Game plan? Yes, please!

Happy Monday!

I am finally, FINALLY starting to feel myself again after bronchitis/pneumonia temporarily took over my life. How dare it come in the midst of the year's busiest season? As soon as Addie's birthday hits, we're off and running. So I'm glad to be crawling out of the dark pit of sickness.

We had a fun birthday celebration for the girls yesterday, and I hope to post a few pictures and stories soon. But now that that's out of the way, it's on to planning the next things and taking care of other responsibilities:

• Bringing dessert to MOPS tomorrow
• Getting Addie's costume finished for her party on Thursday
• Making a costume for Emma's school party on Friday (oh my indecisive girls! This is a post all it's own!)
• Making/sending Emma's party invitations
• Planning Emma's birthday party (should I post about my victory over Chuck E. Cheese?)
• Preparing for Gary's mom to come into town on Thursday
• Shopping for a few baby gifts! Hooray! (oh! not my own... no rumors, please. I have friends having babies left and right!)
• Edit Gary's paper that he's been working on all weekend long. It's due at midnight tonight. I hope to have it edited long before then (hint, hint... my sweet, handsome, hard-working husband)!
  

And these are just the out of the ordinary, immediate things I need to begin tackling TODAY. Not to mention the pile of laundry that only grew and grew in the last few weeks while I've been sick. And there's bills to pay this week. And the girls' bathroom upstairs?! Oh my word. I fear for their teenage years.

I hope I can get all of this done. I need a game plan. Lists, lists, lists!

I just thought I'd pop in and give a quick little hello. Brody's toddling all around the house right now being very happy, Addie is playing quietly with some dolls and my grocery list is ready to go. Better go now while I'm motivated!

Oh! But something FUN you need to know TODAY.... my friend Meredith is celebrating her blog's anniversary week all week long with a great giveaway EVERY DAY! Be sure to go visit Meredith's blog and leave a comment for a chance to win something fun!

Have a great Monday!

Sense of humor

I was sorting some school papers today when I ran across one of Addie's first papers from preschool last month. Poor second child. She started preschool and didn't even get a blog post to commemorate it.

Here she is on her first day of school:

I quickly realized that this top should definitely have a shirt underneath it, and forgot to take an "after" shot of her on the porch. Oops!



But back to her school work.

The kids were learning about their five senses. The day she brought this home, she proudly whipped it out of her "packpack" to show me. And then I just about died laughing. (Laughing on the inside, of course.)



Her explanation: "That's me, and that's Brody." [note the tiny tuft of red hair.] "Sometimes I can really smell Brody."

Just call me Drizella

Yesterday I took my three munchkins to the pumpkin patch to celebrate Addie's 4th birthday.

Obligatory pumpkin patch picture:


After an exhausting, full 8 minutes of kid wrangling, navigating a wagon in desperate need of an alignment, cleaning off Brody's pacifier 14 times after being dropped in the dirt 26 times, and shooing bees which nearly stung my kids 37 times, all while trying to capture the perfect pumpkin patch picture which conveys the serenity of sweet family time on an ideal fall day, I decided it was high time for a break.

I mean, as relaxing as that all sounds, enough was enough.

So I headed over to the concessions tent and waited with 24 other weary moms, who if nothing else, were just thankful not to be making PB&J for themselves for the 732nd day in a row.

While standing in line for overpriced hot dogs and really overpriced apple juice in pumpkin cups, the lady behind me tapped me on the shoulder and told me I look exactly like her step sister.

You know, if I had a quarter for every time I've heard that...

No, seriously. I'd be rich. I get that all. the. time.

I really hear it quite often - at least once a week - that I look like someone that someone knows. And more often than not, it's their step sister. It's the weirdest thing.

But here's the funny thing - the woman who told me I was her step-sister-look-alike came and sat on a picnic bench near us with her two daughters. At one point I saw her talking to her girls and then she immediately shushed them as they whipped their heads around to look at me. Okay, a little awkward. What I wasn't prepared for was for the 5-year-old daughter to nonchalantly pick up her mom's camera while her mom looked the other way, and pretend to be taking pictures of things around us, and then WOW, WHAT DO YOU KNOW she had the camera pointed right at me.

Did I accommodate her with my best step-sister smile? You'd think. But no. I couldn't help myself and without thinking I crossed my eyes and tweaked my lips around and now I'm sure that image is forever burned into the camera's memory and will soon grace that lady's blog where she's talking about the crazy lady who looked like her step-sister.

I'm not sure what I was thinking, but I'm fairly certain that lady's step-sister doesn't look like THAT.

