Three Day Weekends Make Me Happy

My heart has been bursting with joy.  Not only has the weather been magnificent after many cold dreary snowless days, but we got a wonderful 3 day weekend!  We used up every moment of it enjoying being together as a family and soaking in some much needed Vitamin D!

We have been wanting to go to our friend Craig's house since Christmas break, but with sickness and weather it just hasn't happened, until this past weekend.  We were finally able to shoot guns and arrows at the pumpkins we've had since early OCTOBER!  Wow did we get our money's worth out of those pumpkins!

I sure do love to shoot big guns....note to self....bring ear plugs next time.  YIKES!

Ava is getting better and more confident with her bow and arrow.  She landed a few arrows right into that pumpkin and we all were so excited for her!

After everyone had shot as much as they wanted, Shawn took the shotgun and blasted the pumpkin to bits!  It sure was fun.  We also practiced with the handgun that we would actually use for self defense in our home.  I sure hope I never have to scare anyone away in real life with that thing!

So I was in charge of packing the food.  I remembered every single tiny detail...except one.  I forgot the hot dogs themselves.  Yep.  Fortunately Craig's son was willing to drive all over the city to find us some hotdogs.  Just making sure my family knows I'm only 98% perfect.  

 But I sure didn't forget the most important stuff; S'mores.  Shawn had given me a dark chocolate and orange bar for Christmas.  I hadn't eaten much of it yet, so I took that as our chocolate and it made those S'mores AMAZING!!!  Best I've ever had.  I have been craving roasted marshmallows for weeks and had been using a skewer over the gas burner in my kitchen for a few days now and it just wasn't doing the trick.  These marshmallows over the fire hit the spot perfectly!  I still want more, but it's not exactly easy to build a fire in my back yard....note #2 to self....save money for a fire pit.

Moving on to other news....this is happening...Wednesday!  

Today we took the kids to a movie...a rare event simply because it's SO EXPENSIVE.  Even for a matinee it was $33.50 for our family to see a movie.  We saw Paddington.  I have to say, I really didn't care to see the movie, but because it was filmed in London, I went to watch the "background."  It was a funny good family movie, but it did make me miss London.

On that note, this just got real.  Shawn and I have been tossing ideas back and forth about our 20th anniversary trip.  Yes, it's 4ish years away, but with huge trips like this, you have to slowly begin planning far in advance if you want to make it worth the money you spend!  That being said, we are going to go back to Europe but hope to visits countries west of France....such as Switzerland, Austria, The Netherlands and a few others hopefully.  If only we could be gone a month, I could visit all the places I wanted to.  It's an ambitious trip, which is why I am beginning to read up on it now!  We are so very excited about this trip!

Lastly, we took advantage of the warmer weather and finished a LOOONG overdue project!  Remember this dresser we found a million years ago on the side of the road?  It was beautiful....except that someone in it's previous home had scratched a bad word deep into the top of the dresser.  I had the vision and Shawn had the elbow grease.  This weekend after having sanded it months ago, he finally painted it and I painted the handles and it found a new life and new home in the girls' room.  They were in desperate need of more clothes storage so I gave Ava this dresser, gave Elle Levi's dresser, and gave Levi the girls' long dresser.  Everyone won!  Everyone has more room for their clothes!  Altogether this project cost us about $50 in paint and supplies.  I wish I could have painted it green, but it would have ended up making the girls room look too busy with colors...there are already plenty of colors in that room! Plus it also now perfectly matches the other dresser that was taken from Levi's room.  We are very happy to be able to reuse something we found for free in such a useful way!

The after!

Making Up

The week after Christmas, I had so many fun things planned with my kids.  And then, each of then got a fever that wouldn't seem to go away.  It took the entire second week of our Christmas vacation to get everyone well.  I was very thankful that everyone got the sickies over with before starting back to school, but man that week was such a bummer week.  We got cabin fever so bad and were bored and irritated that we all just had to sit around.  Today we sort of made up for that!

First, I want to show you one thing we did do during Christmas break.  I'd seen something like this on pinterest so we tried it too.  We traced a tree and then made lines on watercolor paper, with glue.  After it dried, we painted inside the lines.  Ava was the only one that wanted to go off and do her own thing so she did a very colorful tree.  I loved how each of them turned out.  Levi wasn't into it at all so he didn't do one. Boo.  I hate incomplete sets....maybe I can get him to do one next year.  We finished them up with stars and ornaments during the "sick" week.  I loved how they turned out and am now trying to figure out a way to display them at Christmas since they aren't standard frame sizes.

Onto today:  We started with the kids building each of themselves a "house" in the living room.  When I came down to look, I was amazing at just how much of their personalities showed in their little "houses."  Here's Levi's: Stacked up high with all the stuffed animals he loves.  Simple inside.  Just his blankie, boots and thumb needed.

