The Adventures of Lilli

Almot Wordless Wednesday....

2012-02-22T20:57:00.002-06:00

Pics from the last week of January/first week of February

All weather bouncing....A mild winter + longer daylight = some playground time before dinner

Football strawberries for Brent's office party = hugely successful and all gone!!
Posing in her UofM jammies.

Bounce U Party: Final Pics

2012-02-21T20:58:00.004-06:00

I've long given up getting cute party pics of Lilli with each of her guests at the end of each party, and even though a big group shot would be fantastic that's a wild and crazy fantasy too. Now I just try to get as many as possible and just go with the flow of what the wild ones want to do. It definitely makes for some great and hilarious pics!

Lilli and her "Finny Finn", with Julia standing in for me. My goodness, she LOVES "Her Finny". He's about a month older than her and moved up to the next class about a month ago and she has been absolutely torn up about it - telling me she is moving up too & that I can pick her up in Gina's room. Every afternoon she sticks her head in their class and Finn comes over and gives her a big hug. This week she actually did get to start transitioning up (they spend a few hours each day to get the feel of the new room) and on the first day she said she had a great day because "my Finny is in there and mom, I love him so much". Enough said. At least the feeling is mutual. On their last vacation a couple of days in he told his mom he was ready to come home because he wanted to see Lilli. Ha! Juli and I with our girls. One day we'll get a gorgeous frame-able picture of the four of us together but that day was not this day. Or at Ella's party. And hopefully on that day I will figure out a better pair of shoes to wear that don't make me look so much shorter.
Lilli and her other best friend Katherine. The two of them are pretty much inseparable as well, and a lot of times she likes to pretend Katherine is her sister. I don't even remember what was going on in this picture but Lilli was absolutely cracking me up and I think it's a darling pic of real life with these girls!Another real life with Lilli - she LOVES boys. She has some major crushes on some older boys at church and Dylan is one of them, with Johnathon (he couldn't come to the party) being her main crush. So naturally anytime she's in proximity of them she shows out, a lot. Zach's expression is priceless - as in what is wrong with this girl??? The older boys don't seem to mind her chasing them all around - their current game is having her chase them and they run in the boys bathroom. The funny thing is that does not stop her, at all. To her, a bathroom is a bathroom is a bathroom since sometimes I take her and sometimes Brent takes her, and at school they have a shared bathroom they all use at the same time. So they all about die when she just follows them right in there. I'll die the day an adult boy is in there actually using the bathroom.
Lilli and Lydia Kate. She's super sweet to her and just passed down a Disney princess book that she didn't want anymore to Lilli because she knew how much she loves princesses. We also just found a little Valentine stuck in Lilli's pink Bible from Lydia Kate.
Lilli and Elizabeth. This is pretty much when she said no more pictures.
Lilli and Nikhil, both of them wearing down. Nikhil always cracks me up - after a party he will talk to me for at least three days about "remember that party?". Hilarious.
Some of the other pictures were just pretty much terrible and we didn't get pictures with everyone but I think we at least got pics of all 20 kids playing or eating at some point in the party! They wheeled out all our leftovers and presents! She got a haul!!
The party kid got to pick out one thing from the prize trunk - no surprise she picked the big hammer!
After we got home she opened all her presents and got a ton of baby dolls, Barbies, Ariel things, puzzles, art supplies and dress up clothes - just to name a few! I ordered her some Little Mermaid stationery and we still need to get all her thank you's finished!!!

So that's all the birthday party pics from Lilli's big birthday week. I'd say she had a GREAT third birthday!

Bounce U Party: Pizza and Cake

2012-02-21T20:34:00.004-06:00

I helped get the party room set up just the way I had wanted it along with our party pros during the last few minutes of jump time. We put all the goodie baskets on one table and I think it looked so cute:The kids all raced into the party room...
Since she had wanted it to be an Ariel party, and with having it at a place I was a little limited on what I could do. I bought Ariel plates, napkins and blowies to make it Ariel "enough" for Lilli. I really couldn't do (and didn't really need to) do any big decorations or banners since we wouldn't really be enjoying it for long in the party room. The kids LOVED the horns!! No big surprise there. Here's Ella:
Of course Lilli was all about it.
Our cupcakes. I got this nice tower off Amazon. It breaks down flat and is super sturdy. My old cupcake tower was a flimsy little thing and this was WAY better. I made some vanilla cupcakes and some strawberry brownies combos and they were all topped with fresh strawberry icing. I ordered some Ariel toppers off Etsy and also the princess cake wrappers off a different shop on Etsy. They all turned out very cute!

Lilli and Lydia Kate playing with their horns.

Most of the kiddos were eating....but of course she's still blowing her horn!
Brayden and Elizabeth enjoying theirs...
Then it was cupcake time. Nikhil's face in the background just cracks me up. His mom said he gets really excited about fire!!
During the birthday song they turn off the lights and turn on the disco ball so it makes for a neat glow in the room. For even more money your entire jumpy party can be a "glow party"!

Adam and Ella. She didn't get to enjoy any cupcake at Lil's party but she certainly got into the cake at her 1st birthday party last weekend!
Nikhil and Sebastian
Lilli made sure to supervise Elizabeth getting into a sucker from her goodie basket!
We decided not to open presents at her party. That usually ends in total chaos, and she's a very slow opened because she wants to play with each toy and there's never time for that. Particularly at a party local when your time limit is pretty well set before the next party starts in the room.

Next up, final party pics!

Bounce U Party: Jump Room Two

2012-02-20T20:38:00.003-06:00

I missed just a couple of pictures from the first room - Julia and Ella, such a cute pic of the two of them!And Katherine and Ella playing in the bouncey
Earlier when we were talking to our party pros they were asking me some different things about Lilli and I had told them she kept thinking Santa would be there, since the last time we went to a Bounce party Santa was there. They laughed and said they actually did have a Santa costume, and would I like one of the guys to go and put it on. I thought Lilli would love it, of course anytime I feel like she's going to really like something she never does. They had this guy put on the full Santa outfit and he was waiting at the top of the slide in the second room. Here's Lilli seeing him come down the slide - a smile-
She kind of waves at him...
And then just keeps on running. Which is exactly what all the kids did.
And she went back to the popular tee ball area where you hit a ball that's balancing on air. The kids love it and she remembered it from the last party we had been to. All her little school friends had gone back there and there was no amount of coaxing to get her back to Santa.
This is one of those great pics where it looks like she is smiling when in fact she's fussing and trying to wriggle away from me.
Santa kind of walked around a couple of minutes and then went and changed. None of the kids were a bit interested in him, and the next day one of the older boys told me he thought it was "weird" that Santa was there in January. This proves kids are only interested in Santa during the holiday season!
Dylan going down the slide
Several of the kiddo playing teeball - Madisyn, Ella, Lydia Kate, Ethan and Levi
Katherine, Lilli and I going down the slide. Katherine is Lilli's girl BFF. She is so funny and always wants to talk to me in the afternoons, and the two of them will braid my hair and play with all my jewelry. So when Katherine's mom told her they would be able to come to Lilli's party she asked her mom if Lilli's mom would be there because I am a lot of fun. HA! And yes, I am a lot of fun.
Lilli and I sliding with Madisyn. The two of them are both hilarious and t-r-o-u-b-l-e in church. They are two chatty Kathy's. Madisyn's grandma told me that last weekend she was wanting to call Lilli and had a fit because she wouldn't call us. That would have been one hilarious conversation, and probably would have lasted five seconds.
Emma going over the obstacle course.
Levi and Ethan batting
From there we moved into the big party room for pizza and cake!

Bounce U Party: Jump Room One

2012-02-20T20:19:00.003-06:00

At Bounce U, your party goes to one bounce room for a while, with several different bouncey things, and then after 20 or 30 minutes goes to the second bounce room for a while before you go to your party room for pizza and cake.

Lilli going airborne on one of the smaller bounce obstacles.Lilli and her school friend Sebastian running around in one of the bounceys
The birthday girl jumping around....
Elizabeth, Ashlyn, Finn and Sebastian playing ball
Lilli, Brayden, Levi and Finn
Zach and his mom Wendy climbing one of the walls.
And then Zach coming back down the slide
Miranda coming down the slide
Lydia Kate sliding
Ashlyn sliding
Audrey
We hardly saw any of the bigger kids - most of the time they were up in the "Spiderman". This big climby thing Brent almost got stuck in at someone else's party a few months ago. You climb up through all these ropes to get to the top and it's pretty tough. I had wanted to try it but there was no way I was going to let the smaller kids embarrass me and show me up!! I'll just have to wait til the next little kiddo party!
Then it was time to go to the second bounce room!

Weekend Wrap-Up, Recipes, Groceries

2012-02-19T20:43:00.002-06:00

Man, this has been one of those weekends that just FLEW by!!! The best part about being super busy is we never had time to make a mess in the house, which is always a good thing. Of course this kiddo was still going strong both days and absolutely never tires of energy. These couple of pictures are from after church today, running around outside in the "snow". It did snow pretty hard during church and right after, but it was way too warm to stick to anything but the big flakes were very pretty and I'm sure contributed to Lilli's teachers saying "they were all wild this morning". Which I think is code for "I'm glad Sunday is but once a week."She had a blast celebrating both Ella and Brayden's birthdays yesterday. Any time she can celebrate with some icing and running wild with friends is a good, good time. We'll have lots of pics of those to come, eventually.
Groceries - The last two weeks I haven't been quite as good, but still much improved over the good old days. Last week I just needed a lot of things, plus we made a nice Valentines dinner at home with choice cut steaks and so on. Our Valentines menu was probably about $20 in cost, but way cheaper than a steak meal out. My total bill last week was $135 before taxes, so $55 over budget. This week my stuff just seemed to add up, but I didn't get a thing that wasn't on the list. We noticed her juice went up $1 in price, which is annoying considering that's suddenly a 20% increase. We need to check into juice at Costco, I'm just picky about that stuff and will only buy certain brands not made in China. It's ridiculous that juice is even made in China. So my total bill today was right around $99. So, about $24 over from just needing a few extra things today (particularly I was running low on chicken and we only buy organic.) Still not bad considering I used to somehow manage to spend $250 a week and still not see anything work cooking in the pantry, or have a plan. I did do some cleaning of the pantry this week and threw away a seasoning packet that expired in April 2000. That is not a typo. Almost TWELVE years ago this packet of ranch dressing mix expired. Most likely I bought it not long after we got married in 1999, and that thing moved with us to our house in Smyrna, our house here, made it through our major kitchen demo when we cleaned out a lot of stuff and was STILL in the pantry. Gross.

Recipes - Here's some of our recent meals:

We made this steak and fries recipe for Valentines. Super easy and very flavorful. Brent does a great job with cooking the steaks to the correct temp and then we pull them off. Totally the key to a great steak. The fries were good, but I'd rather have a baked potatoes or mashed potatoes with steak. We made those for Lilli and with the seasoning and lemon on it she wouldn't even eat them. We also made this "love potion" drink I had seen on Pinterest and it was just ok. It was pretty and pink and Lilli had a good time with it since an older lady at church had given her a big heart shaped straw, but it was pretty tart and just not something we were crazy about.

We made this baked potato soup on one of the colder nights. It takes awhile to do everything, so not a great weeknight meal but it had good flavors. It's from my fave healthy eating site, so not as good as a restaurant version, but way better for you with the cauliflower snuck in. It was a bit thick and could have used more broth to it. The bacon totally made the dish though!

This Tuscan Pasta dish was a big winner for all of us. It wasn't a really cheap meal to make though, the raviolis are about $6 and the nicer jar of pasta sauce was $3-something, but it tastes restaurant quality and made enough for all of our dinner and lunch the next day, so again much cheaper than eating out. It was also very fast and perfect for a weeknight! This one will def be made again.

We made our Greek Chicken Pitas again this week. It's one of our fave all time recipes. For Lilli we wrap it in a tortilla like a burrito. For us we put the grilled chicken in a whole wheat pita pocket with saffron rice, feta, and a little ranch on top. Delicious!!!

Other than that, we've stuck with our meal plans the last two weeks and had chicken sausage and rice one night, a tortilla soup mix from World Market one day, a Southwest chicken skillet mix from an old pantry seasoning packet I had on hand, Baked Ziti from my 5 ingredient 5:30 cookbook I really like and then other little sandwiches and soups as needed. We're really starting to trim down our pantry backlog of "stuff".

This week looks like:
Chicken Enchilada Crockpot Soup
Jambalaya for Fat Tuesday
Indian Chicken (helps clean out pantry)
Stir Fry Chicken (helps clean out pantry)
Banana Snowmen Pancakes with Fresh Berry Smoothies
Southwest Tuna Bake
And for the Wednesday night meal at church we'll be having "Breakfast with all the trimmings"!!

Time to relax before it's back to work and school tomorrow!

BounceU Party: Getting the Party Started

2012-02-17T21:17:00.003-06:00

I guess I've through enough large parties since Lilli was born to sort of realize my limits as a full time working momma, so the week before her parties really wasn't all that stressful. I had started working on various thing for a couple of weeks before hand and have gotten a lot better at planning it all out and coming up with a game plan to get everything done without being up until 2 am.

