The kids and I visited my parents last weekend, and while we were there, it was brought up that Noah will be old enough to go to bible school with Emma at my parents' church this summer. Noah was really excited, at least until my mom pointed out that kids who go to bible school need to wear underwear instead of diapers. I can tell he's been thinking about this quite a bit lately, because a few times since then, completely out of nowhere, he has said, "I want to wear diapers to bible school!"

This morning he told me that he wanted to wear underwear so he could go to bible school so I gladly helped him put on a pair of his little Thomas underwear instead of a diaper. A little while later he said he had to pee, so he sat on the potty and did it. I sang our little "Noah peed in the PAH-TEE!" celebration song and we clapped and cheered. As soon as the fanfare was over, he stood up and said, "So, should we go to bible school now?"

He did great all day - enough that I encouraged him to wear his underwear while we picked Emma up from school and then stopped at Target afterward. Once we'd gotten everything we needed at Target, we went to check out and got in line behind a nice woman who turned around and smiled at the kids. She asked Noah his name, and he grinned proudly and said, "Noah, and I have underwear in my pants!"

(And because the pictures of Noah on the potty are a little too indecent to share with the world, here is a lovely G-rated picture of Allie, who is hopefully picking up some tips from her brother's new skill.)

I picked up all the Girl Scout cookies last weekend and have been slowly distributing them to the Daisy Scouts this week. We did end up having snow days yesterday and today so I still have quite a few boxes in my living room. I will be so glad when all this cookie business is over. My kids, on the other hand, probably won't. No matter how many times I tell them to leave the cookie boxes alone, they just look at the stack of boxes and see a big jungle gym and they can't quite keep themselves away. Those boxes have been played with so much in the last week that I'm a bit concerned that, instead of Girl Scout cookies, everyone is going to be receiving Girl Scout cookie crumbs.This week has been a little rough for me. This is a really hard month for Steve at work and he will be working minimum fourteen hour days throughout January. Tonight we picked him up and went out for dinner, then dropped him back off at work, and that was the first time he's seen the kids all week. Which means that I've been alone, stuck in the house with these three, all week long and there's no hope for an end to it soon. Really, for the most part it's not so terrible, but doing bedtime alone stresses me out. By the time I'm putting them to bed, I feel like my patience for the day is completely spent. Of course, they never want to go to bed and there is SO much dawdling and messing around that most nights are not without some yelling on my part. :( At the same time, I know Steve is probably feeling stressed at work so I'm trying to find a happy medium between wallowing in my own misery and feeling sorry for him, too. Besides, now the kids are asleep and I'm free to do as I please, and poor Steve is still at work at 11:09 on a Friday night. I hope we will get to see him for a few hours this weekend, although I'm not really counting on it. Heaven help me get through this month!

Anyway, that's enough whining. Have a good weekend!

Brrr! It's been crazy cold here and we've gotten quite a bit of snow recently. It's actually snowing right now with something like 3-6 more inches expected by tonight. I know a lot of people don't like snow, but I am perfectly happy to snuggle up inside (where it is nice and warm) and watch the snow fall outside. The public schools in our area have had four snow days so far this year, but Emma's school hasn't been off at all yet. I was joking with her other car pool driver this morning that her school isn't for the wimps, but it really does seem silly to call off school so much.
We've been getting a lot of citrus fruits in our weekly produce deliveries, and I've been wanting to try making some candied orange peels. Yesterday we gave it a go, and I think they were a hit. The kids liked them a lot, and I thought they were okay. After munching on them plain for a minute or two, Emma suggested we smear some Nutella on them. I love that kid. Candied orange peels + Nutella = a little bit of heaven.

Inspired by all the snow we have here, Emma was on a bit of a snowflake making binge the other day. She cut out dozens of paper snowflakes and when she was finished, it looked like a snowstorm had blown through our kitchen. Our table and floor were covered with hundreds of tiny scraps of paper, so I handed her the broom and suggested she get to sweeping.Noah and Allie soon realized that they could make a snowstorm of their own by throwing the little pieces into the air. After many of her attempts to combine all the pieces into a single pile were thwarted by her little brother and sister, Emma tossed down the broom in frustration and said, "How am I supposed to get anything done with these little kids around?!" I had to tell her, honestly, I have no idea. I've been wondering the same thing for years.