Ava's matched her personality well too!  She had her stuffed animals and a few art supplies.  She had posted four signs that all pretty much read "Daddy PLEASE come snuggle with me!!!"  (She loves to make signs and tape them on her bed, the walls, her door, beside the door....you get the point.)

Elle's was very well organized and everything was in it's place.  I had to laugh to myself at the sign she found and put right above her head.  I might need to truly hang that in her room right where she can see it often.  

After checking out those amazing "houses", we headed out the door for an adventure.  One of my our resolutions for this year, is to try something new every month.  It could be an activity or a restaurant.  Today we tried out Tacodeli.  Everyone ate their food happily, the place was VERY busy which is a good sign, and I had a delicious Coke (which I was suppose to be cutting out this year.  oh well.  I WILL cut down though.) Shawn still hasn't found a taco place to rival the one he loves here in town called San Pedro Limon but this one was still good.  

Then we went to a toy store we've never visited before called Terra Toys.  IT WAS AWESOME.  It's the best toy store I've ever been to.  I loved it and so did the kids and Shawn!  We will definitely be going back there around birthdays and Christmas time!  The icing on the cake was that they had a small table of Christmas items for 75% off today only and I got two AMAZING garlands for my candy room....like nothing I've seen before!

 Ava and Levi received Orange Leaf gift cards from Elle for Christmas (I'm so smart.)  They have been begging since Dec. 25th to use those gift cards, so we let them today.  Mind you it has been about 35 degrees all day, but weather doesn't dictate when I eat ice cream. (or my kids for that matter!)  For the record I still like Cherry Berry better.  :)

Now I sit here listening to the rain taunting me as it's about 32 degrees and yet no snow.  Maybe I'll wake up in the morning to white!  A girl can dream.

NYE 2014

Here's a rundown of how our family celebrated the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015.

First things first: I made a Caramel Pie that morning so that no matter how lame our night was, at least we had this. lol

 Then I wrapped the kids with some wrapping paper I no longer wanted.

Then I let them go crazy tearing it to pieces and throwing it all over the place.  We have cabin fever as well as real fever so we are getting desperate in the entertainment department.

Later we did some mostly-naked karaoke.  Levi was belting out worship songs at the top of his lungs.  This was going on while Shawn was actually at the church building singing songs with others.  It felt a little sacreligious that Levi didn't have anything but underwear on and that he was using a karaoke machine but again, cabin fever.

After Shawn got home, we broke out a brand new game called Mouse Trap.  We have never owned nor played this game.  After assembling the entire game, we read the instructions that actually said we were supposed to assemble the game as we played.  Ain't nobody got time for that.  Everyone just wanted to get caught in the mouse trap.  After a parents-only huddle, we came up with new and improved directions on how to play this game and now everyone was happy and two mice got trapped and we all cheered!

Then everyone was getting antsy for some of that caramel pie.  We decided to add a little scoop of cotton candy icecream to the side.  This combo is not for the sweet tooth newbie.  It was AWESOME, but I'm guessing that 98.5% of the people reading this over the age of 18 would think this was sweet OVERLOAD.  Not me, I thought it was delicious!!!

After all that sugar, we popped some popcorn and started watching Mr. Peabody and Sherman.  I had never really heard of it before but was determined to sit through the whole thing, to spend time with my family.  (I'm not usually the best at watching "kid" movies with my kids.)  It was a GREAT movie!  It was entertaining for the parents and the kids!  

After the movie, we were moving into the 11 pm hour.  Really we hadn't made plans about whether we were going to try to stay up all the way till midnight or not.  But the clock was moving pretty fast all night long.   We headed out into the FREEZING cold to do a few sparklers and ground fireworks.  Ava would have nothing at all to do with the fireworks.  She didn't even want us to have anything to do with them, but we did them anyway and told her to go inside and wait if she couldn't handle it.

After we finished all of that, we began to drink as much sparkling apple-grape cider as our tummies could handle.  We almost made it through 2 bottles.  We did cheers to having a good year as a family in 2015.

Somehow we accidentally made it till midnight.  Well....Shawn and I did.  We put the kids in bed about 11:50 and they didn't care at all that they didn't see midnight.  We watched New York ring in the new year and then quickly passed out!  Everyone slept late this morning, which was glorious.  I think I slept the latest I've slept in YEARS...till about 8:45.  

2015 holds lots of exciting new adventures for us.  My first baby will start middle school this year.  My middle baby will begin learning multiplication....please let that go as easily as it did for Elle!  My youngest baby will start Kindergarten.  I will for the first time in 11 years, be at home alone all day.  My best friend will move (BOO!) but she will also have a baby this year (YEA!)  I really don't want to put a lot of expectations on 2015.  I usually expect too much and then get disappointed.  I simply hope that far more days are filled with joy, than sorrow.  That's about it. So happy first day of 2015.  So far, so good.  (all 15 hours of it.)