Thursday night before her Saturday party we got the cupcakes made and baked.
That night after she went to bed Brent and I got all the goodie baskets laid out and mostly done. I also hand-made some chocolate lollipops - lobsters and sharks, so the night before the party we bagged those and then wrapped the whole thing in cellophane. Pippin was a great help. And by great help I mean generally in the way, and then on Friday night he destroyed one before we had wrapped it so he could eat some of the candy. And a box of stickers.
Feats of strength!
The goodie baskets turned out SO cute. I bought little sand pails at Party City and filled them with all ocean themed (aka Little Mermaid stuff). I made the chocolate lobster and shark lollipops via candy molds, then put in large Goldfish bags (a steal on Amazon), princess candy and stickers, shark gummies and some little sea horse water guns. They were filled with sand colored crinkle paper and then we wrapped them in cellophane and tied with custom tags I ordered on Etsy. They're by far the fave goodie bags we've ever done, and instead of giving cheap and junky toys I think the "stuff" was a lot better!
We got to BounceU about a half hour early, but they seriously take care of everything for you so we just sort of hung out and waited for friends to arrive. We ended up having 20 kiddos.
She and Finn crack me up. He's her best friend and they are the huggiest little pair.
Emma and Ella arrived.
Lilli loves her Emma! Emma is so good with the littles and she always walks Lilli to Children's Church on Sunday morning and then she'll just grab her on Wednesday night and take her off to class.
We had the framed invitation for her friends to sign. We now have all three hanging up on her wall. It's cute because friends are getting old enough to start writing (or trying to write) their name on their own. This is Zach working on his name.
Then some of the others gathered around to sign. There's Finn, Levi, Madisyn, Lydia Kate, Ella, Lilli and Ashlyn.
After they watched a safety video they all lined up to run into the first jumpy party. Birthday girl got to lead the way!
I'll have to probably break this into several posts because there's just so many kids and pictures!

In other news, we've had a big week at work this week - one of our books is the #1 New York Times Bestseller, unseating a title that's been there for over a YEAR! That's huge, huge, huge! The Vow is a true story that Hollywood turned into a movie - changing a ton of facts and taking the major religious theme out of it. Our book tells the true Christian story and it's only been out for one week and has already topped the charts. A massive accomplishment for our company! The couple has been on all kinds of shows this past week - Inside Edition, Today show and so on and it's all been very exciting and fun to be a part of.

We have a BUSY weekend ahead including two different birthday parties tomorrow! We are the partiest people! But Lilli loves it and it certainly keeps us from getting bored and also from getting this house clean.

Lilli's Special Birthday Surprise

2012-02-16T20:42:00.005-06:00

On the day after Lilli's birthday, January 25th, we had a BIG surprise planned for her.

First, she was having her "school" party, where the parents bring in cupcakes for the class afternoon snack and everyone sings to her and makes it her "special day". Her two best friends, Finn and Katherine, had just moved up to the next room and she got to have them back for her party. They were so excited to all be together! She has been missing them so much and has been telling us she's moving up to the next room, too. She actually is starting to transition over next week, and I know she is so ready.She got to help give out the plates and napkins to all her friends. I did buy some Ariel napkins for the party but then just sent leftover plates from last year's Baja party.
Some of the kiddos in her class.
She wore her new Ariel watch to school that day and she was so excited to show it to Katherine. We don't even have the right time set on it, she always says it's 8 o'clock anyway.
They finished up eating their cupcakes and I was pretty happy the kids wolfed down the strawberry brownie cupcakes. Most of them ate every single bite, except Lilli who ate one bite and was done. They finished just in time for me to let in the BIG surprise - Ariel and Rapunzel! This really wasn't something I planned to do, and came together in less than a week's time. Lilli had started mentioning something about Ariel ACTUALLY being at her party, and at first we tried explaining to her that Ariel had to be in the sea and all that, and then I thought why not have her at party? And do it at school for all the kids there to enjoy since I doubt Bounce U would have let us bring in anyone special. This one took a little convincing for me to get Brent's mind around it. He's totally right though - it completely wasn't necessary for her to have a special birthday, but it's just something I wanted to do for her. Who knows if any of us will even be around next year, and as long as we are kind and charitable to others (which we very much are), why not enjoy the fruits of our hard labor?

I hired Party Belles of Nashville, after getting quotes from several local companies. They're all about the same price, but they were so fast to respond, and I ended up getting two princesses for the price of one because they were both available. They do a lot of modeling and singing on the side, and are super talented and professional. Rapunzel is also a former Bob Barker Beauty from Price is Right. They were truly just great and I'd recommend them for anyone to use!

I wish you could have seen her face when they walked in! The buzz was already down the hall - the three year old room has front windows and saw them getting out of the car, which spread into excitement in the 4/5 year old rooms and all the kids were waiting in the door to watch them walk past. They walked into Lilli's room and asked where Lilli the Birthday Girl was and her jaw just DROPPED! She couldn't believe her beloved Ariel was actually there and there to see HER!
They talked to her and the kiddos for a few minutes, she showed them the classroom hamster (every room at her daycare has a pet - everything from fish to hamsters to bunnies to even a BIRD!), and told them about her birthday. At one point she also told them she had been bitten by a shark which is just hilarious. At no point has she ever even been close enough to a shark for that to happen!
Then the group huddled around and the older kids (who wanted to watch) were allowed to come in as well and the princesses performed. Ariel and Rapunzel each did a song, and then asked for a request for Lilli. Since we'd just seen Beauty and the Beast she asked for that song. They are great performers and did a fantastic job. The kids were totally mesmerized.

Then they taught them all a little princess dance where they curtsied and twirled and had a grand old time.
They also led them in the Hokey Pokey and took song requests from them. They all wanted to sing the ABC song. Hilarious!!!! Then they wanted Old McDonald. Oldies but Goodies.
Of course we wanted some good posed pictures!!
The boys wanted to show them all their favorite toys to play with. I was surprised how many of the boys knew who they were!
She got some special one on one time with Ariel. She was just in heaven!! It was so completely worth it.
Some of her classmates. The younger ones are just now two and have such a shorter attention span that they were wondering off. All the older kids were a lot more interested.
We printed this one and framed it on Lilli's wall so she could see herself with her favorite princesses every day!
The awesome thing is that these kids TRULY believed Ariel and Rapunzel were there. Not people in costumes, but TRULY the princesses were there with them. How cute is that???
Sweet hugs for her Ariel.
For some reason she started doing these crazy fish faces as they were leaving. Even though I know she was just being weird, I like to label this as my "I can't believe my mom got two princesses to come and visit me for my birthday!"
She stared and watched them until they had completely pulled away and left. Then she asked me if they were going to be at our house.
Such a special day and experience, and if we can I will totally do it again next year!

Almost Wordless Wednesday

2012-02-15T21:18:00.001-06:00

Everyone in this picture has an interesting sense of around-the-house fashion.But that doesn't mean we aren't awfully cute.

Happy Valentines!!!

2012-02-14T20:48:00.002-06:00

Here's a little sneak peak of Valentines at our house.....Some boy must have broken her heart today. Or she didn't get her way on something. Most likely the latter. Oh, the temper. And the tantrums. Hello 3.
Lilli's Valentines - we saw these on Pinterest and knew it was perfect for our bug loving gal! And it gives the kiddos a little toy!
Isn't she doing great writing her name??? So then to make it super cute I put it in a little bug treat bag with some candy, a whistle, and then tied it all up with ribbon and a little Valentines on the outside so it was easier to read names.
So cute!! Lots of other pics from Valentines to come eventually!

Lilli's Birthday

2012-02-12T13:55:00.006-06:00

On Lilli's actual birthday we both took the day off and took her to Chuck E Cheese to celebrate. Both sets of grandparents drove up for the day and went along to play some Skeeball. I mean, to play with Lilli and celebrate her big day!
It was so nice to get to go during the weekday. It wasn't crowded at all and we pretty much had the place to ourselves. The package we ordered had a ton of tokens, so everyone got to play as many games as they wanted and have a good time.

This is her "don't make me talk to Chuck E" face. Sometimes costumes can mess her up, you never know.
Amongst all of us we ended up with 441 tickets, which was enough to get her most any of the "junk" prizes they have. She wanted cotton candy most of all, so we got that along with a fan (already broken), some sort of sticky lizard (surprisingly not broken or lost yet!) and a couple of pieces of candy and other little toys (all either broken or lost by this point). From their we took her to pick out new fish for her new Ariel fish tank.
Her photo booth pic with Brent's parents.
Her photo booth pic with my parents.
And her photo booth pictures with us. We always try to save a couple of tokens and do that before we leave so we can hang these on her wall. It's really cute to look back and see all the pictures of her at CEC over the years!
She got to open her presents at home. Her new Barbie roller skates from Brent's parents! It's hilarious to watch her try and skate. We've only tried them out indoors so far, I think by the end of the summer she'll be really good on them!A new Ariel ballerina Barbie from my parents!Finally cake time -

After the grandparents left she rode her trike outside for a little while. We have had such a nice and mild winter (until this weekend)!
Here's the new fish - 5 little neon type tetras. Two pink and three are this silver type of neon fish. She named them all after princesses - Ariel, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Belle and Cinderella. It wasn't until Thursday night before one of them died - nearly three weeks which was pretty surprising! Since there were 5 of them she actually hasn't noticed, a big plus of having several.Buzz really pretty much sticks to visiting us on the front porch, but while we were eating dinner on her birthday we noticed him up in the dining room window. I guess he just wanted to wish her a happy birthday!For her birthday dinner I had picked up some special birthday pasta at World Market. It's in the shape of cake and presents. It's much cuter than it is tasty, it's just kind of thick with too much bite to it. But she really thought it was cute and she got to eat on the special birthday plate we have.
After dinner we decorated cupcakes for her school party. She wanted Ariel cupcakes for all of them, so I made the special strawberry brownie cupcakes and buttercream icing. Once I iced them we let her decorate with the Ariel pieces and princess sprinkles. She was very careful with each one and told us which classmate she wanted to have each cupcake.
Lilli had a great third birthday and really enjoyed her special day and party #1 with the grandparents for the day. And she had NO clue what surprises were in store for the following day at party #2 at school!!!!

Birthday Eve

2012-02-10T20:34:00.002-06:00

This week got a lot more interesting when I got really sick in the middle of the morning on Wednesday. A doctor's visit and a lot of medicine later I'm finally starting to feel mostly better. Still I'm glad we don't have much planned for this weekend, just a visit tomorrow morning for Pippin's annual shots.

These pictures are all from January 23rd, Lilli's birthday eve. I had a lot of birthday shirts for her that week, here's the one from that day:Our tradition is always to go out for Mexican the night before her birthday. Thank goodness we quite going to the one we went to the night before she was born, that one was always so filthy with terrible services.
We came home and let her watch Tangled. We'd watched it a long, long time ago and I don't really think she remembered seeing it. That one is really so cute and has helped propel Rapunzel into one of her top princesses.
And then I let her help make her birthday cake. We kept it simple with a Funfetti cake mix box and then I made homemade cream cheese icing for the cake.

After she went to sleep the "birthday fairy" came and decorated her room with all kinds of Little Mermaid balloons and streamers. I was running streamers from one side of her bed to the other and she slept through the whole thing. Since her ceilings are so high the balloons had to be anchored with weights.
Here's a close up of the finished cake. I found Princess sprinkles at Kroger -
The yellow ones are crowns and the blue are Cinderella's slippers. It also came with red apples for Snow White and some pearls for Tianna but I skipped using those and just filled in with regular red and pink sprinkles in the middle.
Time for more rest for me!!

Dressing Up

2012-02-07T20:44:00.004-06:00

These pics are all from the weekend of January 21st and 22nd.

Some friends from church had us over for dinner that Saturday night for Lilli to play with their kiddos. Their little boy is almost 4 and their little girl turned 2 in December, so Lilli plays great with both of them. They ran around the house chasing monsters and playing with flashlights and had a blast. This is the picture Brent got, right before we were leaving and she had found an unattended Ipad. The kid loves technology. Many more fits are had over our phones, Kindle and computer than the TV.On that Sunday she wore her birthday dress. I want Brent to piece together a triptych for me since this will be the last year she can wear it (it's getting tight in the arm holes). Here she is wearing it at age one, two and then three below. One of the biggest changes each year is just the length/thickness of her hair!!
Some friends at church (Ella's family) brought us two HUGE bags of all kinds of dress up clothes and other princess toy hand-me-downs. It was SO sweet of them and Lilli has had a blast playing with everything. (On a side note, this week we are purging and packing her room. Between birthdays and Christmas there is WAY too much junk in there and we are clearing it OUT this week.) Of course she loved the Little Mermaid dress.
The Sleeping Beauty dress is SO nice. There were probably close to a dozen different dresses/costumes in the bags. She'd put each one on them hop down the hall and check herself out in our bathroom mirrors. This bounce ball is easily the favorite gift she's gotten this year!
I think we may try hosting a little princess dress up tea party sometime in the next month or two to enjoy the outfits.
In the Barbie bride dress:
The ballerina tu-tu. This one actually gets worn on top of her clothes a LOT.
That weekend she also got to go out and visit the shut-ins during church as part of the Kids program. They'll take a little group of kids (usually split between boys and girls) and go visit an elderly person and hear a little Bible story or something else they want to share. I heard that on the way over she and Zach were singing the whole time and being hilarious - and as soon as they walked in the two of them wouldn't say a word and the other little girl (Madisyn) had fallen asleep in the car and slept through the whole thing. I bet it was hilarious but made that elderly lady's day.
Of course her big crush Johnathon was probably just happy he didn't have to go the same house she did!

Happy Birthday Madisyn!

2012-02-06T21:07:00.002-06:00

People I work with literally ask me every weekend "so what type of birthday party are you going to this weekend?". I think it's pretty true, we are partying for people ALL the time!

On January 20th (a Friday night) we went to Lilli's friend Madisyn's 3rd birthday. Madisyn is a church friend and she had her party at a big indoor playground at a large church around Madison. It's this indoor climbing/sliding type contraction that's probably about 3 stories tall.Of course Johnathon, Lilli's big crush was there, and she had to chase him around a bit.
Overall though she was a little uncomfortable with the big thing and wanted one of us with her at all times, which really isn't our favorite thing to crawl all around in. Once we thought she had moved on from really needing us around and Brent snuck back out only to have another parent bring her back down to us, bawling. She did have several small friends kind of running around on the bottom to play with though.
There were a TON of kids there. We counted 34. That's a LOT of kids. She sat with Emma and Ella to eat pizza and cake.
I never got a really good picture of Madisyn. She's in the purple shirt, but you really can't see her Rapunzel cake. She and Lilli are good little playmates and get in a **bit** of trouble during church if we're sitting too close together.
Towards the end she was starting to slow down and she and Audrey found a couch and hung out eating ice. What else would a couple of two year olds be doing???
We had a great time at Madisyn's party and Lilli knew all along that her party was the next one after Madisyns'. So much so that she cried the whole way home because she thought we would all be going to her party RIGHT after it.