Since I last updated, we've been busy with lots of Christmas stuff and some not-so-Christmasy stuff.We made a bunch of treats, including what I think is now my most favorite cookie ever. This Date Spice Loaf was pretty awesome, as well.There was some crafting, although not as much as I would have liked. Noah made ornaments this year for the first time and I think we was pretty pleased with himself.For her ornaments this year, Emma devised an elaborate plan for embroidered Christmas trees with ornaments but once she (finally) finished one of those, she decided to wait and make those when she's nine instead. At the last minute, we went to Michael's and bought a kit that included everything needed to make twelve beaded tree ornaments. They ended up being really cute and all of them took her about an hour total. Perfect.We had a visit from Santa, which I think makes this the first year since we've been married that Santa has actually been organized enough to come before we leave for the holidays. Way to go, Santa!Pretty much everything Noah got this year (from everyone) had to do with trains. He is obsessed with Thomas these days and I thought he might get a little tired of the train gifts, but nope. We got him these train slippers and he has hardly taken them off since he opened them.We spent a couple great days at my parents' house, where it was non-stop fun except for one small part involving Emma puking all over herself at my grandma's house. Minus that, it was the perfect Christmas. I hope you had a wonderful holiday as well!

Tomorrow morning is when I have to turn in all the paperwork for the cookie sales for Emma's entire Daisy Scout troop. The girls turned in their orders to me almost a month ago so I've had quite awhile to complete this ridiculous amount of paperwork, but so far I've done exactly nothing. That is, of course, why I decided to update my blog right now - I just love a little procrastination!I've sort of been dreading putting up our tree this year because (if this year is anything like last year) I don't want to deal with rehanging a bunch of ornaments every time it gets knocked down, but also because it takes up a lot of space, and space here is pretty limited to begin with. Our train table, which is in the exact spot where we always put our tree, gets a lot of use every day so I was reluctant to move that as well. When I was complaining about all this to my mom, she suggested a perfectly wonderful plan - get a smaller tree! The kiddos and I picked one out this week and it's itty bitty but I am totally thrilled with it. I went through all our ornaments and picked out the ones that weren't breakable, didn't have much or any sentimental value, and didn't have any chokable parts. I packed those away and gave all the rest to the kids to decorate the tree however they wanted. It still looks plenty festive, it doesn't take up much room, and so far it's only fallen once. What more could a person want?St. Nicholas came to our house over the weekend and, in addition to some fun stuff for the kids, he also brought me this necklace. My, but he has good taste! I can't say for sure, but I'm betting he got the necklace here.
Oh yeah, and we're still into "fancy" around here.

Good golly, how can this week already be over? I've been meaning to blog about Thanksgiving, but now it's already been over a week so I'll try not to bore you with details.We spent a few days at my parents' house, which was great as always. The weather was amazing so we were able to enjoy some time outside before it got really cold.
We baked cookies, and one thing is for certain: Emma is still a huge fan of sprinkles.Steve was out of town for three days this week. This is the first time he's traveled in over a year, so I really can't complain, but I don't know how I did it when he used to travel all the time. Overall, everything went pretty smoothly while he was gone (even bedtimes!), so the biggest problem was just that I missed having him around.Emma had a little friend over today and they dragged all the old, forgotten fancy dress-up clothes up from the basement. It made me sad when Emma stopped wearing fancy dresses everywhere she went, but it looks like maybe Noah is trying to bring it back. Here he is traipsing around Cactus Grill tonight in his new "favorite dress".Now I'm off to go drink some wine and watch Love Actually with the husband. Have a great weekend, everybody!

The kids and I did something fun this year that I think will become a family tradition for us. I came across the Samaritan's Purse website and I thought my kids would really enjoy preparing shoe boxes for their Operation Christmas Child project.

I was a little nervous that they might have a hard time picking out a bunch of stuff they liked and then giving it all away, but I didn't need to be. Other than one isolated incident involving Noah trying to take a Jolly Rancher from one of the boxes after they were all packed, they were really excited about sending presents to little kids who wouldn't otherwise be getting very much, if anything, for Christmas.
Emma, Noah, and Allie each got to send a box to a kid in their own age group, although we helped Allie with hers, of course. We went to Target and the dollar store and picked out a bunch of fun goodies to fill the boxes. After we bought the stuff, Emma and Noah drew pictures to put in the boxes, along with photos of themselves.Yesterday we brought our boxes to the drop-off place and watched as hundreds and hundreds of shoe boxes were loaded onto a truck. I'll be getting an email that will tell us where our boxes went and possibly some info about the kids who received them, so we're all looking forward to that. I already marked this on my 2010 calendar and am excited about continuing this tradition every year!

