Time again for family photos! What to do?

When I pledged to myself that we would take family photos EVERY year, come heck or high water, I was unprepared for all of the whining and the bitter, sour attitudes, not to mention the annual dilemma of finding a new picture setting and coming up with a new color-scheme for each.  Of course, I COULD just take everyone out in the yard every year and take a quick one in whatever they happen to be wearing (And, unfortunately, some years it has looked like that has been the case anyway.), but that is no in my nature.  I LOVE the "artsy" part of the whole process!  That's the exciting bit for me!  Well, that and having a lovely current picture of the people I love most in the world to hang in my front room for the next year!
BUT...We have been doing this now for some 15 years now and I am out. of. ideas.  Plus Stilman's not here so I'm having a hard time thinking of doing it without him.  Please help!
Here are a few of our favorites from the past.

Amish Country

the plane ride

Indiana:  Das Dutchman Essenhaus

Ohio:  Walmart's hitching post

Amish shopper in Walmart

Mary Yoder's Amish Kitchen

 Ribs and homemade pie and ice cream

Whoa!

End of Commons, Ohio

Amish Art

New Eyes

He only mentioned that he was having a hard time reading the board at school a few times so I was a little surprised when I took him in and the eye doctor told me his near sightedness is fairly severe AND he has a substantial astigmatism to boot!
Glasses are miraculous!  Walker suddenly sees with perfection.  -And he's stylin' too.

Cake it On

 Yellow cake filled and frosted with vanilla whipped cream frosting.  She wanted a "flower cake" and wanted them made out of sour straws so this is what  we came up with.  She loved it.
Tasty too.

White cake with strawberry filling, frosted with vanilla buttercream and topped with white chocolate shavings.
For a friend.  Didn't get to taste this particular one


BUT... Fallon wanted a "strawberry cake" for her birthday so I made the same thing with extra strawberries on top and I had more than my fair share of that one!  Mmmm...

Yellow cake, chocolate ice cream (dredged in Oreo crumbs), and Airhead tomatoes and lettuce, fondant cheese.
Fun party cake!
I didn't take photos, but this month I also made a German Chocolate cake, with peanut butter filling, chocolate buttercream, and "decorated" with Reese's Peanut butter Cup pieces on top.  Divine!
But I think the favorite was the "Black Forrest" cake:  Devil's food cake, a little chocolate buttercream to crumb-coat, cherrie pie filling, frosted with Cool Whip, and topped with more cherries.  Always beautiful AND delicious.

One of Those Weeks

It all began on Wednesday.  It was a beautiful day and Jeff was driving with his truck window rolled down when -ZAP!- out of no where a bee flew in and stung him on the lip!  Not only was it a rude gesture, but the sting-site became a giant swollen lump of lip for a couple of days.  OUCH!  (Jeff wondered if that's how it feels to have colajen injections?)
By Friday the swelling had gone down considerably and we decided to go on our Friday night date.  We were on our way to Logan and then decided we'd just grab a bite to eat here in town instead and head back home to catch up on the smooching we'd been missing.  Before our meal was even served we got a phone call from a nearly histerical Quincy to "Come quick!"  Stilman and Walker had been riding home from soccer practice (so at least they were close to home) when Stilman popped a "wheelie" and his front bike tire fell off ("quick release" tire- the clamp of which had been messed with by who-knows-who, but most likely little sisters or neighbor kids just wondering what it was for.) and he hit the street face first.  It took some time to get him cleaned up and dig all the gravel out of his cheek and neck, but we were grateful that, aside from lots of scrapes, some bruises and a few chunks of skin off here and there, he was in pretty good shape!  It certainly could have been a lot worse.  He was feeling pretty beat up of course and couldn't help wondering aloud, "Why does this stuff always happen to ME?"  (-Honestly, I'm beginning to wonder that myself.)
As if that weren't enough to keep us busy for a while, Sunday night Tevya was playing outside without any shoes on (Which of course she's been warned about 746,893 times - if you include the 17 that particular day.) and stepped on something that hurt her really bad.  Being the kind and compassionate mother that I am, I brushed her foot off, pulled something off that looked like it might have been a stinger, and said, "Well, I'm sorry, but that's what you get."  She whined about it all night and I finally had Jeff look at it before she went to bed to make sure there wasn't something else in there like a sliver or something I'd missed in my haste to be so compassionate.  Nothing.
But 1:00 a.m. she came flying down the stairs screaming her head off and I was up with her every hour for the rest of the night trying everything I could think of to make the pain stop.  Next morning her foot was swollen so fat and was so red and she was SO miserable it was certain my instincts had been wrong.  She wasn't just being dramatic after all.  The doctor confirmed she's been stung -probably by some mean yellow jacket, had an allergic reaction, AND gotten an infection!  She missed 2 days of school and we both missed a lot of sleep, but she's better after a bout of antibiotics, lots of Benadryl, and alternating doses of Tylenol and Ibuprofen for 3 days (and nights).  Whew!
I could do without another week like this for a looooong time.