Beauty and the Beast

2012-02-06T20:57:00.002-06:00

These pics are from mid-January, from around the 14th-20th.

Lilli's class just finished a series of lessons on cooking and they've gotten to make all kinds of things including lunch a couple of times and several fun snacks (yogurt Popsicles, Cinnamon twists, etc). They sampled all kinds of fruit and she's pretty insistent on what color of apples she likes.We took her to see Beauty and the Beast 3D. It came back out for a limited number of weeks at "the big movie" and she was so excited to see it.
This was the last time she'll be free at a movie. Booo! And considering 3D movies are $14.50/adult and $11/kid I doubt we'll be seeing anything 3D for a LONG time.
Of course little Belle did have to come and watch it with us. The hilarious thing was most of the people in there were adults, and there weren't a lot of kids. So she got a lot of attention as a "super fan" with her little Belle.
Brent and I went out on date night. Nothing exciting, we just went out for a normal dinner and did some shopping getting a lot of stuff we needed for Lilli's birthday and just some other errands. It's just nice sometimes to move at a speed faster than preschooler!

Mid January - Snow and Party Prep

2012-02-05T16:00:00.002-06:00

These pics were taken from around January 10-13th. I am slowly catching up!!!!

Lilli loves to go to the Turnip Truck with Brent and grind coffee. We usually have about 4 different types of beans on hand at all times, so they get to go fairly often! She cracks us up with how she recognizes places now. When we pace the TT she says that's the coffee store, when we pass Jeni's she says that's the ice cream place and even last night when we pulled up to IHOP (and we had only been there once, a full month ago) she said it's the pancake restaurant. She is really a smart kid.Playing princesses is one of Pippin's favorite games.
Some of the kiddos in her Wednesday night class. Three other ones are usually in there but I think they had already been picked up. They always get to do fun stuff, one night the teacher brought in a little plastic pool and they got to be "fishers of men" and catch fake fish.
On the twelfth we had our largest and only snow so far. She is SO wanting a big snow and points out that I have snowmen all over the house (including the one above on the porch) but we have not gotten to build a snowman. The cute cupcake hat was a gift from our babysitter Stephanie.
That's all the snow we got.
We had to go out to Nashville West that night and pick up her party invitations and I went to Party City (known to Lilli as "The Ariel store") to get all her party stuff for her school party and her big party. I stocked UP. I was so glad they had all the Ariel stuff in stock in the store so I could mix and match and I got all of the Little Mermaid stuff she had wanted to make both parties "Ariel" parties.
We ate dinner at IHOP. We forget about that place but it is SO good.
And the next morning she was able to leave invitations for all her school friends in their note pockets. For each kid she went through and decided which princess sticker she wanted on the outside of their envelope. It was a process she took incredibly serious!!! All of her best friends got either Jasmine or Ariel, and everyone else ended up with Belle or Sleeping Beauty.
Time to finish getting all our cute Super Bowl foods together for our class party tonight. I don't care who plays or who wins, but more about all the great food and fun! And Lilli only cares about going to Zach and Audrey's house - we told her the events of today (1-church, 2-grocery store, 3-nap, 4-Zach and Audreys) and she came in our room at 6:37 am ready to go the party. I think our numbering system was lost on her! But for now, she's just woken up and I'm watching her read her little pink Bible in bed and I know she's ready to party!

Meal Plans And Groceries

2012-02-04T15:10:00.003-06:00

We've been doing great since Christmas on our meal plans and grocery budgets. I'm looking for some sort of program to keep my recipes more organized and easier to re-use. I'm leaning towards either ZipList or using Pinterest. Or I may stumble on something better than either of those for food planning. Most weeks we've been very close to or right on our $75 budget, even with birthday ingredients to buy. One week I knew I was right on plan (I add everything up as I shop on my IPhone) but it rang up higher than I expected. When we got to the car I noticed the girl had rung up Lil's nighttime Pull-ups twice - that was an extra $9.99. So of course I went right back in and had them pull that off the bill. In the past I probably would have never noticed since I rarely look back over the bill.

Lilli enjoys playing with my old Bananas in Pajamas toys....

Some recent recipes-

I made these cupcakes for Lilli's class and half of her big party. They were SO good and super easy to make. I used strawberry cake mix for the top half, and for her class I made homemade buttercream icing (the best), and for the big party I made my absolute favorite Martha Stewart strawberry icing. There is really not a better icing in the world. Homemade icing makes all the difference. And it only takes about 10 minutes to make.
Lilli has the biggest crush on Johnathon, a 3rd grader at church - also the preacher's son. Anytime he goes up to read scripture, etc we have to pretty much muffle her. It's a pretty fatal attraction.

We've also gotten the crockpot out quite a bit lately -

This crockpot chicken was fantastic. We aren't big fans of olives so we skipped that, and then used a can of diced tomatoes instead of plum since tomatoes aren't in season. It was great - the chicken was so tender it fell right off the bone and everything was still fantastic for lunch leftovers the next day. Lilli likes shredded chicken so it was an easy sell for her if you scraped off the other "stuff".

On the other hand, this crockpot spaghetti sauce did not do it for us. It was a lot of work the night before, and it really just didn't have a lot of flavor. It was ok, but not worth it. We have lots of other homemade spaghetti sauces that taste a lot better.

Painted nails Lilli (above and below).
One Saturday we made these Thai Chicken Flatbreads. Lilli loves to help make pizza, and she made hers with chicken, pepperoni, carrots and just a host of ingredients. All of that doesn't sound tasty to me, but she ended up with a great mix of veggie and healthy chicken protein, so who cares! Brent and I followed the recipe, minus the bean sprouts since that's not something I keep on hand. It was SO good. I'll definitely be making that one again.
Are those pants not the cutest thing ever? You may have to click in to see - but it has an embroidered Pippin on the rear end.
And the real Pippin, hidden under a Memphis pom pom.

Other than that we've had just the normal staple foods - Indian chicken, Turkey Tacos, Birthday Spaghetti dinner, soups, and just the normal non-new dishes. This week's meal plan is for:

Baked Potato Soup
Chicken Enchilada Soup (Crock Pot)
Southwest Chicken Skillet (uses up older pantry ingredients)
Chicken Sausage and Rice
Baked Ziti

We've got a Super Bowl church party tomorrow night and I've got some really cute things I'll share that we're doing for that!

New Years Eve and Day

2012-02-03T21:16:00.002-06:00

The biggest event on New Years Eve was Lilli's first haircut. We've had such a mild winter that afterwards we grilled out some hot dogs and we all sat outside on her little table and ate. She always thinks it's hilarious when we sit at her table or use her plates.We spent the rest of the afternoon outside as well and passed on nap time. Lilli helped Brent trim some trees and hedges.
She swept the porch for me.
And she worked on her artwork. She loves drawing people right now and her people are hilarious. She can also write her name and several other letters (like A, M, F). I think in another month or two she'll really be writing quite a bit.
On New Years Day, after church it was so bright and sunny, and I just love this little dress so much (another great Le Top consignment find for $6!) that we decided to try and get some pics for her birthday party invitation. As always she was in a mood so her deal was she could have a banana if we could have pictures. If you've seen the invitation here are some of the pics we didn't use! I'll have to get Brent to fuzz out our email/phone before I post the final invitation cut from this year.
We were really trying to get good jump pictures of her.

She isn't scared in the least about jumping full out!
For our anniversary dinner we kept it low key and stuck to our traditional Blue Coast Burrito. We all love burritos.
When we got in "Santa" aka Mom and Dad, had dropped off some things from Bruce and Suzy. Some hand me downs from Kacey and some Christmas presents from them. Lilli truly believe Buzz left these things for her since they were all cozied around his bed and he was right in there asleep!
That face just cracks me up!!If you look close you'll notice Buzz curled up in his bed - parallel to Lilli's cheek! She's had a lot of fun with the Barbies and with the vanity.

Dec 30-Donuts and Bowling/Happy Birthday Ella!

2012-02-02T21:02:00.004-06:00

Yes, back to December 30th! We're almost into 2012!!

I was also off that Friday, so when we got up I took Lilli out to breakfast at Krispy Kreme, just us girlies. She was so excited about it all night the night before and I remember she woke me up way too early that morning. As excited as she was she still never eats more than about two bites of donut before "her tummy is full".She always goes for the sprinkles. Always.
That night we were invited to our church friend Ella's 5th birthday party at a local bowling alley. It's been at least 6 or 7 years since Brent and I have bowled (it's just not our thing), so Lilli hadn't bowled yet either. We were really excited to go and watch all the kiddos bowling.I dressed her in all black and her little skull and cross bones skirt. I don't have any bowling attire for her, so I figured that was a good "rough and tumble" look.

The lightest ball was about six pounds, if I remember correctly. She had to carry it with both hands and then sort of shove it down the lane. We had bumpers, so no gutter balls, but our main problem was her velocity was so slow it got stuck a LOT and the guy had to come, walk down the gutters, and push it to the end. Our lane was all the 2-4 year olds, so this happened a LOT.
Her friends Zach (right) and Audrey (left) taking their turns.
She would squat down and watch her ball for about a second and she was already ready to go again before it ever made the end. This type of patience wasn't made for the preschool set, but it was so hilarious to watch them. They'd jump up and down and high five before the ball ever made it anywhere. They were so out of turn whichever kid got a ball first was just going for it.
We all got to enjoy pizza for dinner.
She and Audrey lost interest in actually bowling pretty quickly after the pizza, and mostly just turned into annoying little cheerleaders for Zach!
The birthday girl Ella blowing out the candles on her bowling ball cakes.
Just waiting for the balls to pop back up provides endless minutes of entertainment for the preschool set.
We had an absolutely great and hilarious time at Ella's party and Lilli can now cross bowling off her bucket list. But I think we'll probably wait a while before we sign her up for a bowling league! At least until they make shoes small enough for her size!

Dec 29th - Walmart and Dinner Out!

2012-01-31T21:01:00.004-06:00

The week between Christmas and New Years I worked a couple of days (and mostly focused on getting all my last minute CPE in to keep my CPA license active) and then took off two days and Lilli and I played around town.

Thursday morning she and I didn't really have anything going on so we went to Walmart to play with toys and check out Christmas clearance. I actually got several toys on clearance that I put back for her birthday.It's always SO nice to go places during the week when they aren't as crowded.
We even stopped and picked up Happy Meals for lunch. It doesn't get better than that!
That evening we met Adam, Julia and Ella Kate "Roses" for dinner at Fazolis. Lilli looooves Ella Kate. She thinks every baby we see is Ella Kate.
Getting a good picture of the guys and their girls is just not going to happen, probably ever.
Maybe Brent can do some of his photoshop magic and crop together enough pictures where everyone is looking at least once.
Regardless of failed photo attempts we had a great time catching up with Adam and Julia, and seeing Ella Kate. And we can't wait to see them again - oh wait, we already have. Magically being six weeks behind in blogging gives me all kinds of insight into the future!!

Dec 26th - Opryland Hotel

2012-01-31T20:39:00.004-06:00

Oh yes....we're going WAY back in time. But if I don't keep it chronological it will read all out of time and there's lot of fun things we did in-between Christmas and now (like Lilli's first bowling party!) that I don't want to forget.

Since Christmas was a Sunday, we both had Monday off and decided to go to Opryland Hotel and see the lights, and the Shrek stuff. This year they did a big Dreamworks thing and had Meet n Greets and Character Meal throughout the holidays. Lilli LOVES Shrek (no clue why), so we were hoping she could meet him and have a picture made. Of course Opryland Hotel is all about gouging people for as much money as possible, so for the nominal fee of $50/person we could have had breakfast with the characters. Instead we took pictures of them from above. Since actually meeting any of the characters were out of question (they told us they never walk around, just to and from the $$ high dollar events), we didn't mind taking Lilli on the boat ride since we weren't going to pony up for any of the Dreamworks events. The line was pretty long, but we finally got on the motorized boat.

Of course keeping hands and fingers in the boat is an impossible task. She was also still free so we got a break there! It was fun to hear about all the different plants and how the water was combined from rivers all over the world.

Of course they wanted to sell you a picture of us on the boat. Clearly this was not a picture any of us wanted to buy. Snapping a pic as soon as we get on the boat is really not an opportune time to get a curious preschoolers attention. She was amused by the picture though.
On the flip side, she did want her picture taken with the big horses.
The lights were the same as any other year. I think when you've seen them once, you've kind of seen them a million times.
The Shrek show (the only free thing) was at 2:30 and 3:30, we happened to be heading to a nearby bathroom at 1:30 and saw the line was ALREADY getting long. So we stood in the longest, most disorganized line EVER, smooshed into tons of people, for a full hour. Easily one of our top 20 most miserable experiences ever.
However, it did pay off on us getting some really good seats to see the show. Shrek, the Penguins, Puss in Boots and several other Dreamworks characters were in it.

We were sitting right on the end of the aisle and the MC guy ran up to Lilli and did high-fives and talked to her several times. We got really lucky because there really weren't a lot of kids on the end so she got a lot of his attention.
The show lasted all of twelve minutes. Twelve minutes. Yeah, Brent asked if the hour wait was worth it. Of course not, but Lilli loved it and had a great time. We just won't make this mistake again! I'm sure somewhere someone has it on YouTube and we can just watch it from our computer. Without being elbowed by people who don't speak English for an hour.
So that was our day after Christmas extravaganza!

Goodbye Weekend!

2012-01-29T20:42:00.002-06:00

Another weekend gone too soon!!!We had a great one, of course the first half was full of getting ready for Lilli's party, then the party itself, and then recovering from the party!! Today was another busy one with church, then an older couple had us over for lunch and then a potluck kick-off 2012 party at church tonight, so we have hardly even been home this weekend. The plus side to that is the house hasn't gotten dirty, it just stayed the same level of dirty.
We're looking forward to getting back to normal and catching up on the "usual" stuff around the house this week!

