Get a tree, like now!

We usually head out to get a tree the day after Thanksgiving. Since we were out of town for the weekend, it didn't happen. So we decided to go for Family Home Evening. We grabbed Maxine after school and headed out. We drove to Jacob Lake and the road we usually take was closed. So we ventured down a dirt road and by the time we found some trees, the sun had set. So we had about 10 minutes of dusky light. We fanned out, found the tree, chopped it and we were back to the truck in about 15 minutes. It was the fastest tree-hunting expedition in our family's history. This was the only shot of the evening. Please avert your eyes while my children fight to hold the saw.

Now as many years as we've been going to Jacob Lake to cut trees, we've never seen the lake. I thought maybe the lake dried up years ago. I've asked Merril what's the deal with it and he didn't know either. We decided it didn't actually exist. While stumbling on the dirt road back to the highway, we found Jacob Lake! It's more like a bowl-shaped meadow that catches a lot of spring run off. This time of year, it was more like a mud hole but it was too dark for pictures and we were too far away. All I could get was the sign next to it.

And then tree decorating. I don't believe in dictating where my kids put the ornaments. It's too hard to convince my 2-year old that 2 blue balls shouldn't hang on the same branch. I just wait for them to go to bed and fix it. If I didn't, my whole tree would look like this:

I hope your Christmas season is getting a great start!

Thanksgiving up North...

We went to my sister's house (Jo Anna) for Thanksgiving. She was gracious enough to let us stay there. Dinner was fantastic, as were the pies. I meant to get a picture of us all at the table but it didn't happen.

The day after, we went to a movie. This is me and gorgeous little sister, Jess.

That evening, we went to a festival of lights. Everyone piled into the back of the truck to save some bucks. It was freezing so I'm glad we were driving with the heater cranked, except for Maxine. She wanted to ride in the back with her cousins.

After that, Jo Anna's band had a gig at a bar. I got carded at the door and had to show my ID. Did you know our state's driver's license glows under a black light?? True story. Jo Anna is the one on the left playing the red guitar. She sings and plays keyboards too. I know, uber talented!

Her husband, Boyd, plays a mean set of drums.

We stayed out until 1. Super fun and they were awesome!

Ho Ho Ho!!!

I just finished putting the last of the return address labels and stamps on my Christmas cards!

I like to get them out the week after Thanksgiving! We're headed out of town to spend Thanksgiving with my family at my sister's house (Jo Anna). I just finished making pie crusts for the pumpkin and triple berry pies I'll be bringing. Nothing makes me feel more like a housewife than making pie.

Not that I ever wear heels when I bake pies but I just have this 1950s image stuck in my head while I bake. Sorry to the feminists, I never was one.

Snowy...

On an earlier post, I mentioned that Merril's dirt bike broke down and we had to go rescue it. Here are the pictures! Merril decided to try and fix his bike out on the dunes. His buddy Ryan was there to help.

I knew it was going to be chilly so I brought coats and blankets. Mostly for riding in the scout because doesn't have a top for the back seat or doors that keep the wind out.


Merril or Ryan, I can't remember which, zip-tied a pizza box to the door to try and keep the wind out. It didn't really work.

While Merril was fixing his bike, the wind really picked up and it started snowing. The kids jumped on my lap to warm up and then would run around in the snow.

After about 15 minutes of blowing snow, we decided to just load up and head back to the truck. It was chilly but we made it just fine, and without too much whining.

On a side note, I sliced my finger pretty bad making Maxine's lunch this morning. It could've used stitches but I didn't have time so I told Merril to go buy some super glue. We dumped alcohol in it and sealed it up. It was the first time I've ever needed a wound glued shut! I think I'll just try to be more careful next time.

Potty training success...

Now just so you know, I'm knocking on my wood-composite desk for continued luck. Lately, we've had huge potty training successes at our house. About 2 weeks ago, I started bribing Juliet with a Dum Dum sucker if she pooped in the toilet. She whipped right into shape and hasn't had an accident since then. She's even starting to forget about the sucker reward.

Jack, whom I've struggled with for 10 months, has finally started to show some improvement! He's always told me that when he's 4, he'll start pooping in the toilet. Sure enough, he hasn't pooped in his underwear since Thursday. He just goes and does it. There are a couple of factors playing into our success.

#1-Juliet has shown great success and he didn't want to be shown up by his 2-year old sister.

#2-He has a Woody toy (from Toy Story) that would sit on the fridge until he pooped in the toilet.