Ta-DAH!I mastered the granny square, so on Saturday morning Steve and the kids dropped me off at the yarn store and drove around while I browsed and picked out yarn for an afghan. I take my kids a lot of places, but going into a yarn store with a five year old, a two year old, and a one year old is not something I am willing to do. I can just see the employees ringing up hundreds of dollars worth of expensive yarn that my kids managed to unroll, tangle, and destroy in a matter of minutes.

Since I picked out the yarn, I have been granny square-ing as fast as I can, which is admittedly not that fast. I have stayed up way too late the past two nights, working on my squares, so hopefully it won't be too terribly long before I have a completed afghan! Hooray!

A couple weeks ago I had to run into an Eddie Bauer store to check and see if they had something, and while I was there I stuck my hand into a fluffy-looking slipper. The inside of it was so wonderfully, incredibly soft and fluffy that I immediately considered buying the pair. I talked myself out of it, mostly because I always prefer to have bare feet and therefore have never been a slipper person, and also because the slippers looked like they should be worn by someone who is about 98 years old. Several times in the next week or two, I realized that my feet were a bit chilly and I thought longingly of those warm and cozy slippers that I hadn't bought. Saturday evening I couldn't resist anymore, so we went back to Eddie Bauer and I purchased the slippers. I am telling you, these slippers are absolutely heavenly, and I've been wearing them nonstop since I got them. And if I happen to look like I should be shuffling around in a nursing home, so be it. That's a small price to pay for comfort of this magnitude.

Well, I never got the basement cleaned and organized (which probably shouldn't be a surprise to anyone) but I did make some progress in other areas. After studying various youtube videos last night, I made my first attempt at crochet. Are you ready for this? It's going to knock your socks off!Impressive, huh? Not sure why my stitch count seemed to be decreasing with each row, but it doesn't matter anyway, because I today I started another piece and apparently I corrected whatever I was doing wrong the first time. I know it's hard to believe I could create anything that would surpass my original work, but here you go:After that I was feeling confident enough to attempt a granny square. You might notice that there is absolutely nothing "square" about this at all, but don't let that bother you because I think I've figured out what I was doing wrong.Today I also managed to drag out and work on an old unfinished project,
as well as something new.Be ready for more crochet excitement to come soon! (And if you're asking yourself if crochet and excitement belong in the same sentence together, just wait!)

My mom came to visit this weekend, and just left this morning. Her visits are always so great that I feel a little down in the dumps when she leaves, but today is not so bad. Right now it's chilly and yucky outside but warm in here, I have soup cooking on the stove and bread rising on the counter, and (best of all) both babies are sleeping. We will also be seeing my family again in less than two weeks so that helps too!

The only bad part about my mom's visit is that she played Candy Land with Noah, and now that's all he wants to do. I strongly dislike Candy Land to begin with, but Noah's version mostly involves a lot of throwing the cards around, and guess who is usually stuck picking most of them up. For that reason, Candy Land is now hidden back in the game closet, and hopefully soon forgotten.I have not done any sewing or knitting in quite awhile, but lately I am itching to start doing those things again. My goal this afternoon is to get the basement cleaned and organized so I can at least get to my sewing machine without having to wade through mounds of toys and clutter. In addition to new things, there are many (many, many, many) unfinished projects that are calling my name. I also need to learn how to crochet because I want to do this. Of course, it's so easy to sit here at the computer and be inspired by other people's projects; the problem is actually finding the time to work on projects of my own. However, today I am vowing to make that a priority, so hopefully I'll have some crafty things to show here pretty soon.