Birthday Week Conclusion!!!

2012-01-28T21:29:00.002-06:00

Lilli has had one fantastic birthday week and now we can all RELAX!!!She had a great time with about 20 of her closest friends today for her Bounce U jumpy birthday party. She LOVES to jump and this is just completely up her alley.
It seemed like all the kids had a great time and a lot of us parents have a lot of fun bouncing too!!
It's so sweet that so many of them can all write their names now and can sign our annual matted invitation themselves. (Each year we've framed her invitation with a big mat and had all the party attendees sign it.) Lilli even wrote her name in her huge stick letters at the top.

Lots and lots more pictures from birthday week and beyond to come. But for now, Brent is making me a cappuccino and the only thing on my to do list is to prop my feet up and watch a little TV!

Birthday Week. It's Better than Shark Week.

2012-01-25T21:39:00.004-06:00

Birthday week is in full swing here in our house! Lilli had a fantastic birthday yesterday. Both sets of her grandparents came and went to Chuck E Cheese with us. It was really nice because there were hardly any kids there during the day so we pretty much had the place to ourselves.We came back to our house and had cake and opened lots of presents.

And today was another big day for her celebrating at school! We brought cupcakes in the afternoon and she got a BIG surprise. TWO surprises, actually!

Her two favorite princesses in all the world came to surprise her and sing to the class! They were absolutely fantastic, and watching her little jaw drop when they came in the room and asked where the birthday girl Lilli was was completely priceless. The whole school was a buzz and a lot of the older kids were watching and came to listen in their classroom as well. Lots and lots more picture and video from these fun days to come.

But for now there's one more HUGE party on Saturday to get ready for! Goodie baskets and all the goodies that will be going in them are in full swing. And on Saturday afternoon you'd better believe I'll be taking a very good nap!

Christmas Day

2012-01-22T15:46:00.003-06:00

Lilli's been waking up a little early (about 7) so Christmas morning we set our alarm a little before then so we wouldn't miss her reaction! I've posted some pictures from Christmas already, but I think all of these pictures with presents are new.

Excited to see all her fun stuff! I think she was still a bit confused as to where all this "stuff" came from. But she did pick right up on that Santa had eaten all the cookies and milk.She and Pippin checking out their loot. Of course he left BOTH of them goodies at the fireplace.

Lilli and her new dog "white Pippin" jumping in the trampoline that now dominates our living room. Can't wait for summer to get that thing outside! But she loves it and it gives her a good place to get rid of some of her energy this winter.
We had to take Buzz his new gifts, too. Santa left him a new bed for the front porch that he absolutely loves!
One of her favorite gifts was this embroidered blanket from Disney store that Brent found on a deal site.
It had to be tried out immediately!
For our main gifts, Brent got me a towel warmer - he knows I like all things at a balmy 80 degrees, and this one works great! I throw my towel and pajamas in there every morning while I shower and they're warm and toasty when I get out. I got Brent a cappuccino/espresso machine. He's become quite the barista since Christmas and it's nice to have no inclination to buy a $4 cappuccino at the coffee houses. We never did it much, but it's still a savings!
For Christmas lunch we skipped the turkey this year. We were all turkeyed out from a million formal dinners during the holiday season, so instead we made chicken fettuccine Alfredo, sauteed green beans and fresh salad. Yummy and delicious!
Christmas day was SO pretty that we spent a lot of the afternoon outside. Lilli rode her new trike all over the neighborhood. She's really into her shadow right now. Sometimes she'll run outside just to see it.

We shot some hoops with her new basketball goal. We've all been enjoying it!
And that was our Christmas day! Nice and low-key, with beautiful weather for playing outside!

Christmas Eve!

2012-01-21T15:37:00.005-06:00

Get ready for a lot of pictures!!! I am trying (although it's never going to happen) to get caught up before the big birthday next week and the upcoming party of the century.

Christmas Eve morning we got up and had a good breakfast - bacon and the little Christmas pancakes using the new pan that Mom got me for Christmas. So cute!! Next year we'll really get a lot of use out of it leading up to Christmas.Lilli had wanted to save our leftover popcorn from seeing the Muppets a few days earlier. We never ate any of it so we tossed it out in the front yard for the birds.
Mostly squirrels ate it, we don't have a lot of birds around this winter. The fuzzy white animal behind Lilli may be one reason we're short on birds.

Christmas Eve treats for old Buzzy.
Later that day we made a Gingerbread House. I'd gotten a kit on clearance the day before at Kroger. We've actually never made one before, it's just never been something I've gotten excited about. Her primary objective was eating icing.

Some decoration did actually make it on the gingerbread house.
Our finished house. Of course the candy gingerbread man was broken before it was ever time to glue him to the house. He didn't stand a chance with Lilli and our stone countertops.
That night we watched Polar Express. It was the first time any of us had seen it and it was such a cute movie. That might be a new Christmas Eve tradition. Since it was a holiday we fired up my big popcorn popper. I have to admit, I love watching it too!
It is a little frightening when they all start popping and flying around!

Oh yes, I even have fancy popcorn boxes. We don't play in this house.
The main tree
After we watched our movie I had ordered (for free) one of the little North Pole Santa things where he tells her to go to bed and says a few things about her. She thought it was hilarious every time Santa said her name and would ask if he was talking about her. Ha!
They even talk about what she has asked Santa for.
We got our cookies ready for Santa, and she also wanted to leave him some of our popcorn.

The annual leaving cookies for Santa pic. This year we even had a stocking for Buzz.
She was not about to let Pippin get any of Santa's goodies. He got pulled by the collar out of the room.
And then she wanted the gate up.
Of course WE wanted our traditional Pippin getting into everything shot, so when she wasn't looking we let him in for a minute.

Lilli's tree. Full of Disney and princesses, and some Star Wars people.
Reading Twas the Night Before Christmas.
And from there it was time for her to go to bed and for Santa's elves to get busy on putting together trampolines and basketball goals and everything else!

Christmas #1

2012-01-20T21:37:00.002-06:00

Yup, still talking about Christmas. Almost a month later. Better late than never, right??

On Friday the 23rd we went down to Hohenwald to celebrate Christmas with our families. The kids were busy playing on all the Ipads, specifically the Charlie Brown Christmas app that day. She's only seen Charlie Brown stuff a couple of times, but for some reason she really likes him.The kids couldn't wait for lunch so they got to eat a little earlier than the rest of us. Christmas and presents is just too much anticipation. Somehow Brent failed to get a picture of his mom's industrial sized Crock Pot appliance.
We did tapas again, or as some people would say "finger foods". Afterwards it was present time and Lilli really racked up. She wanted to open the biggest one of hers first - her new trike! She loves it and rides it all over the house. It is a pretty far walk from her room to the bathroom.

Pretty much everything received the big "wow" face this year!
And then of course the "concentration face". Ken is always the passenger in Barbie's car.
She and Madison had a great time playing Barbies after all the unwrapping was done.
The Bobsy twins (our moms) did it again - coordinating sweater vests.
Grandma and Grandpa had lots of fun putting together the trike. For some reason she can just peddle it so much more easily than her regular upright trike.
We had a great Christmas with the family and all came home with lots of goodies we've been enjoying for the last month!

Talented

2012-01-18T21:20:00.002-06:00

How talented is our little munchkin??Most of the time she draws more "sticks" than her name actually is, but tonight she was one stick short. And her little people pictures just crack me up, but I think she's incredibly talented for her age. She always draws arms, legs, eyes, nose and mouth. The curve above the eyes is hair. Pippin also gets pointy ears and Buzz gets a long tail. She's drawn several of each of us on high quality paper we're going to frame.

Just been a busy week without much time to blog. Ten loads of laundry between Sunday and Monday kept me really busy and Tuesday night Stephanie came over to play with Lilli so Brent and I could have a much needed date night. I can't believe it had been our first night out since October! We're always so busy we don't even seem to notice so it's good for us to schedule something with her once a month. We went out to dinner and got some final stuff bought for the goodie bags (or should I say goodie pails!) for her birthday party next week. I think she's going to have such a cute party with her Little Mermaid theme.

Isn't she lovely?

2012-01-15T21:40:00.002-06:00

This afternoon about 1 o'clock this beauty rolled up in front of our house and pretty much blocked the street off:It took them two and a half hours to set it all up! WoW! We were very glad it had free delivery and installation, because MAN, it would have been tough for the two of us to get all this installed. Especially the stacking of the pieces within the closet. There were three guys doing it and they were all sweaty and one got scraped up somehow. Since they are the top of line steam washer and dryers, both units hook up to the water, and it makes them both a lot heavier.
My junior assistant greatly enjoys helping load the washer and watching everything spin around and around. We actually all enjoy watching! There are so many bells and whistles on these things, and it plays a song when it's done. Those crazy Chinese really know how to make us feel fancy!
I don't think this really captures the extent of laundry that had piled up. It had been 17 days since our last wash. AAAAH. I think I'll have about 10 loads. That should break the girls in nicely.
So far so good! I'm about 5 loads in now and have our top priorities done. They don't match in color because the platinum was a floor model and was 70% off, there was no way we were going to pay an extra $200 for a platinum upgrade for the washer. It is so strange, because now it takes about an hour for a load to wash and only 20 minutes to dry because of the difference in top loading and front loading washers and dryers. I'm also excited about all the energy efficiencies, they should only cost about $11/year to operate! I LOVE all the extra space we have now, and we also installed a broom hanger to the left for my Shark Mop, broom and swiffer, and on the far right a hanger for ironing board and iron.

The broken washer was put on the curb by us last week and someone grabbed it (probably for parts to sell/scrap) and we gave the dryer to Shannon. They're in an apartment that shares one washer and has no dryer (for four apartments). They also have a little three month old baby, so they were very excited to have it (for free!). And we were excited to pass it on to someone who really needs it and can use it. Upgrades all around!

The Muffits

2012-01-14T21:53:00.002-06:00

While I was off for a few days before Christmas I decided to take Lilli to another "big movie". She had really enjoyed The Lion King and Puss in Boots, so I had thought about just us girls going to see a matinee one day while Brent was at work. Earlier in the week I had noticed Happy Feet Two was still playing, so I told her we'd go see that only to notice that morning that it wasn't playing anymore. So we ended up seeing The Muppets remake. I think she was always a little disappointed it wasn't the penguins.It was the first movie of the day, so we had a great parking spot, no lines, and nice seats since it had already been out a little while. She really just wants popcorn so she's easy to please! She had to go to the bathroom twice, and I think the story was a little over her head. I had a bad cold/cough before Christmas so I didn't feel so hot myself. I thought the movie was really pretty cute, and if you ask her she'll tell you she liked it but her summary was that "The Muffits were sad and liked to sing and dance". She does get excited anytime she sees Kermit or one of the Muppets on TV or in the store, I just think some of the cartoon ones appeal to her a little more. And she's so light she doesn't keep the seat down so it was a little uncomfortable for me being the only one with her to keep her from folding up. Ha!
We always find the poster to take her picture with it. It's just a tradition we started with her first "big movie". I don't know if we'll ever do anything with them but it's a must have! She saw the Penguins poster and was still pretty set on seeing them.
Since it was just us girls this was the best I ever got with her and the poster!
Later that afternoon I had her help me make sausage balls for our family Christmas exchange. She loves to help in the kitchen and had a blast squishing it all around.

Our new washer/dryer should FINALLY be delivered tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed! We're down to beach towels for showering and Lilli has practically no normal colored tights left to wear. I don't even want to think about Brent's underwear situation. There's going to be a LOT of laundry going on here tomorrow night!

Pre-Christmas Activities

2012-01-12T21:20:00.002-06:00

The week of Christmas Lilli had lots of present-opening to do!

Stephanie came by to bring Lilli her Christmas presents. We haven't had a sitter since we went to Wicked in October - the holidays are just too busy for us to go out alone, but she's coming over one night next week to play with Lilli. Not only does she spoil Lilli, but she's the ONLY person besides us and Santa who got Pippin anything for Christmas. Poor guy, and he had such a rough year!Everyone was excited about the new Cinderella Barbie! She also got her a book and stuffed dolphin.

And then she pretty much unwrapped all of our gifts to Stephanie for her!
One of my coworker's little girls picked out the Wizard of Oz for Lilli. We watched it that night and she loved it, so we've been playing with lots of WoOz books and toys since then.
One of the days I was off I took her out to Brent's office to visit. It's probably been about a year and a half since she's been there. She was underwhelmed except for the one office where someone had lots of singing Christmas toys. She did make out with several pieces of candy from a few people.
We went out to the pizza buffet for lunch with Brent. More underwhelming.
That night when we went to church Pippin got a little Satan in him and ripped into several presents and ate some fancy soup mix intended for Brent's mom. Powder and noodles were everywhere. He also opened two blankets and a candle.
Unfortunately this was about one day before we were headed to exchange gifts with them so we wrapped up a box of Ramen noodles for her, printed out this picture and told her Pippin was to blame. Maybe now I understand why he didn't end up on anyone else's Christmas list.

Lilli Gift Guide 2012

2012-01-09T20:54:00.004-06:00

Here's a few gift guide ideas for the family members asking about Lilli's birthday:

Fisher Price In Line Skates - They have some of these at school and I think she'd really enjoy getting to roller skate at home, too.

I saw several new Ariel things at the store the other day, she would love all of these - Ariel is hands down her favorite princess and she's asking for a Little Mermaid Party:

Ariel Bath Castle, Ariel Wedding Set, Ariel Bath Doll, Ariel Princess Doll, Ariel and Friends Gift Set, another Ariel bath set. I've seen most of these at Walmart.

Jasmine is her second favorite princess and you hardly ever see anything Jasmine in the store - here's a Barbie, and a little play set. She would love those.