We wrapped up lunchtime fairly fast after that proud moment and moved right along to the corn maze.

I think next time I'll just roll with it and smile nicely. That is, unless, it's Cinderella I'm talking to in line at the pumpkin patch.

Happy birthday, Addie!

Emma and I went shopping for Addie's birthday present yesterday and made a quick stop for lunch before heading home. Just as we finished, Emma burped loudly.

"Emma!" I scolded.

She looked down sheepishly and said, "Burping's just not as much fun when Addie's not here to laugh at it."

So Addie, for that and about a million other reasons, we are thankful for you!

We love your happy laugh, the joy you can instantly bring to a room, your funny personality, and your sweet spirit.

Happy 4th birthday, Adeline Joy.
You are so loved!

Church at home

Today is one of those "I-can't-believe-I-get-to-live-here" days in Colorado. Bright blue fall sky, temps in the upper 70s and low 80s, fall colors painting the landscape and that crispness to the air that makes days like today make you feel like you're on top of the world.

Unless you're sick as a dog. Like me.

I've been fighting some nasty cold-turned-pneumonia-turned-bronchitis for a month now and am SO ready to be back to normal. After multiple prescriptions, a nebulizer treatment, an inhaler (I thought it was so cool that my friends had to have inhalers when I was younger - um, not so much!), and a couple days of laying low, I'm starting to feel a bit better. But I should probably buy stock in Kleenex because I'm supporting them single-handedly right now.

So today while I'm home from church, I hope to be somewhat productive while taking it easy. I did take a shower, but in an effort to do my hair without taking much of an effort to do so, I put a sample of some gel in my hair and thought I'd scrunch it dry. However, I think the sample was old and defective. Instead of being all foamy when it came out, it was like lotion. But being the hair product newbie I am, I figured it was normal. WRONG. My hair is now as crispy as burnt bacon. It pretty much looks and feels nasty. And being that I don't have the energy to take another shower, it is what it is for today.

The only thing I really want to finish up today is cleaning out my pots and gardens of all the dead flowers. Usually I have this done weeks ago, but with recent trips it just hasn't gotten done.

And so with crispy hair, a stuffed up nose and a wheeze that rivals bagpipes, off I go to have a little church service of my own cleaning up dead flowers with my girls.

"The grass withers and the flowers fade,
but the word of our God stands forever.”
Isaiah 40:8

Praise God for that!
Happy Sunday to you!

Back with a snack attack

(I'll spare you the rest of the nonsensical rhyme that finishes my title. Be glad. Be very glad.)

I've got to get back to blogging because I've missed it so! It's such a good outlet for random thoughts. And even for deep thoughts that do make sense. But surely you don't come reading my blog expecting that, do you? I've felt pretty scattered and in a funk lately, so I figured maybe my lack of blog reading and writing is contributing to that feeling. After all, my Google Reader says I have "1000+" unread items. Even Google Reader won't accommodate a blogging slacker like me.

That said, I'm wiping it out. Starting over on Google Reader. If you have breaking news you've shared in your blog and I MUST KNOW about it, please, please put in the comments below! I hate to be out of the loop, you know. Seriously.

I've wiped out Google Reader before. This is like deja vu.

I thought I'd jump right back in with a few timely snack ideas.

First, you must know that when I was in preschool many moons ago, I came home one day and told my mom that I had eaten "pencils and water" for my snack. Yum! Translation: pretzels and water.

So, how appropriate that Addie and I made pencils for her preschool when it was her turn to bring the snack. They were a huge hit, and Addie had a lot of fun making - and eating - them.



Before you start thinking I'm the most creative mama that ever did live, you need to know that I found this in Family Fun magazine's September issue. I love that magazine.


All you need is string cheese, bologna, mustard, raisins and Bugles. I read that you could use an apple corer to cut the bologna, but apparently, my corer is HUGE or my string cheese is too THIN, so I ended up cutting out all those little bologna erasers out by hand with a paring knife. It didn't take long, and now I'm an expert eraser-out-of-bologna-cutter. Cut off one end of the string cheese so it's flat, and attach the eraser with just a dab of mustard. Snap off the end of a Bugle and squeeze 1/2 a raisin in it, and twist it onto the other end of the string cheese. Voila! You have an edible pencil. On some of them, we whittled the string cheese down a bit in order for the Bugle to fit better.




Also, a friend (shout out to you, Jenn!) sent me a link to some REALLY fun Halloween snacks. How cute are these mummies?!

There's lots more where that came from. Check out the other snacks here.

Happy snacking!