Have your cake

Suddenly, over the last month or so I have felt inspired, even driven maybe, to bake cakes. Yummy ones. With delicious fillings and delectable frostings and something akin to lovely decorations. (Obviously I'm about as far from professional as a person can get. Like my little plastic decorating tube?)

Because I am a firm believer that no woman should ever have to bake her own birthday cake. EVER! Especially moms. And because no child is ever going to let their mom get away without having one AND because I'm sure there a

re more women out there who -like me- wouldn't dream of BUYING a cake for themselves when they could make one for $25 less, I've decided to bake birthday cakes myself and give them to my friends who might otherwise feel obligated to bake their own.

I've done regular sized ones for my friends with families, but

I found these adorable little "single serving" size cake pans online which are perfect for those who don't. Monday I took them out for their debut and I was not disappointed! Look how cute these little cakes are! And my kids were thrilled that the cake mix (Yeah, see. Not professional.) made 5 little cakes (double stacked- so 10 individual layers) meaning that after we gave away the two birthday ones, we had three left over for Family Home Evening treats!

These ones are German chocolate filled and topped with Coconut Pecan frosting and frosted with chocolate buttercream. Mmm. Mmm.

Now. Who's going to make MY birthday cake?

The Bishop Beard

Happy birthday to Jeff! I saw this "Beard Beanie" and thought it was the perfect answer. Now he can have facial hair whenever he wants AND he can stay warm in the freezing winter weather, AND he can hide from people he doesn't want to talk to! It's pure genious! (We've named it the Bishop Beard.)

A stiff upper lip

Who knew ice skating could be so dangerous? Okay, I'm sure there have been many greater injuries sustained, but, OUCH! Stilman said he was skating backwards and lost his balance when someone skated past him real quick. Next thing he knew he was on his face with blood dripping down his chin. At first when he looked at his reflection in the glass around the rink he just saw a big gaping bloody spot and thought he'd lost a tooth, but it wasn't long before the entire ward (It was a mutual activity.) came skating over and the Young Men President told him his lip was gashed. Anyway, there was a hole on the inside where his tooth had poked through, but I think just the impact did the actual splitting of the lip. Jeff was in favor of just letting it heal on its own ("Every guy needs a cool scar or two!") and having a scary, gnarly, chewed-up lip-that-nobody'd-ever-want-to-kiss for the rest of his life, and, while that would be fine with me as long as Stilman's a teenager, I DO have dreams of him finding some nice young lady to marry someday and I've never met anyone who wanted to marry someone they didn't want to kiss a little! It took some doin', but I finally helped him see that a trip to the emergency room really was a good idea.
You can't tell from the pictures, but ya know those huge Q-tips they use to iodine everything with? The ones with the inch-long cotton tip? The whole was so deep they had the entire cotton tip up inside Stilman's face to clean it out! Yikes! It only took five stitches to stick him back together, but they had to take extra time and care to match up the lip just right so it wouldn't look goofy. They did a good job, and I think both Stilman and Jeff are pleased that he still got a good visible scar there - minus the scary, gnarly, chewed-up bit. I am pleased too!



























Maybe the most amazing part of the whole experience is the fact that this was our very first trip to the emergency room in our entire married-with-children life!

Yards & Yards of Summer Fun!

(Okay I just spent an hour trying to get the words with the right photos and then ended up accidentally erasing a picture or two -How do you work this blog thing anyway?- so this will just be easier.)

It's been an all-summer-long project, but it finally looks like we might actually get it done! Hooray! Our 70 year old lawn was too lumpy for kids to play on safely any longer or to mow evenly. It was time! Each of our neighbors came over one by one to ask what in the world was going on after Jeff killed the grass. (It was brown for about 2 months before we finally tilled it up and I'm sure they were ready to volunteer to come water it FOR us if that's what needed to happen.)