I found her a little set of alphabet cards that show you the lines to trace on top of the letters with a dry erase pen and she absolutely loves it. We play with it every night for a while and she's doing a great job writing the letters. I think she'd really enjoy this set for numbers, or any other set of dry erase learning activity. Any other sticker books, or coloring/art activities would be great. She's really loving the "magic" coloring princess marker set Aunt Becky got her for Christmas at church. She loves drawing and making cards, so any of the art activities like Michaels has are always a lot of fun for her.

She would love this princess storybook, or anything like it.

We now have a ton of Barbies, so she really doesn't need any Barbies. Some of the other accessories would be fine though - clothes for Barbie to wear, the Barbie pool or other accessories. I also got her a storage box for her Barbies so we don't need that anymore. All the shoes and pieces everyone were driving me nuts so we have that under control.

More puzzles - she has already torn through all the 24 piece ones she got for Christmas. I'm guessing she's ready for 36 or 48 piece puzzles now?

"Smelly" markers - I had found her 2 stinky ones on clearance after Halloween and she loves figuring out the smells.

Zoo tickets, ITunes Gift Cards for her apps (she has a ton of apps on our phones she loves to play - she just loves games already. Tonight she wanted to play her Elmo game on our computer while I cooked dinner instead of getting her nightly TV time!, Movie tickets since we take her about once a month now, or other tickets to things around town since we like to be out and about!

Anything from the Disney store online - tons of princess clothes, toys and so on from there and we don't really shop there so the only thing she has is the personalized Ariel blanket. This girl LOVES all her princesses so much! She's constantly telling me we're going to visit Cinderella's castle when she's older. I tend to buy her size 3T in most things now, the pants fit better in a 2T though. She still wears a decent amount of 18-24 month pants, too! But generally for dresses and tops I've moved up to 3T. Size 7 shoe, and size 24M sock.

I think that should just about sum it up and give plenty of options!

Appliance Love

2012-01-08T22:13:00.002-06:00

Good old Buzz Lightyear is still around and loving life on the front porch. The new bed Santa brought him encourages him to sleep in later each morning than anyone else in this house.Saturday morning we went shopping for a new washer and dryer. We decided to go ahead and get a set since the dryer was also 13 years old. We went to Home Depot first and looked at the LGs. The salesman was super nice, but I also wanted to see Samsung so we went to Lowes. I can't stand Best Buy, and Sears is so run down we decided we were really only interested in our two home-away-from-homes, the mega home improvement stores.
Of course we wanted to make sure they had plenty of buttons to keep Lilli entertained.
The salesguy at Lowes was pretty much terrible and didn't engage us much at all (we were about 30 seconds from leaving because no one had even offered to help us when he did wander up), and for the price I was going to go back to HD for the LGs, until I asked if there were any clearance ones and we found this steam dryer - regularly $1300 on markdown with additional discounts for $600! That's a lot cheaper than the regular mid-range dryers, so we got that one and then a fancy steam washer. The pair ended up costing us less than a pair of mid-range Samsung or LGs would have. So, even though we would've rather bought from the nicer guy at HD,Lowes got our business this time.
The washer, which is what we really need, won't be in until Friday so everything is set to be delivered on Saturday. In the meantime, Brent is wishing I had asked his mother to buy him some underwear for Christmas. Lilli on the other hand, could go until early summer and not run out of things to wear. I may get low on socks, but we should be fine. There's just going to be a LOT of laundry to do this weekend. A LOT. My guess would be 8-9 loads. That should help us determine pretty quickly if we like the new set up!

We spent the rest of Saturday dragging the broken washer off to the curb, where someone (prob a junk dealer) gobbled it up. Since we always have mice issues Brent re-did some things in the laundry closet area with drywall and mud and the whole thing got a very nice cleaning. I can't wait until my new stackables arrive for all the new space I will have in that closet for hanging and organizing cleaning materials!
Can you guess what the top and bottom pictures have in common? Each of our pets are featured and in the top one Lilli has her University of Memphis pajamas on and in the bottom one she's smothering Pippin with her University of Memphis pom-pom.

Jinx!

2012-01-06T21:39:00.003-06:00

The best way to jinx your weekend is to mention how nice it is to not really have anything planned. A nice, quiet weekend with some good time to get things reorganized upstairs, tossed out to Goodwill and get my new workout equipment moved up there so I don't have to fold it up and move it around each night.A weekend with no birthday parties, or obligations or major errands. Even the fun things can just be a bit tiring.
Poor Pippin even gets worn out from all the activities of the Christmas season. So tired that he doesn't even notice a roll of paper jammed in his jaw when it's bedtime.
(This is the modern adaptation of the Nativity Scene. No where in the Bible does it say that the stable wasn't in the middle of a busy train station depot. Or that Santa was not also in attendance.)
So imagine our delight when I sent Brent into the laundry room tonight to change out a lightbulb and he comes running back into the kitchen telling me the washer is smoking. Apparently either the belt or motor has died because it is no longer spinning and the thing was filling our laundry room with heavy smoke. Luckily I had sent him in there for the lightbulb problem, and it's also a good thing we were awake - most of the time I have laundry going when we go to bed, it's just the most convenient time to get things done.
Our set is exactly 13 years old this weekend, so we've certainly gotten our moneys worth out of them. And I've been absolutely lusting over a stackable washer/dryer set ever since we moved in this closet deficient house.

So you can cross laundry off my weekend to do list, and add washer repair/shopping instead. Maybe next weekend we will have an empty to-do list.

*Yes, most of these pictures are from before Christmas.

Holiday Recipes

2012-01-06T19:09:00.006-06:00

It's really time to get back on track with everything this year. We managed to still cook a lot over the holidays, but we're really just now getting back in the swing of things. We've spent a lot of time the last week or so organizing upstairs to move my new gym equipment up there, and also reorganizing the attic. Next week we'll get back on our FlyLady zone house cleaning, because that has really helped us get the house more clean and organized before the Holidays.

We also stayed in our Grocery Challenge Budget for most of the holidays. The week before Christmas we spent $113 and the week of $130 (or that might be backwards). Considering all the places we had to take food plus cooking our own meal that's really good. Before we really starting watching it in a normal week we'd spend $150 easily. The week right after Christmas we were back to $74 and last week we were a few dollars over and spent $80 (and saved 20% with coupons - organic chicken was on a good sale so I stocked up a little). Still great improvements! The pictures in with recipes this time are from Brent and I making homemade bread for Lilli's teachers. About $5 in groceries has made us 4 loaves of bread so far, and we can probably make about 2 more with the ingredients I had to buy. We're backing away from grocery store breads - there's way too many unidentifiable things in there.

Recent good dinners:

Rotel Chicken Spaghetti - easy and good!

Grilled Lemon Chicken - simple, healthy delicious!

Marshmallow Fudge - I had to convert the squares into choc chips, I added some nuts and used red and green Christmas Marshmallows to Christmas it up. Very good and it looked so cute in our Christmas goodie boxes!
Always have to make sausage balls for Christmas. I add an egg into the mix and use hot sausage. I still thought they were missing something this year though.

We love cookie dough ice cream, so I thought this recipe for cookie dough bites would be good. It was incredibly easy and they were ok yummy. Not my fave, but they would be great to even mix in with ice cream in the summer.

The recipe for the delicious Herb Bread. We gave that to her teachers along with seasonal pasta and sauce. It was SO good - it tasted like the oil and herbs we love to dip bread in.

Cajun Chicken Pasta - We've been making this for years and it's always a fave. We use penne pasta, typically.

Chicken Marinade - sometimes you just want to soak it, forget it, then grill it. It was super easy for a weeknight and pretty tasty.

Back in the Swing

2012-01-04T21:26:00.002-06:00

It's been back to the old routine this week. Amazing that this is taken about 10 minutes earlier than when she normally comes rolling into our room, full force, announcing it's daytime, the sun has come, and asking if today is the day we get to go to her birthday party.We're all adjusting to getting back into the swing of things, so blogging has been back burner. A new evening exercise routine (after Lil's bedtime) is more priority this year, but I plan to still get caught up on Christmas and probably blog three times per week this year. If I ever get caught up that should be super do-able. More rest and relaxation are also on the goal list for this year, as well as both of us following the program our church is doing this year to read the whole Bible through in the year. So far we're hitting all those goals.
Cold weather has also hit - FINALLY we've gotten her to try on the cute cupcake hat Stephanie brought her last fall.
Although I don't think she's really gotten the point.
Happy Wednesday!

Happy New Year!

2012-01-02T20:38:00.002-06:00

One last night of vacation until back to work tomorrow. I'm not all that excited, but she is probably more than ready to play with all the friends again!We've been able to keep up her cute little layered curly bob, so that's good news. Brent will be responsible for fixing her hair tomorrow though!!!
Super productive day today, all the Christmas stuff is down now and boxed back up in the attic. I got rid of a ton of Christmas things this year that I don't have the space for, so we were able to really consolidate down all the tubs of Holiday decor and we also got rid of quite a few other things taking up space in the attic today. 2012 is all about organization and DECLUTTER. If it's never been unpacked since we moved in how useful is it really?

But now, it's time to relax! Tomorrow is going to be a busy day back in the office.

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T15:41:00.003-06:00

For New Years we decided on a new look. For the youngest member of our household. It was time for a CUT!

Before - long and shaggy in the back and all over the place in the front.Getting glammed up -
She got moussed and diffused. It looks like she'll still have curly hair.
All done!
And curly in the back, just much more kept!
Happy New Year everybody!

Birdseed Crafts

2011-12-30T14:21:00.002-06:00

Here's a pic of one of our cookie boxes ready to be delivered - We made marshmallow fudge, stuffed Snickers cookies, and sugar cookies. We also did Puppy Chow in little treat bags. We gave away tons of cookies to church teachers, school teachers, coworkers, etc.

For her classmates, I wanted a fun little craft that would give them something to do over the holidays. I found this birdseed craft on Pinterest and thought it would be perfect. It takes a while for them to dry, so we did them on Sunday afternoon after church before nap. Not ideal timing.
She started out pretty strong helping me stir it all up, and then she remembered her boo-boo finger. And sadly she could no longer be of help to me.
You mix bird seed up with a few different things and then spoon it into cookie cutters and level it out. We let her pick out all the various shapes she wanted to do.
When she got bored she went and found bubbles. And proceeded to blow them in my face while I did her project. Just a sign of all the homework I will complete in the future, no doubt.

You also poke part of a straw through so you can have something to hang ribbon through in order to hang your ornament outside for the birdies.
They dry in the cookie cutters for a few hours and then on wax paper overnight.
The next night I filled a Ziploc baggies with some ribbon paper and decorated it with some stickers and included a note telling them what to do with it. I think they turned out really adorable! She got to put them in each friend's cubby the next day and pick one out for herself.
She came home with the firetruck and we put it out for the birds. By birds I mainly mean the squirrels made off with it, but we still had a lot of fun putting it out and watching them try to figure out how to nab it!

Baking Christmas Cookies

2011-12-29T15:26:00.005-06:00

The last full weekend before Christmas we made our annual batch of Christmas cookies and all kinds of treats for our friends and of course Santa. We started doing this in 2009, kept it going in 2010, and this year she pretty much did everything herself! The goal is to get (at least) one great picture each year to frame in the kitchen. So lighting and the "scene" is taken very seriously!The finished product:
We make sugar cookies for pretty much every holiday, so she knows exactly how to roll them, flour it out, etc. I usually make the dough the evening before and keep it in the fridge until we use it the next day. It really needs to get fairly stiff, especially with my little "helper" pounding on it so much. Otherwise it gets warmed up too fast and the shapes won't stay formed.

When it starts getting a little too soft I stiffen it up with flour. My assistant looooves to sprinkle and spray some flour all over the place.

Poking finger in the dough also = fun.
Anytime she's concentrating her tongue it out. It's hilarious. I even noticed it in some class pictures they posted of their latest lessons in Cooking. They've been making all kinds of treats at school - yogurt Popsicles, individual pizzas, pigs in a blanket, cinnamon twists, and more! She has loved this learning module.

These little hands are so cute. I think also want to frame in a triptych her hands year over year. Little hands are just so cute, it also reminds me of Becky's recent post about hands!

If this were a recording it would pretty much read "I do it all myself" about a hundred times. And she did.

She's moved to more of a "less is more" attitude with the sprinkles. And she'd rather eat them anyway.
But she will share. Only if she can feed them to you one by one.

I'm not sure if we ever got any final pictures of the iced ones, but I know in my next collection of photogs we got some of them all boxed up and ready to go out to people!

Happy Birthday Finny!

2011-12-28T21:11:00.002-06:00

Even though it's been about a week and a half (my normal delay), it's pretty appropriate that tonight's post is of Finn's birthday party. Today when I picked up Lilli they had cupcakes in his honor, and yesterday was his actual birthday. His poor mom is always faced with the dilemma of when to plan his party!!

She had his party at Shipwrecked Playhouse down in Brentwood. It's a really cute indoor play place with all sorts of things for the younger kids to do. Traffic was awful getting to it since it was the last weekend before Christmas and near the mall, but once we got in the kiddos had a blast.

Finn is one of her top three friends at school, easily. She just loves him, calls him "My Finny", and talks about him all the time. I think they play really well together. It was funny to talk to his mom and hear about all the things he also says about her at home. She said on their most recent vacation, in the middle of the trip, he asked when he could see Lilli again. So sweet! True Story - I'm pretty sure the brand of her outfit is called Krazy Pants. It was a fantastic Zulily find.
They had lots of cars, slides, ball pit, trains, dress up, grocery store, etc. I greatly preferred this place to a previous party we had been to earlier in the year somewhere similar. The facility was private for the party, meaning only the kids for Finn were there. So there was no worrying about them getting mixed up with older kids, or it being overpacked from walk-ins. Nice and relaxing.
The ball pit was a huge hit for the kiddos!!
She and the birthday boy disappeared for a minute and I saw them running down the hall together. Knowing they are both quite mischievous I poked my head out since his mom was busy keeping everyone entertained. I caught the two of them in the party room working as a team, about 15 seconds away from pulling down the entire box of cupcakes. I was able to stop them and by then his mom had also noticed him missing. Apparently he had asked if it was time for cupcakes and she had told him just a minute. "Just a minute" to this age is best interrupted as "Go ahead and do it yourself". So they tried. The other little boy at the table is another one of her daycare buddies. She also fell in love with this little Minnie Mouse costume and did not want to take it off!