#3-Recently, if he pooped in his underwear, he'd lose his underwear privileges and have to go commando until he pooped in the toilet to earn his underwear back (Thank you Emily).

Also, about a month ago, I quit putting Jack in pull-ups at night because I didn't feel like it was helping. At the same time, Juliet refused to wear a diaper or a pull-up to bed, so we were washing sheets every couple of days for a few weeks. However, they've both made it through the night dry for 2 weeks.

It's been a long, ugly, stinky road but I'm feeling relieved that the end might be near. It's only taken 4 years to get Jack completely potty trained and I think it has a lot to do with Juliet. Juliet has been my easiest to potty train because she wants to do everything herself. She's so tenacious!

I'm not saying there won't be relapses, but I haven't washed out poopy underwear for 5 days and that feels wonderful!! Let's hear some noise!!!!!! YEAH!!

Sinking in...

Merril went to the sand dunes today to ride his dirt bike. Unfortunately, his bike broke down and he had to hitch a ride on the back of a friend's dirt bike. So we're going back to the dunes tomorrow to rescue the bike because it's sleeping out at the dunes tonight. But before his bike broke down, Merril took this picture with his camera phone.

When he showed it to me, I said, "Wow, nice job with the solar flare and the offset subject." He replied, "Yeah, it was total luck. I kind of just held up my phone and snapped the picture." Well, whatever works, babe!

Birthdays...

Maxine and Jack have birthdays in early November. Maxine is now 7 and Jack is 4. Yikes, I have a seven-year old.

Maxine wanted to have a fairy party and everyone wore wings. (She looks unenthusiastic but I swear she had fun.)

The fairy idea was all inspired by a cake we saw at Wal-Mart with a cascading river and tons of Pixie Hollow fairies. They wanted $38 bucks for it. We decided to make our own. It's been a while since I've worked hard on a cake. It was fun!

Here's a picture of the cousins eating cake at Jack's party. We just ate the leftovers from Max's party because that cake gets big in the back. It's 3 cake layers tall.

Another year older and I don't have to think about birthdays again until February, where I'll be turning 30. Oi.

Recycle...

Our Tahoe has a tape deck as well as a CD player. I can't think of a time that we've ever used the tape deck, until now. My MP3 player tends to slide around. Merril, bothered by things that rattle, buzz, or slide around while he's driving, took the MP3 player and stuck it in the little door of the tape player. It's the perfect size and fits nicely.

Today I'm elated because I was looking for a Christmas present for Merril and could only find it for $100 to $150 bucks while shopping on Saturday. Dismayed, I started hunting online. I searched some stores and found what I wanted on a big chain's website for $50. They have stores in town so I drove over to give it a look and it was only $40 on the shelf!! Wahoo! I'm actually going to cash in some rewards points off our business checking card and I'll only have to pay $15! I'm glad I didn't just give in and buy the $100 one. Saving money means more Christmas! (I'm almost done.)

Only Amy will appreciate this one...

I follow a baking blog for fun and they just posted that William Sonoma just released a limited edition Bundt cake pan that creates a small Christmas village. So with some powdered sugar and a little bit of colored icing, you can have a snowy scene. IT'S SO CUTE! It's $36 but I thought it was adorable. Totally not gonna buy it but I love clever ideas.

WOW! Clean stove grates! It really worked!

I've lived in my house for about 4 years. During that time, I've struggled with keeping the top of my stove clean. I have a gas stove and the grates on the top are not black cast iron, but an enameled grey color. Since they're enamel, they are a pain to clean. And let's face facts, I boil things over daily and rarely clean my stove top. :) I've tried spraying Oven Off cleaner and leaving them overnight and then scrubbing them like crazy the next day. It worked okay but it was a ton of elbow grease and they still looked like they had burned on food all over them.

I finally found a solution that required almost zero effort!! I thought about throwing them into the oven and then turning on my self-cleaning oven feature. I figured it bakes all the gunk in my oven down to ashes, could it work for my grates? I jumped online to see if it was okay and wouldn't totally ruin my grates. I found several people who'd done it and it had worked fantastic!

So I took my blackened/greasy grates and the little circle covers from the stove top, put them in the oven on the middle racks, and pressed the self-clean cycle and walked away for 3 hours. When it was done, my grates were as clean as the day I first used my stove. Some of them had a little white ash on them but it wiped right off, no scrubbing. SO CLEAN!

Just so you know, they were black in comparison from all the baked on food! I just thought I'd share.