We've been living with a slightly-gravelled driveway that is mostly mud for a major portion of the year, and decided we'd start there - AND the walkway between the driveway and the garage door which was in even worse condition. (I'm ashamed to admit that I have spent winters visiting the recycling dumpster every week to find new cardboard pieces to lay over the mud so our shoes don't get sucked off on our way into the house.)

We poured a concrete drive (complete with mandatory family handprints), and Jeff layed a lovely paver walkway over my mud and also constructed a cute curving paver pathway from the driveway to the front porch to make it easier for visitors to get to the front door!

Next we dug trenches and put in our very own sprinkler system! (It really was exciting to turn them on for the first time! In fact Jeff said, "I do this every day and I've never been excited about a sprinkler system like I am about this one! This is great!)

On Labor Day we built a curvy shrub bed and filled it (and the bed created between the house and the pathway to the porch) with pretty black mulch and lots of shrubs and perrenial plants/flowers. We're still on the lookout for a couple of small ornamental trees or plants to finish them off, , but we are in hopes that our summer-long project will be complete - including grass planted- this weekend!
It's a good thing too because, although we did have a Saturday here and there and a couple of holidays, most of the work has been done after work and long into the night (I'm sure the neighbors are grateful the flood lights are no longer keeping them awake.) and Jeff and I are ready for a long winter's nap.

A LONG story about short hair

After more than a year of contemplation, I finally got sick enough of the eternal pony tail that I did it!

Aaaahhh! So easy, so cool, so SHORT, so stress free! Then I decided I'd like it even better with a few highlights and since the number of "sparkly hairs"(as my little girls call them) is increasing by the day, I thought maybe it would be a good idea to color all the hair just my normal color and THEN add the highlights.

Now, you have to understand that I grew up with a mother who was a wizard with hair! She, trimmed, permed, cut and colored every head in the house (Except our very particular father.) thus instilling in me a great aversion to actually PAYING for anyone else to do my hair so...Guess what! They actually carry boxes of such hair color combinations with color and highlights at my local Walmart! Lucky me, right?!

Well, not especially lucky after all, 'cause the hair color turned out maroon and the highlights were red. --Not even close to my style!

I scoured the internet for ways to remedie the color catastrophe and then I tried them ALL.

I started with simply washing it with hot water, then washing it with dandruff shampoo and hot water, then dish soap and hot water, then bathing my head with hot extra virgin olive oil, and even washing with a mixture of baking soda and shampoo. All of this served only to soften the color a little -as seen here. There were only two other suggestions: Color Oops stripper (for sale at any store carrying home hair color) or admit my defeat and call a real cosmetologist.

So Color Oops it was and....

... YIKES! I looked like a pumpkin!

Luckily the instructions did indicate that the stripper would not restore me to my natural color as I had supposed and prepared me for something much more hideous, but I was still shocked.

I was grateful I'd seen the sidenote on the box that indicated my hair could be REcolored immediately after applying Color Oops and I'd purchased yet another box of hair color - of a more desireable shade for that very purpose.

The finished product is much better - though all of that doing-it-myself took quite a toll (It feels much more like straw than hair) AND I still don't have those highlights I was going for in the first place.

Oh well. After some added trimming and styling I really love the cut itself and - ya know- with hair this short, all of that nasty "straw" will be grown out and cut off pretty soon and then...

I can start all over!

Once a Pirate, Always a Pirate

PHS class of '91 Reunion - Aug. 6 2011

20 whole years!! I poured over my yearbook in anticipation of forgetting everyone's names and faces and fretted -probably unhealthily- over what to wear, what to have my children wear, how to wear my hair, etc. and when we finally arrived I was pleasantly surprised that--HEY! these people have all grown up too and it was much more congenial and fun than I ever remember my time with them in high school being! (There WERE a few men I never would have recognized, but mostly it's that darn facial hair that throws me so far off. But, then again, there were probably several who didn't recognize me either - hopefully not because of facial hair however.) Of course it was the most fun to see my "bosom friend", Marcy Soelberg Ellsworth and our pal Eric McCarney. We also got to take our families on a tour of the high school which was really fun! Our kids loved that.

So glad we went!