Riding around in cars with her buddy Sebastian
She has never liked "enclosed" tube like slides and would never go down until she was basically forced by two of her friends, near the end of the party. Then she decided she loved it!
The ball pit was the most popular attraction. By the end of the party they realized you could stand of the side and jump way in. After that we never saw Lilli again. She kept getting so much air she'd nearly hit the wall. She LOVES to jump.
When the party time is up they pretty much tell you you have to leave. Cue screaming, crying, and fits from ALL the kids. That's a fantastic sign your party was a success at this age. She had big hugs for her buddy before we left.
Happy Birthday Finn! Thanks for inviting us to your party!

Christmas Dress

2011-12-27T21:01:00.002-06:00

Little Miss just did not want to be photographed in her pretty Christmas dress, so that was a major Fail this year. I think if we told her we didn't want to take pictures of her it might work better. A lot of times we start taking pictures of Pippin and the jealousy monster kicks in, but nothing worked on this day.I even bribed her with a princess lollipop and still had terrible results.
These are at least pretty from a backlighting angle, with her pretty blue eyes and curls.

At least I only paid $5 for the dress at consignment!

The End of Christmas

2011-12-26T21:23:00.002-06:00

Christmas vacation is almost over, it's back to work and school for us tomorrow, at least for a couple of days. Minus the getting up early and actually having to work part, I think we're all a little ready to get back in the routine.We had a great Christmas and there's lots more pictures to come. I doubt I will ever get caught up here, anytime this century. Lilli had a fantastic Christmas and has enjoyed all her new toys and most of them end up in her bed, mysteriously, every night. I think her new Barbie car has been there every night. The new trike is up and down the hallways and the streets of East Nash daily, and she's worked a billion puzzles and played with Barbie from sun up to sun down.
We spent the last day of our vacation at the Opryland Hotel checking out the lights and Shrek stuff. I think she's probably a year too young for Ice, she whines about being cold when it's 60 degrees outside so I think she'd be pitiful. Particularly considering the price. Since we always park for free at Opryland (we laugh at people who pay $18 to park, seriously people!!! That's ridiculous) besides lunch we just sprang for a ride on the "River". It was really a lot of fun and Lilli was still free. Score!
She loved it, although she most certainly did not pose for our camera shot. She was amused and we clearly felt no obligation to buy it.
More pictures and tales from the last of our break to come, not the least of which will be the tale of the horrible hour we spent crammed in line to get "free" seats to the Holiday Shrektacular.
But our seats were totally worth it!!!!

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T21:22:00.001-06:00

Merry Christmas from our home to yours!

Santa was very good to us all this year! Lilli got her white pretend dog and much, much more!

Merry Christmas!!

Out and About

2011-12-22T15:19:00.002-06:00

Puzzles are absolutely one of her favorite things right now. She can work 24 & 30 piece puzzles in the bat of an eye. Her teachers gave her a little 24-piece Tigger one for Christmas and she worked it all by herself on the first try.It's become impossible to take a pretty Sunday picture anymore.
This one got Pippin hi-jacked.

This was about a week and a half ago, the heater was broken in the auditorium so we had to meet elsewhere in the building and it was BLAZING hot. After church that evening we stopped for ice cream/sorbets at Jenni's. Brent thought we were silly but it was SO good, as Jenni's always is!
Much to our surprise, we pulled back the blinds one night to see someone who is for sure NOT Buzz Lightyear enjoying his dinner. We actually see possums a good bit in our yard. Either that or we have some seriously large city rats (entirely possible). Yuck. Lilli named him Woody. He will NOT be added to the family Christmas card, ever. She did ask if she could pet him. Ugh.
Last Friday my division had its annual Christmas breakfast at Union Station (gorgeous downtown hotel across the street from our office). Afterwards we all get the rest of the day off to holiday shop. I didn't have anything else I really needed to get so I picked up Lilli early (at about 10 am) and took her over to the downtown library to see the puppet show, since we never get to do that sort of thing.

After going to one I can't say we are missing out. The little room was full of a bunch of ridiculously noisy kids (so much so that a lot of times you couldn't even hear what was going on) and their oblivious moms. I'm talking about a ton of toddlers WAY too young to be there, and completely distracting. This was a marionette show, and since they were the type of puppets where the librarians had to move them around they wore these black masks so you couldn't "see" their faces.
Very strange. It was sort of like the puppets were being held hostage.
But Lilli enjoyed it and that's all that mattered! We came home, watched Frosty and enjoyed some lunch and naps!
She has also since decorated her bed for Christmas. Her idea. It's quite festive!

Donuts and Ornaments

2011-12-21T14:07:00.003-06:00

About a week and a half ago our church had a Christmas donut breakfast at an old mansion in our neighborhood. The theme was donuts and PJs and that was super easy for us to get into!Lilli wore her Santa PJs (thanks Gymboree!) and of course picked out a heavily sprinkled donut. No surprise there!!
Some of the "girlies" in their PJs and slippers.
The slipper contest.
We were feeling so lazy we kept our PJs on most of the day. Lilli helped Brent clean off some old Christmas trees our new neighbor was getting out of the attic. They were covered in insulation but were otherwise really good trees.

Later that night we took her to Hallmark to pick out her annual ornament, and also get the "Baby's 3rd Christmas" one. She was wearing her cute little ornament skirt I bought off Etsy.
There were a lot for her to chose from, a ton of princess ones and other Disney characters she knows, as well as some from Dinosaur Train and then just other Santa, Rudolph and Frosty ones. It was hard to pick but she went for the Barbie in the pink evening gown.
And then "it" happened. She had a massive accident right there in the middle of Hallmark, leaving a giant puddle in the floor. I knew at some point something like this would happen, but since she's been potty trained since April she's never had a public accident, and rarely had them at home or school. We scooped her up and Brent took her to the bathroom to see what could be saved. Since she had a skirt and tights on, the tights were pretty much drenched but she was still able to keep her skirt and we keep extra clothes/undies in the car so we were able to just swap her out there and keep on with our evening. It did keep us from getting any additional pictures with her ornament choice for this year!
Oh well! Accidents will happen, and they might as well be in Hallmark, during the Christmas season.

SANTA!

2011-12-20T21:37:00.004-06:00

This year has been a year of Santa excitement! During my department's dirty Santa game I just knew I had to steal this blanket for Lilli. And I was so right! She loves it and sleeps under it every single night. Probably one of the best dirty Santa things I have ever ended up with!
She's also been really excited about our Advent calendar. Not so much as a countdown to Christmas, but as a daily piece of candy! Next year we will probably do more "Advent" type things, but we do play with her nativity toys a lot (I have a ton from work) and she's VERY fond of her What God Wants for Christmas toy. It's a great tool for telling the story of Christmas for little people.
About a week and a half ago Brent and I took some time off and went and did our Christmas shopping all day while Lil was in school. We covered a ton of ground and got most things crossed off, everything else has been arriving in stacks of boxes every day from Amazon! We finished up and picked Lilli up early from school so we could take her over to Bass Pro for their free Santa pic. We knew we needed to beat the rush, so we got there at 4:15 and people were starting to stream in. She was excited at first, but then started getting more apprehensive.
They give you this goofball pass, but they key is just to go and get in line. The pass means nothing. We were only in line about 15 minutes but the line was getting very long behind us as people came in after work. I tried to give her a pep talk, and so did the little girl in front of us, but the more she thought about it the shyer she got.
And this is how our picture turned out. Whining.

Right afterwards I picked her up and she was more than happy to talk to him as long as I was holding her. She told him she wanted a "pretend white dog" for Christmas. Thankfully that's been the story she has stuck to this whole time. I think Santa can easily manage that!
She even gave him a hug.

And a high five.
She was very excited to pet one of the "reindeer". And then about five seconds later she told me she wanted to sit in Santa's lap. Um, no. If we run into another Santa before Christmas we'll let her try again, but there was no way I was getting back in the now crazy line.
They have all kinds of toys for the kids to try out, and then of course the parents can buy them. Since most people were in the line for Santa she got to try several out.

They also have a free carousel we rode a half dozen times. They do know how to work it - fudge and popcorn were for sale RIGHT beside it.

Afterwards we went to Home Depot to get some poinsettas for my dining room table display. Home Depot has something for everyone!
She loves, loves, loves this stuff!
Finally all our presents are wrapped and I think I've got the last of the Christmas cards addressed and ready to go! It's finally time to enjoy the holiday season a little!

Christmas Cheer!

2011-12-18T22:01:00.003-06:00

Our house smells ridiculously good right now - here's the culprit.Italian Herb Bread. It tastes just like bread dipped in all the olive oil and herb goodness and wow - you really should be able to smell our house. We made three fresh loaves this afternoon to give to Lilli's school teachers, along with some good pasta and sauce from World Market and some other goodies. Hopefully it will be a nice "practical" gift, along with tins of all the cookies we made this weekend. My oven has been our MVP the last two days.
Someone did not want to pose in her pretty Christmas dress. I don't know who that could be.
She is a mess. If she could have figured out the magic combo of buttons on her microphone I think we would have had a fabulous nap time serenade. It always makes me laugh to see what she gets up and puts in the bed with her after we "put her down". That's exactly why we just let her be and don't go in and yell (usually).
But it does always leave me wondering how in the world she fell asleep with Big Bird's rear end in her face and her prized Rudolph puzzles under her rear end?

Busy Days

2011-12-17T22:25:00.002-06:00

Someone has had a busy day, full of fun. We had to do our annual Christmas baking so we have lots of goodies to give away this week.Flour, flour, flour.
All business is no fun so we went to one of her best little friends birthday party tonight. She and Finn are hilarious together.
They had the best time at the indoor play place his party was at and we have lots of cute pictures of her playing with her school friends. They really seem to get along so well, of course their teachers may have some other stories. Every single kid was crying when the party was over because they did not want to leave. I'm talking massive fits everywhere. That's the sign of a good preschool party.

Lots of fun pics to come!

Decking the Halls

2011-12-16T21:41:00.002-06:00

This year we actually didn't end up buying a tree for the first time since we've been in this house (5 years). It was so rainy earlier this month and we do have a nice, large artificial we bought a long time ago we can use in the attic. So, we saved about $100 bucks and drug it downstairs and got it all decorated up.I'm also determined to get rid of a ton of extra Christmas junk, so as we unloaded all the Christmas containers I went through and sent pretty much a carload to Goodwill with Brent. I had WAY more ornaments and things than I could ever use.
Someone has been a big fan of the daily chocolate advent calendar.
We "watched" the Grinch while we trimmed the tree.
In Lilli's room I did her mantle in Santa decorations.
Our main mantle also has Santa decor along with just some general red and other Christmas stuff. We did get individual hangers for the stockings last week.
In the dining room I do garland and put out snowglobes and pics from Christmases past.
Nothing too over the top this year, just enough to be spruced up for the season and not spend a million years pulling it in and out. I'm also got poinsettias for the table and some things for the kitchen I'll have to take pictures of before the season is over!

Randoms

2011-12-15T20:26:00.004-06:00

Lots of loving for all the animals around here. Of course hand-feeding them treats never hurts.This is what Lilli's bed typically looks like after "nap time". On this particular Saturday most of her art table ended up in her bed along with her What God Wants for Christmas toy and a lot of books.
This is the only picture we took at our Sunday School class Christmas party a few weeks ago! It's nice that she's old enough to go off to the playroom with the older kids and we pretty much only see her when she needs to go to the bathroom. She also brought me her socks at one point. This was right before we left so the kids had mostly broken up and headed home, but the girls were still finishing up Little Mermaid.
She's our little Laundry Nazi. She's constantly checking my dryer for towels (they're usually a dry load in there pretty much all the time!) and unloading them in any "basket" she can find.
She rolls everything up in this little "log" shape. We're working on folding. She's also very much into helping cook dinner every night and loading the dishwasher. She really does LOVE to help. We should probably come up with a little allowance or something, but some days I'll tell her she was such a great helper she can pick out a new toy out of the prize box or have a piece of candy and that's pretty much enough motivation for her!
About a week and a half ago we went to Target to do Christmas shopping for her and also Angel Tree shopping. She latched onto this Barbie with bicycle combo and we have NEVER seen her want something so bad. She drug this thing all over the store and wouldn't even trust us enough to put it in the buggie.

All smiles when Barnie made it home with us. The helmet is just hilarious. Safety first.
To Lilli, From Lilli. The gift that just keeps on giving.
So glad tomorrow is Friday! We've got a birthday party for one of her friends, Finn, this weekend. I was telling her tonight at bedtime that we were going to go to his party this weekend and she got all excited. The conversation went a little like this:

Me: Tomorrow's Friday!
Lilli: Duby time? (That's what they call their special music class)
Me: Yep, you'll probably have Duby time tomorrow. And then on Saturday we're going to Finn's birthday party!
Lilli: Finn's Birthday! We're going to Finn's party?
Me: Yup, we're going to Finn's party!
Lilli: Is Finn gonna be there?
Me: Yeah, I'm pretty sure Finn is going to be at this one!

HA!

Bounce with Santa

2011-12-13T20:54:00.001-06:00

About a week and a half ago, our church had a Bounce with Santa Christmas party for the kids at an area bouncy house. I already posted a picture or two of Bounce with Santa, but never really posted about it.

