This nail polish claimed to dry in 45 seconds.  Sold.  Because that is about all the time I have to get my nails dry before I need to go fold more boys clothes.  Did it work?  Like a miracle!  So dry, so fast.  Go buy yourself some, they had fabulous holiday shades like grey, purple and a lovely deep blue.  Treat yo' self!

December Pics

Northwest Tour

What did we do for Thanksgiving? We got rained on, a lot. I mean, a lot. And it was the BEST week!! We had so much fun on our Northwest Thanksgiving Tour Week. First we headed to Portland, and the boys decided to play outside despite the constant downpour. The boys had fun with their grandparents and fabulous Aunt Stacey. Then we headed to Seattle for Thanksgiving with our friends the J family. They have four girls. We are a perfect match, obviously. They were amazing hosts, and we had so much fun and stayed up way too late. We had one glorious sunny day in Seattle and got to hit the downtown and ride on the ferry. We also made it to the aquarium. This past summer Jeremy and I drove 16 hours to Seattle in a 24 hour period to hit the U2 concert. I decided I really wanted to take my kids to this fantastic city and added it to my bucket list. Cross that off, we did it!! Rain, Schmain, we don't care. Thank you to both cities and households that hosted us, we couldn't have had a better week!

It's Gone

Anybody know anything about crop rotation? I can't wait to see what we get next year. I just hope it's not Wal-mart. Oh, that would be a good post.

The Dipper

Nathan likes to dip his food. He will eat just about anything if there is something to dip it in. I will not own up to how much ketchup this child has consumed.

Peaches

I am still catching up on some old blog posts I meant to do. Sometime during the summer I canned peaches. We took the whole family to the peach orchard for a nice family outing. We hit the Jackpot because the farm had just finished picking, and they said we could go glean whatever was left on the trees or ground. I became a crazy peach lady. Free peaches? I went totally nuts. The boys were done after about 10 minutes, but I could not walk away. I only brought a box or two, and they were falling apart because I overloaded them. I just started filling my shirt and carting them to the car and dumping them in the truck. Jeremy kept trying to get me to leave. Probably because of the whole filling my shirt thing which was pretty embarassing. But how could I? There were these lovely peaches they had left on the trees, but you had to climb pretty far to get one lone peach left there. Jeremy and I were climbing trees and the boys climbed some too. Not safely. It was weird, dangerous dangling, monkeys should only do this, climbing. It was great fun. When I finally got the resolve to leave, I kept making Jeremy stop the car as we drove away. "Wait, I see one more. Stooop!" He would stop(love him!), and I would run over and start grabbing again. Can you believe I hate shopping at Ross? I should love that place after this behavior!