Wrong season, Right weather

It's so fun to have an entire week off for Spring Break and not to have weather that beckons children outside and even punishes them if they DO venture out! Well, such was the case around the Preston School District April 4-8. By Friday, when we awoke to yet another storm, I was about to go bananas! During our morning paper route, the D.J. on the radio relayed the bleak weather forecast and then cheerfully added, "Merry Christmas!" Suddenly I had a stroke of genius! It was so close to Christ's REAL birthday! Why not celebrate?

It didn't take much to talk the kids into celebrating April Christmas. They drew names and we went to town so they could buy gifts for each other, we made Christmas candy (English Toffee), listened to Christmas music all day, ate our traditional Christmas Eve dinner and even took a secret treat to some neighbors.

Santa's helper came in the night and filled our stockings too! What fun! And best of all- at least for that day-it made the snow seem like a welcome guest instead of just another bad trick to foul up our Spring Break!

Spring Break wouldn't have been a complete bust even if we hadn't thought of celebrating April Christmas. (We did get to ride the bus to Hyrum to see my sister Sharlee and play with cousins all day Wednesday and then met them again the next day in Logan for Baby Animal Days at a historic farm there. We got rained & snowed out, but found shelter back at Sharlee's and played some more, ate the lunches we'd packed, had hot chocolate and watched movies until the storm passed. We went to dinner with Jeff and to "Hop" at the movie theater too.) But, as it happened, I believe it turned out to be our most memorable Spring Breaks yet!

Top O' The Mornin' To Ya!

Every St. Patrick's Day Eve a little Leprachan sneaks into our house and turns all the milk green and leaves only Lucky Charms to eat for breakfast. Well, we caught him this year! We must have been last on his list of stops to make 'cause he was still in the kitchen when we all got up! (Kind of him to pose for a photo I thought-though we WERE disappointed that -true to the tales- he had no intention of letting us know where all his gold was hidden. Rats!) The kids were all thrilled to finally catch a glimpse of the mysterious yearly visitor and I believe it served to confirm their belief in other unseen, but much-talk-about visitors like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. (We have a few who were beginning to doubt, if you can believe it.)

After such an exciting beginning, the day couldn't have been anything short of amazing! I didn't even bother with corned beef and cabbage for dinner. Seemed like it might have been a little anticlimactic.

I just had an epiphany! Aside from birthday cake and ice cream, Thanksgiving dinner, and Christmas and NewYear's Eves, most of our traditions are centered around breakfast. We do breakfast-in-bed on birthday mornings, CUPID comes and leaves little love notes and goodies at each child's plate on Valentines Day, and - as mentioned here - we get excited over green milk and Lucky Charms for St. Patty's Day breakfast. Easter breakfast is "Empty Tomb" sweet rolls plus the story of the Resurrection, and -rather than a BBQ- we feel free and grateful over every-breakfast-food-imaginable on 4th of July (After a sunrise flag-raising.). I just realized that possibly the biggest reason I have (unintentionally) configured things that way is because I have the most energy in the morning and find it easiest to make simple, silly things seem really fun and/or exciting. And since "simple" and "silly" is all that I can muster, if I have the entire day to spress over it, I have a lot harder time convincing myself and everyone else it's exciting OR fun.

Hmmm... What does that say about my character or lack thereof? Just musing.

It's time!

After Fallon absentmindedly picked another (the fourth, I believe) huge hole in her cheek while sucking her thumb we decided we really needed to break that habit; not just because the dentist showed us how it was turning her teeth and pushing them out, but in order to save her face from disfigurement (Is that a word?). (I'm sure she'll thank us later.)

First we tried putting gloves on her hands. She didn't mind and even asked to wear them, but then I realized she was just pulling them over her thumb when she'd lie down to sleep! Hmm...

I duck taped them to her wrists.

I bought long elbow length "princess" gloves.

I duck taped those too.

Nothing seemed to work for longer than a week or two - and then a MIRACLE: my sister-in-law, Katie, sent me an email with the answer. It's called "Mavala STOP". It goes on like fingernail polish (A bonus for sure as far as a "beauty conscious" almost 4-year-old is concerned.) and tastes SO nasty that she hasn't put her thumb in her mouth since the first night we brushed it on! (Jan. 14.)

I haven't put it on her now for about a week and last night my heart dropped when I passed by her room and I heard that old familiar sucking sound. I rushed in to confirm my disappointment and was surprised to find her hands resting peacefully at her sides but her mouth instinctively "sucking" nothing. Old habits die hard.