They started it out with pizza for the adults and kids, then brought in Santa. Lilli was SO excited when he walked in the room, got up and ran over to him to say Hi. But when it came time to sit in his lap - she wasn't having it. She doesn't mind talking to Santa or seeing him, it's just being around him by herself without me right there that's not floating her boat this year. So this is her first Santa pic of the year for 2011:Ha! At least it was a free Santa event.
And she will tell you that she did not sit in Santa's lap, that Mommy did. It's pretty funny to hear her talk about the events of the night. Then they were all unleashed to the bouncy rooms. That's what she was excited about anyway!! She loves to bounce, and we think it's a lot of fun too!! Good thing she's still small enough she "needs" us around to help sometimes.
She can do a lot of the climbing and obstacles now (here she is with Zach and Audrey), but she did get stuck in the middle of one and an older kid came and found us and told us she was stuck and crying. She had climbed over one side but couldn't make it through to the other side. Brent had to go and fish her out.
She loved the big slide. Once I went down it with her a few times she became pretty fearless.

The bigger kids were doing all sort of crazy jumps and flips, so of course she picked up on it and started taking flying leaps down the slide.

She had so much fun that as soon as we got in the car (WAY past her bedtime) she immediately wanted to go and bounce with Santa again. And anytime we mention Christmas parties or seeing Santa she asks if she will also get to bounce again. Ha!!!!

Groceries and Meals

2011-12-12T21:27:00.002-06:00

We've been doing pretty good with our meal planning and groceries lately. The holidays have meant more parties and dinners and such to go to, but we just build that in at the beginning of the week. My freezer is looking MUCH better as we've been planning more things specifically out of it. Thankfully it's at a point where you can a) open it without things falling on you and b)in a pinch if someone brought us a freezer pie we'd have a spot for it. Major improvement!
The last two weeks I've ended up spending $85 pre-tax, which is $10 over my goal. Both weeks I've gotten caught up in dog food, which is $16/bag (he eats organic). The first week I needed dog food, last week it was a good deal with a coupon, so we'll have dog food for quite a while. It will realistically be about 6-8 weeks before I need to buy more, so that should work out well. I've noticed our other big spend each week is on dairy. With Lilli's being "special" (lactose free), plus my milk, we end up easily spending $15 a week on milk, which is a pretty big chunk of a $75 budget.
Overall it's been a great exercise for us in not buying frivolously and keeping more $$ in our pocket this holiday season!
Some recent recipes -

Modenese Pork Chops - We had a nice thick cut from our CSA left in the freezer. We were careful not to overcook and it turned out really nice. Nothing superb, but good. I just don't love a pork chop. We had a salad, mac n cheese and some delicious homemade bread a friend brought me as a Christmas gift with it. Yum-o.

We did another crock pot chicken using this brine recipe. It was extremely tender but not super flavorful. I think we're down to just one more whole chicken in the freezer. I do have a new appreciation for the value and versatility of the whole chicken now, plus some great ways to cook it.

These chicken crescent squares were delicious and super easy. We made 2 cans of crescents with it, I think otherwise they would be way too stuffed. We also some Oscar Mayer carving board meats (in the lunch meat section) as the meat in it, and that turned out great.
Aren't those two so precious? She's into telling us everything she loves right now (big kids, Rudolph, Santa, milk, various food items, shoes, etc) and she'll tell us she just LOVES her Pippin. HA!

Second Thanksgiving, Part 2

2011-12-11T16:16:00.002-06:00

Just a few more pics to post from Thanksgiving.....

The annual family pic...for some reason Brent and Cody seem to think it was a lot warmer than the rest of us!We didn't get a lot of pics of the dogs together, but Chloe and Pippin obviously got along really well this time! They played together really well and napped together quite well too!
After Bruce and his fam left to head back to Cincy we all relaxed around the house a bit and then went out for Mexican food.
Lilli and Grandpa.
We packed up and headed home. Poor Lilli was exhausted from about 4 days of no naps and late nights, but she was still really in a pretty good mood. At home that night we got a pizza and had a "movie night" to just relax. Old Pippin was worn out, too.
Now we can finally fast forward into all the fun holiday stuff we've been up to!

Second Thanksgiving, Part 1

2011-12-10T20:54:00.004-06:00

Second Thanksgiving was spent the second half of the week with my family in West Tennessee.

Pippin was excited to play Barbies with Lilli and Kacey. The girls did a little turnip hunting out in the garden.
Cody caught some fish.
While Kacey mostly just caught the back of her own hair.
Grandpa tried to teach the girls the fine art of patiently waiting on the fish and being quiet so as not to scare them away.
Some shooting was done by the guys.
Lilli tackled Cody in the dog beds.
Grandpa had an assistant pool player.
Lilli had an assistant snack eater.
Some movie watching took place, although most of her time was spent sliding down the stairs face first with Kacey.
That's just the first day of "2nd Thanksgiving." We've had a busy weekend of Santa sightings, shopping, and a Pajama donut breakfast at church this morning. We topped it off with some shopping tonight and a visit to Hallmark to pick out her annual ornament. I'd say that was the memorable moment, but in reality when she had an accident in the middle of Hallmark, leaving a giant puddle in their floor, I think the memory of picking out her ornament is going to be more about the puddle each year than the Barbie ornament she picked out! Oh well, at some point I was sure she'd have a public accident and it might as well be in good ole Hallmark!

First Thanksgiving

2011-12-08T21:00:00.006-06:00

First Thanksgiving was spent in Hohenwald with Brent's family. Once the ham and traditional Thanksgiving foods were cleared away, a birthday cake was brought out for Brent's dad. He had plenty of help with the candles!
And with eating the cake.
When ceramics are left in arms reach the temptation is just too grand. And besides, all the little chickens needed some tea.
The best way to burn off all that food and cake is by chasing Uncle Eric around the yard.
Of course some family timer pictures are in order.
I have a feeling this one may end up as someone's Christmas card.
We did actually take it out for a spin.
And then Madison, Grant and Lilli moved on to something a bit more substantial.
We had a great first Thanksgiving with the Spears family!

The Buzz

2011-12-07T21:30:00.002-06:00

I did forget to mention on my gift list I'd like a small umbrella - one of the little "totes" type that fold down really small. I need something like that for my gym bag for all these rainy days. We have a ton of the larger ones, but I need something lightweight. Poor Buzz, he's mostly on the outside looking in. Every once in a while when he decides to camp out on the back-porch (thus blocking Pippin from the facilities) he gets to come through and be transported back to his spot on the front porch.
I have lots of Thanksgiving pictures to post but that takes more time than I have this week. So all of these are from right after Thanksgiving. Last week we put up the 7 foot fake tree in Lilli's room. She loves it, and we've filled it with Disney, Santa, and other random ornaments she wanted in there. It's a great bargaining tool because we let her sleep with the lights on (until we go to bed) if she behaves, listens, and gets ready for bed when asked.
Her nativity also features Santa. She's equal opportunity like that. She did want to know if Santa would be at church tonight. I wanted to say "No, but Jesus will be" except I knew she'd take me literally.
Pippin is also quite proud of the tree. She refers to this one as "Lilli, Pippin and Buzz's tree" and the main tree as mine and Brent's.

Holiday Gift Guide 2011

2011-12-06T20:44:00.005-06:00

We've had lots of inquisitions lately from the fam about what to get us for Christmas this year, so here's our holiday Gift Guide -

Lilli - She's the easy one to shop for. However, if it's large, noisy, or something she already has 15 of (baby dolls) it's going to Goodwill.

Barbies and Ken - She's just getting into that, so we don't have a lot of them. However, Santa has probably already gotten her several Barbies. She could use more Barbie clothes, the Barbie cars, and a Ken. We don't have any Kens. An organizer like this or like this would be great for storing them and keeping everything neat and organized. Her room is about to get majorly cleaned out and organized because it's overflowing with The Junk and The Never Plays With It.

Tennis Shoes - Size 7, good ones that she can wear to school and run and jump and be wild in. Size 2T Socks. Her feet practically skipped over size 6, so I don't have a ton of everyday shoes for her for this winter right now (although she has plenty of dress shoes and she won't wear boots.) Winter Gloves would also be good (even thought I'm about 100% she won't wear them).

Puzzles and Games - She's good with the 24 piece ones right now. There's also a lot of games she's probably almost big enough for - we already have Memory, Candyland and Chutes and Ladders.

Anything Disney Princess-y. Ariel is her favorite.

She's also into nail polish.

Train stuff, she always likes Thomas anything.

Arts and Crafts supplies. We have lots of markers and crayons and that sort of thing, but Michaels has great little crafts we can do together this winter. We also like any sort of "quiet" toys for church/air travel - both Walmart and Target carry little $1 Play Packs with a sheet of stickers, crayons and small coloring book. We also got her one of those little $1 books at Michaels where you color with the special marker and it makes the colors appear. We go through a lot of things like that, so we can always use more. Costco also has great large sticker books that last for a while - they're about $8-$10 but are really large and last us for several months.

Subscriptions to any of the little preschool magazines - she loves to get mail. I know National Geographic has some younger ones, as well as Highlights. I bet Disney even has something she would enjoy, and that's one she'd be getting for a full year and growing into.

Me -

I'd like a Shark Mop. I've always heard good things about them and I think with all our hardwood floors they'd work well.

More kitchen towels, the nice waffle-y ones in black or deep red like our walls. Or cream. I always like more silicone spatulas, we use them a ton.

A subscription to All You magazine, or to Family Fun magazine. Southern Living might also be nice.

Since our dress code at work got majorly changed, gift certificates for clothes would of course be great! Old Navy Jeans, Gap, Ann Taylor Loft, Express, any of those. And since I just got myself a new Kindle Fire gift cards for Amazon would also work well! Movie gift certificates would work for all of us since we do take her out now to the movies every few months.

I have a ridiculous quantity of jewelry, especially bracelets, rings, and earrings from all my trips to Market, but I can always use more of the extra long necklaces. This is just a link to the type of length - the longer ones that dress up a casual outfit. For some reason those are the ones that Lilli seems to break the most.

I could also use gloves. I don't have a clue where mine have all escaped to. You could probably ask Lilli about that one. I like tall boots and could always use more fun boots - size 7.

Disney Cruise Gift Certificates

A maid, a personal chef, a personal trainer and a nanny are also on my Wish List.

Brent -

(This is exactly what he's telling me)

A hat. A camouflage hat. Oh wait, I've got that.

(Seriously just typing exactly what he says).

He would not feel comfortable with his mother buying him underwear, even though he REALLY does need underwear.

New tires.

An Ipad.

And then he followed it up with "I don't need anything at all".

He did fall in love with a $1,200 pair of shoes at Nordstroms.

For him I would throw in a personal handyman.

I will also add that if anyone gives him a flashlight it's going to Goodwill. We could run this house on nothing but flashlights for a month if we had batteries for all of them, which we don't.

He could use new clothes, gift cards for Express or Old Navy. A new jacket hoodie.

Don't worry if this didn't help you at all, I also have no clue what to get him. I'm not stressed about it yet because we have Amazon Prime so I can wait until December 22nd to decide.

Pippin -

He's the easy one. Rawhides. Treats. Peace and Quiet. A Warm Lap. A trash can full of dirty diapers. Easy access to Buzz Lightyear.

Buzz Lightyear -

Also pretty easy. Treats. Toys. A bed for the front porch (Santa will bring him this one). For someone to leave the door open so he could run in. A space heater. Less rain and cold. Shots and probably getting "fixed". Easy access to Pippin.

Hopefully this year's Gift Guide will help in some way, but if you're ever in doubt just give cash. We are planning to get a new freezer for the garage after the first of the year so that's our Christmas cash goal!

Here and There

2011-12-05T21:20:00.002-06:00

We had such a busy, but fun weekend. I could use a day just to sleep and relax, but somehow Lilli is still singing Jingle Bells from her crib over an hour past bedtime!

Right before Thanksgiving we made a few cookies for her teachers. I know I have a turkey but I could never find it so we made pumpkins and leaves. Besides rolling them evenly, she did everything. The cutting, putting it on the sheet, etc.We made Thanksgiving hand turkey cards for her three teachers, and filled some little ceramic bakers with the cookies, some Pilgrim hats we made (fudge stripes + Reeses) and Thanksgiving trail mix (candy corn + peanuts, tastes just like Payday candy bar!) You can also see where she signed her name on each of them, the big long "sticks". We did give her the easiest name ever to write.
Right before Thanksgiving we did homemade pizzas. You can tell which one is hers - no sauce! But she does like pepperoni.
She really like playing with my old Night Night doll. Brent is constantly telling her to be careful with it, which cracks me up because I'm thinking if it lasted through my childhood it must be pretty solid!

Next Time I'll Sit on his Lap

2011-12-03T21:40:00.002-06:00

We've had a ridiculously busy weekend, as all weekends this time of year have been. I think up until this point I took about 10 minutes to just sit down and do nothing this afternoon before we went to a Christmas Party. And I made myself do that one because we'd been up and running around all weekend.

But it's all been fun stuff and whenever I catch up to that point we have several good pictures from the Kids Ministry "Bounce with Santa" event. Except for the actual Santa part. She screamed and ran up to him (in a happy way) when he walked in, but when it was time to sit on his lap for the world of paparazzi she screamed in an entirely different way.However, today we were talking about it and she said "next time I'll sit on his lap". We'll see. We may try to hit up the Bass Pro (free) Santa one night this week. I am not paying good money for a photo opp that could yield similar results.
The actual bounce part was much more to her liking, once she gets comfortable with the larger slides she becomes fearless. Thankfully her gymnastics weren't quite as wild as some of the bigger kids she like to imitate! She had a blast. She also had a great time at our Sunday class's Christmas party tonight. She cozied up with some older girls and they ended up playing with all kinds of princess toys and watching some of Little Mermaid and Aladdin and we hardly saw her all night, except for when we had to be located as she ran through the house telling everyone she had to go potty!

I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle

2011-12-01T21:11:00.003-06:00

Almost two weeks ago I had a mid-day appointment to get my hair cut and colored up, and since it was a gorgeous day Brent and Lil got the bikes out for one last ride before they get banished down to the cellar and out of our way for the winter.