P.S. A friend told me that her grates had little rubber feet and they got burned to ash. Maybe hold off if your grates have rubber feet. Mine were feetless so I didn't even think about it. Sorry Jamie B.

Family Home Freezing...

Yesterday was filled with sunshine and NO WIND. So what does our family do when it's warm, sunny and not windy?? We go to the lake. :)

I know it's November but it's unseasonably warm and we couldn't resist. It's supposed to stay in the 80s all this week! Yeah!

The water was so glassy because it was calm and there was hardly anyone there. Not that we were skiing because the water was freezing. I was trying to get the kids to the beach as quickly as possible because my toes kept numbing up.

We squished sand castles.

Maxine and Jack pretended to find buried treasure.

And as we left the lake, a HUGE moon was rising in the east.

So cheers to our first November lake day!

Something wicked this way comes...

Ahhh Halloween! One of my favorite holidays. Merril and I decided to dress up as The Blues Brothers for a Halloween party. Here's the original:

Here's us:

The crowd was kind of young and only a couple of people understood that we were the Blues Brothers and not Men in Black.

The kids were all themed from Peter Pan. Maxine was Peter Pan. Jack was the crocodile from Peter Pan.

Juliet was TinkerBell.

I made the costumes so they have that homey, unfinished quality about them. Jack's hat and Juliet's tutu were fun to make.

Can you believe Thanksgiving is right around the corner? Maxine's birthday is this week so I have to start thinking about what we're going to do for it. Yikes. I kind of loathe birthday parties for my kids! Mostly because I'm sure how to entertain kids for that long.

Intuitive computer...

I was sitting at our desktop computer with my phone on the desk. The speakers crackled and a second later, I got a message. "Interesting, " I thought to myself. So I sent a text back and set my phone on the desk again. The speakers crackled again and then my phone started to ring. So apparently some cell waves crackle my computer speakers right before my phone chirps.

On Sunday, our ward had the Primary Sacrament Meeting Program. So the kids looked especially nice and ready for church and they all decided they needed a snack. I didn't want their church clothes to become soiled moments before heading out the door, so I made them all wear their aprons. Jack's apron made him look like a little, professional chef.



And lastly on my rambling post, the Tahoe needed new tires. I don't really want to buy new tires right now so I wanted Merril to find a set of used, cheaper tires. So he tells me what he really wants is a set of new, Nitto Dune Grappler tires because they have flames going down the sidewalls as illustrated here:

I informed him that he was not allowed to get new dune grapplers and that I just needed something used, cheap, and gets me down the road. So he comes home the other day and says, "You'll never guess what I found on KSL.com!" Oh great. He found a set of half-tread dune grapplers. When I raised an eyebrow, he said, "I swear they were the only set of 20-inch truck tires on KSL or Craig's List and they were a steal!" What a stinker.

Smells like teen spirit...

Ever since I had Juliet, I've developed seasonal allergies. It's an annoyance and I'm rather perturbed that my body suddenly decided to overreact to things like pollen. I become itchy and cough (not sneeze) and have chest and nasal congestion. I take Claritin and Flonase, which help a lot, but I lost my sense of smell around late February/early March. A lost sense of smell comes in handy when cleaning up vomit or poopy diapers but it's unfortunate to be unable to smell bread coming out of the oven, my husband, or sagebrush after it's rained.

So the other day, I was making toast and when it popped, I caught a whiff of warm toast smell and started to cry. I haven't smelled anything for 7 months and the sudden smell of ANYTHING brought me to tears. Since then, I've started to catch other whiffs but nothing on a consistent basis until this morning! I could smell my shampoo (which Juliet calls sham-poop), my hairspray, my deodorant, Merril's deodorant, that funky smell in the basement, and the laundry soap! Hooray! I'm actually a little overwhelmed because EVERYTHING HAS A ODOR!! I've forgotten how much everything smells.

And so I apologize if you've come over to my house this summer and thought, "Wow, this place stinks like garbage." or "Jamie has some really bad B.O. today". Sorry, I just couldn't smell the difference until today and I'll try to be more careful about it from now on!

Starting to feel better...

Jack is starting to get off the couch and play again. Today, Juliet and he wanted to pull carrots out of the garden. I still have some carrots, onions and a couple leggy tomato plants out there.

Now comes the dreaded task of weaning my children off television again. I have a no t.v. policy during the day but when kids get sick, it pretty much goes out the window. So here's one last shot of us in front of the t.v.