Safety first.Cheese!!!
She loooves to ride.
They went all the way out the Greenway to the bridge that takes you over the river to the OpryMills side. I think it was about 10 miles round trip and she was pretty unimpressed with the river. She does see it twice daily going back and forth to daycare.
I think spending some time on the playground on the way back through was probably a lot more impressive.
Since this is pretty self explanatory Brent would probably want me to point out again that they rode 10 miles. That really doesn't impress me all that much, but he's mentioned it a couple of times while he saw me working on this post. I'll throw in that he was pretty whiny and sore the next day about it.
Loves to swing. Perhaps she has a future in Cirque de Soleil?
After the cold, gloom and fog we've had all week it would be really nice to have a few mild days like this again!

We've got a packed weekend, we just told her tonight that we're going to "Bounce with Santa" tomorrow night, something that church is doing with the kids at a bouncy place tomorrow night. Then we have a class Ugly Christmas Sweater party on Saturday night that should also be lots of fun. And hopefully somewhere along the line we'll have a chance to get our Christmas tree. We put up one of our fake one in Lilli's room this week, a 7 foot one that we put my Hallmark Disney ornaments and her ornaments on. She loves it and gets to sleep with the lights on (until we go to bed) if she listens and behaves all night. Tis the Season!

Shopping Til We Drop

2011-11-30T21:09:00.002-06:00

Pippin is a big fan of Lilli's toddler bed....I know if we didn't keep the gate up at night he'd be asleep with her in her bed.Lilli in her turkey shirt, she also wore it last year. I'm a-ok with her being on the small side and getting two years of wear out of most stuff!
About a week and a half ago we went out shopping on Friday night in Green Hills. We had to hit up our favorite Greek place first.
Macy's had a big thing for you to send letters to Santa.
She can't write, but she drew a big smiley face for Santa and signed her name. You may have to click on it to see the detail,but she really does some amazing faces. She was blowing me away at church tonight with the smiley faces she was drawing. We'll have to scan some in because I think it's super impressive for her age.
Doing a little shopping in the brand new Container Store in town. So glad we finally have one of those!!!!
She and Brent played in Pottery Barn Kids while I shopped in Gap for jeans. Cleanliness first!
This may also be one you have to click on to really see..but this nice older guy was handing out candy samples from his candy kiosk and gave her a chocolate "sucker". Messiest thing EVER. We ended up having to take it away from her in Gap Kids because it was just so gross and all over her hands and face and I knew it would get everywhere in their perfect store. They have a new long sleeve Pippin shirt that of course we went home with!! He is such the fashion icon.
At the end of our night because she'd been such a good listener while we shopped that we stopped at Christie Cookie and got a treat. This picture just cracks me up.
I wasn't actually ignoring her, I was just busy posting a cute picture of her on Facebook!!

Chuck E Cheese

2011-11-29T20:59:00.002-06:00

About two weeks ago, we met Adam, Julia and Ella at Chuck E Cheese for a little mid-week winter break. Lilli loves the "Cheesus" and was screaming as soon as we pulled into the parking lot and she saw the big sign. Some past visits were back in July, August of 2010, and her very first visit on October 2009. I know we've been several more times than that, but I'm way too lazy to figure out where those blog posts may be. Ella was stoked about her first visit to Chuck E. Sadly, the shows are such an afterthought now and they mostly just play cartoons on a sad little TV.
Lilli really wanted to play more games this time than in previous visits. They have a lot of little rides that she really enjoyed when she was younger, but now she's all about doing things so we ended up with a lot more tickets than in previous trips. Especially since we also had the Wrays scoring us more tickets as well!
Gotta ride the Chuck E Car! This one is cute because it also takes your picture with him and prints it out in black and white.
She loooves the basketball games. She is really going to love one of Santa's gifts for her!

Since Ella is pretty underage Lilli had to drive the Stuart Little car. This picture just makes me laugh.
And of course we had to squeeze in the photo booth for a memento! This booth is made for two, but we didn't do half bad getting six people in here!!
At the end of the night Lilli had something like 220 tickets to spend on junk, I mean toys. She got a few things, but the only one she's actually still playing with is this sticky hand thing.
We had a great time and are looking forward to more winter weeknight playdates with friends!

Groceries, Meals and Crafts

2011-11-28T20:44:00.003-06:00

A few more of the Thanksgiving crafts we did this year...

Any project involving glue is a home run...The finished turkey family - can you guess which one is Lilli's??
We also did the hand-print turkeys, you trace your hand and then decorate with googly eyes, feathers, etc and then we glued a Popsicle stick on it to make puppets. I had seen a few various variations on it, but came up with that method on my own. This is Lilli's tracing of my hand. Not bad considering her age!
We forgot to get a close up of her turkey. Lots of feathers and creative licensing. And of course she's wearing that awful Jasmine dress.
Pippin is not impressed by arts and crafts.
As far as the grocery challenge goes, I didn't hit my goal this week, I ended up spending $85 pre-tax which is still a huge improvement from where we had been at and just $10 over budget. I did save 18% or just over $19 between my coupons and Kroger plus savings. With it being the end of the month there were a few more coupons expiring that I wanted to use on things we always use. The kicker was $13 for Tide, but it is the best at keeping colors bright.

A few new recipes from over the last week, I did a lot of my menu planning from Plain Chicken this past week.

Chicken Chalupas Casserole was to DIE for. I had some Perdue grilled chicken strips in the fridge I needed to use, so I used that for the chicken in the chalupas. My casserole dish only held half as many chalupas, so I halved the half and half it called for and it turned out perfectly, with enough for our dinner and lunch leftovers. And since all the work is done the night before it was great for a week night meal for us. I'm sure I also snuck in some extra hot sauce because we like it spicy.

Rosemary Ranch Chicken was also delicious. We were out of ranch salad dressing (bizarre) but I did have a new bottle of spicy ranch that we used that turned out just fine. We grilled indoor on the George Foreman due to weather. It was such a pretty piece of chicken that this one would be great to serve when hosting people or taking food to others!

Due to the holidays our other meals were either at relatives' homes or simple soups and other freezer stuff!

Go Fly a Kite!

2011-11-27T20:52:00.002-06:00

If you live in the Southeast you know these pictures aren't from today, they're from two weeks ago. It was another mild day, and super windy, so we thought we'd get out the Batman kite.For some reason really windy days freak her out and she ends up bawling. It did go better this time than last spring when she melted down while we were flying kites with friends. THAT was embarrassing.

She handled it a lot better this time, but still likes the idea of flying a kite much better than actually doing it. But hitting the swingset at the playground was a much better reaction.
Yup, some of my favorite recent pictures of her and she's wearing that awful Jasmine dress.

I took a little turn with Batman as we walked back home.
While she napped I made some pumpkin cupcakes and let her do the decorating. This was the one she made for her teacher Mrs Betty. I didn't think they tasted all that fantastic, so we never sent any to anyone.

Here's the finished look. For some reason the candy corns just disintegrated in the pumpkin icing and looked awful. The ones with tons of candy corns are ones she made for a couple of little boys in her class (uh-oh). She would tell us who she was decorating each one for...
It's been a super rainy Sunday here on this particular Sunday, about the opposite of the pretty one from these pictures! It did make for good afternoon naps for all of us, and Buzz Lightyear the cat has been asleep on the porch all day. Poor thing, it sure would be nice if someone (ahem, Brent) would let the poor cat inside for a little while!

Home Sweet Home!

2011-11-26T21:12:00.004-06:00

Home Sweet Home! Over the last few days we've loaded up....
Told Buzz Lightyear good-bye for a couple of days (he was really happy to see us tonight...)Had one family Thanksgiving gathering...Then had another Thanksgiving family gathering...
And in-between spent a lot of times running with the big dogs and little dogs. And apparently dogs of all sizes like to play with Barbies.We've got one pooped little girl and one pooped dog snoring away tonight. I think there's going to be a lot of afternoon napping going on tomorrow!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T21:06:00.002-06:00

Happy early Thanksgiving, gobble gobble!

Barbie Girl

2011-11-22T21:08:00.002-06:00

We've finally hit a very exciting stage - Barbie! A week and a half ago she threw a big fit about leaving school one afternoon because she didn't want to leave the Barbies she was playing with. She loves playing with the Barbies at school and we didn't actually have any Barbies so we made a deal that we'd stop on the way home and get her her very own Barbie if she felt that would help her manage the crushing blow of having to go home.
Even Buzz Lightyear the cat is excited about Barbie!
Hopefully Santa can manage to get Barbie a more size appropriate car for Christmas.
Since our "own the way home" stop is just Family Dollar, and their selection was pretty awful we did go to Walmart and let her pick out one more Barbie, so she has a total of three Barbies now. Of course she wanted the one that came with two little dogs and a stroller to push the dogs in. Barbies are so different now with their bendable legs and one of them has bendable feet. Weird.
We may think about starting an allowance soon. She loves to help, with groceries and also with loading the dishwasher every night after dinner. Even though some items end up in some strange spots and I'm pretty sure most every glass will end up being broken it's awfully hard to refuse someone who is screaming about how much they want to help Mommy.

One more day and then Thanksgiving break time!! We made cute little Thanksgiving cards for her teachers along with some little cookies and "Pilgrim Hats" tonight.

Winter Time Blues

2011-11-21T21:30:00.003-06:00

One should never have to entertain themselves when going potty.She's also kind enough to share the pictures with Baby Roses. This was Noah's Ark, her version of Noah's Ark goes a little something like "And Jesus said, HEY, all you people and animals get in my boat." The story of Adam and Eve goes a little bit like "HEY, you people DON'T EAT MY APPLE." In her world, it's really a story about sharing.
This time of year is just plain boring. It's basically dark when we get home, and there's only so many stories we can read and toys we can play with. One night we made pudding, just because for no apparent reason I have a ton of pudding, and it's an easy one for Lilli to make pretty much all on her own.
We also made these incredibly easy little turkey faces. Graham cracker + large marshmallows + mini choc chips and add the candy corn after you micro for about 10-15 seconds.
And we also made this little turkey from a kit I got at Michaels. All these things were already 75% off a few weeks ago so I got it for $1. She loves gluing and making little things like this, so it was a big hit.
That was the first of several turkey crafts we've made lately!!!

Another thing we're trying this winter is FlyLady to help us keep our house cleaner, more organized and clutter free. We started this week, with the current zone being our Master Bedroom. The premise is spending 15 mins (or so) a day and working through your house in zones to keep your house clean overall. With the holiday later this week we've accelerated and doubled up on a couple of things, but our bedroom is already looking SO much cleaner and less cluttered in a style more manageable with our limited time to clean! Hopefully having someone give me small projects a day will help us inch towards of goal of getting rid of the junk that accumulates around here.

Grocery Challenge Week 2

2011-11-20T21:26:00.002-06:00

We had another great Grocery week today, I ended up spending $80, which was $74 before tax so I'll count that as hitting my $75 goal. With coupons/Kroger plus I saved 16% which is right around the norm for me. The big one this week was milk, I needed lots of Lillis and mine and that was $15 right there.

We ate some good things last week, here's a few of the recipes:

Napa Cabbage Salad - this dressing is SO good and makes the recipe. Now that our CSA is over (thank goodness) other than the ton of fall squash we have this was about the last thing left in the fridge from it.

Garlic Lime Pork Chops - I'm not a huge pork chop person, but these were pretty good. The pork chops were also from our CSA. We marinated overnight and it was pouring rain so we grilled indoors on the George Foreman. We did get Lilli to eat some and she liked it so that was a win.

Chicken Taco Cornbread Pie - This was also super easy and really good. The leftovers for lunch the following days were also really good.

We also did some other simple things like Breakfast for Dinner, Hamburger Helper (not really great but does help clean out my pantry) and one night we had dinner out at Chuck E Cheese with some friends.

So far so good with the Grocery Challenge and I'm sure Lilli and I can find some ways to spend all the money we're saving around town, especially at the new Nordstroms!

Buzz Lightyear, Nature, and Arts & Crafts

2011-11-20T21:07:00.002-06:00

Meet Buzz Lightyear. I guess he is probably our cat. After the stray we had tamed was "reclaimed" this one still hung around. He'd never been friendly, but for some reason once the black cat was gone and he got hungry, he became a lot nicer! So, we've claimed him, started feeding him, and he's actually gotten really friendly. Lilli came up with his official name.
When she wanted to wear yellow pants I got pretty excited because I knew I had the perfect jacket to match! I love this little puffy vest. Even if she did choose flip flops (with socks!!!) to wear with it. And even if I did have to bribe her with a sucker to wear the vest. It's ridiculous how friendly this cat has gotten! To us. Not Pippin.
Two weeks ago (when these pictures were taken) we headed out for a nature walk right after nap-time to gather up some leaves and pine cones for some fall art projects I had pinned on Pinterest. Of course our walk had to take us past the fire station. She was pretty disturbed by the fact they left their shoes and clothes outside.

We weren't sure we'd eventually find a pine tree but luckily we did. The type of tree it is made somewhat skinny pine cones, but we were still able to turn them into some cute turkeys. Next time we may just buy pinecones - it took several days for them to soak to get most of the sap off, then they have to dry for several more days.
Buzz was waiting for us to get home.
The first leaf project we did was one I saw on Martha Stewart. You take the leaves and turn them into animals. Some leaves we cut/trimmed, others we left as is. On her website they made some pretty elaborate ones, but we kept it simple. I think the elephant is my favorite.
Here's a close-up of a bird Lilli and I made. She did all the gluing and drawing. She gave it a mustache, ha!! Most of her drawings have mustaches right now. She also drew other clouds in the sky, along with the sun, and gave it a tail.
On some of them she also added other stickers and embellishments. This one started out as an octopus with other fish in the sea.
All in all a very easy art project that included "exercise" of walking around and looking at the various trees and having a fun little "scavenger" hunt for items we could use.

Speedster

2011-11-19T21:01:00.002-06:00

Contrary to her wardrobe choice for today (remember she gets to pick her outfits, shoes and all...) it was a gorgeous day.
Perfect for riding her trike (those legs are finally long enough!!!) and chasing little boys at housewarming parties (sigh).You know she's smitten when she wants to sing Happy Birthday to "that boy from the party" when she's brushing her teeth. (We always sing Happy Birthday to someone of her choosing while we brush teeth to "time" it.)