I swear, I'm turning it off tomorrow.

Leftovers...

I had 2 windows leftover from miscellaneous basement projects and decided to blow them out the door on Craig's List. It took about a week but I got a call today and the guy wanted to buy them! He came and picked them up tonight! Now I don't have these any more:

Instead, I have these:

And this:

House of sickness...

OHhhahahrhah cough cough. The flu is making its rounds at our house. First it was Maxine, followed by Merril, Juliet, Jack and lastly, myself. Yucky fevers and coughing fits. I've done nothing for a solid week because I was tending to sick family members and then whimpering on the couch. I'm on the upswing, which is a good thing and everyone seems to be mending except Jack. I'm hoping and praying that he sleeps REALLY well tonight instead of waking up and coughing every 30 minutes or so. Hopefully I'll be able to leave the house sometime this week.

This is Halloween...

I love Halloween! This year, I decided I'd make some tombstones. I would have liked to buy them but I was trying to save some cash and I was afraid the Styrofoam ones would just blow away. It can get windy here. I had some scrap wood leftover from basement projects and started sketching ideas. I came up with 4 patterns and started cutting. (Please try and ignore my open-toed shoes, I'm pretty sure they're not OSHA approved.)

Then I started painting. I coated them with some primer gray spray paint and added texture with a sponge. (I'm a little embarrassed that I was faux finishing something but oh well.)

This is how a few turned out.

Jack said he wanted his own tombstone for him so I made him this.

Next year I might make a Juliet one and a Maxine one but for now, I'm good. All told, I spent $1.96 on 2 cans of cheap primer spray paint. I had the rest of the paints from other projects and leftover brackets from basement plumbing. I was pleased with how they turned out! I made 4 total. Now I kind of wish I had a fog machine. Eeeeee eeeee eeeee!

My other homemade decoration was a spider's egg nest. It hangs from the front chandelier in the entry.

I really feel like my Halloween decorations are where I want them to be and feel pretty satisfied with the creepiness factor in my house.

Potty training update: Juliet has done really well and is going to the bathroom pretty much by herself. I haven't been able to get her to go #2 in the toilet so we're still working on that. Jack only had the one success that day but I'm hoping things keep looking up. Other than that, Merril and all the kids have/had the flu. I have somehow escaped so far.

I hoped, I prayed, but I never thought it would really happen...

We were eating dinner and Jack said he needed to go to the bathroom. He ran in there and did #2 in the toilet! (I know some of you are so bored with the toilet habits of my children and I apologize but I'M EXCITED!) We've been trying to get him to do this for 10 months! I don't want to get my hopes up too high but I hope the trend continues. Please. Please. Please. Please.

Progress...

I've been potty training Juliet this week and I'm excited this morning because she woke up dry. I tried to get her to go to the bathroom but she didn't go. So I went to have a shower. While I was showering, she said she had to pee so I told her to go ahead. She climbed onto the toilet and went all by herself! Yea! Here's looking forward to a productive day!

I must be out of my mind...

I decided to start potty training Juliet this week. *Duhn duhn duhn* I'm still struggling with Jack. (He still won't go #2 in the potty.) All last week, Juliet would say she needed to pee and then run to the bathroom and take off her diaper and climb onto the toilet herself. Who am I to hold her back? So I just threw panties on her and decided to jump in with both feet. Plus, I'm hoping if I start earlier than I started with Maxine and Jack, I can avoid the awful pooping in the underwear thing. (We're going on 10 months with Jack. Maxine did it for 8.) So far, she's made it to the toilet for a #1 and a #2. I think it was a coincidence. But today, she's had far fewer accidents which suggests to me she's learning control.

I'm hoping, and this is a huge hope, that Jack might get in gear when he sees his little sister showing him up on the toilet. She thinks she's as big as Jack. Guess what babe: You're not as big as you think you are.

Eureka!

I bought a DVD remote a few months back because we lost ours. Then the DVD player quit working so I ended up buying a new DVD player/recorder. Today I was vacuuming between couch cushions and found the original DVD remote and $1. 27. *roll eyes* Our couch cushions don't come off, they're attached to the couch. The remote was between the cushions and the back part of the couch, about to pitch into the couch underbelly. I thought I had checked all over in the couch when the remote became lost originally. I guess I didn't check good enough. I've decided that I'm going to sell the two remotes on Ebay and make $15 bucks. It'll be Christmas money. (I've wrapped 11 presents so far. Hee hee)