On our first Valentine's Day together, Steve and I had been dating for almost a year. For his present, I made him a scrapbook of of our first year together. (I obviously didn't know him very well then because Steve doesn't care about that kind of stuff at all and, although he didn't say so at the time, I'm sure he thought it was a lame present.) Still, I really liked making it and I wanted to keep scrapbooking after that. I had good intentions and I still worked on scrapbooks after Emma was born, but by the time Allie was born five years later, I had about two years worth of scrapbooks and three years worth of photographs shoved in a shoe box. My last scrapped page was before Noah's birth, and the task of trying to catch up seemed pretty daunting - especially when I thought about the huge mess of scrapbooking stuff I had to drag out to do it.This summer I started looking at my friend Christina's blog, in which she posts pictures of her digital scrapbook pages. Her pages were so cute that I was inspired to give digital scrapbooking a try. It's cheap, fun, and best of all - no mess! I started scrapping current pictures and worked my way back and it didn't take me long at all to get several months finished. Once I had eighty pages complete, I ordered a photo book. I was so very pleased with how it turned out! The quality was excellent.
In addition to the first book I had printed, I now have almost two more complete. I am completely up to date, and have gone all the way back to when Allie was born. It's a great relief for me to get these pictures scrapped, and making the pages is a lot of fun for me as well.Right now, I'm feeling a little stuck because the next pictures I need to scrap are of Allie's birth. My friend Deanna took over 500 wonderful pictures during her birth and I need to go through them and pick out the ones I want to use. Mostly though, I am not sure how to create pages that can portray the emotions involved in her birth. I want to make them special, something more meaningful than just another typical afternoon-at-the-pumpkin-patch type of page.Anyway, I guess the point of this post is, if you are considering trying digital scrapbooking, I highly recommend it!

Here's a tip. If your baby learns to spit her water and thinks it's funny, don't encourage her because she might never again take a drink without spitting it out afterward. Really, don't do it, no matter how cute it might have been in the first place.

Emma apparently can't get enough of school, because every afternoon she sits at the table and draws and writes, and writes and draws, then draws and writes some more. She is very into learning to read and she spends a lot of time trying to sound out new words and writing them down. Yesterday afternoon she was working on something that she wouldn't let me see and she only asked for my help once, although I was kind of confused about why she was asking me to spell "ing".

Last night when I went to bed I found this on my pillow."Thank you for love ing me very much."

Thank you, Emma, for making it so easy.

We spent the weekend at my parents' house and, as always, we had a great time. After Trunk or Treat at school the night before and then a day of general Halloween festivities, the kiddos were plum tuckered by the evening when it was time to go Trick or Treating. Noah, who has never ever ever in his entire life admitted to being tired, said that was too worn out to go on after only about two houses. Allie fell asleep in my arms a few minutes later, so it turned out that Emma was really our only Trick or Treater.

Every year we spend Halloween at the house of some good family friends, and I wanted to bring some sort of cute Halloween treat to share this year. I stumbled across Bakerella's Halloween cake pops, and I thought they would be perfect. While all of hers are super cute, I thought it would be a good idea to make mine a little simpler. Not only would they be way less trouble, considering I have three less-than-meticulous helpers, but they would probably be more pleasant to eat, given that there would be no black licorice or anything like that to pick off before eating them.Emma and I rolled the gooey cake mixture into many, many little balls. I thought that was the messiest job ever, but no. The part where we dipped them into chocolate was much, much worse, probably because we also enlisted the help of Noah and even Allie. You would not believe the huge globs of chocolate that were flying around my kitchen. Note a couple of those globs in the picture below.In the end, the cake balls were absolutely delicious, and I think everyone liked them. We also wrapped each one in cellophane and tied them with little orange ribbons so they were cute too, although not quite on par with Bakeralla's. Still, have you ever seen anyone look more excited about a cake pop?

This is a random cute picture I took the other day. Emma likes to play games on the computer and Noah will sit there, watching intently, for a surprisingly long amount of time.

Yesterday Emma was asking me about saints, and what sort of things people have to do to become saints. I told her that to be considered for sainthood, someone basically has to spend his or her entire life doing really nice things for other people. "What about me?" she asked hopefully. "I obey the Girl Scout Law at all times!"

Last night at dinner, I think I qualified myself for some sort of bad mommy award. We were eating at Spin, and Noah and I were sitting in a booth seat that stretched along the entire length of one wall, well past our own table. He kept running along the seat, which was not such a big deal until someone else sat at one of the other tables along the wall. I didn't want him disturbing their meal, so I asked him to sit down and stay at our table. And I asked him again. And again. And again. Like a typical two year old, his impulse control is not the best and he just couldn't stop himself from running along the vast expanse of seat that stretched before him. I was getting so sick of chasing him down, and I really just wanted to sit and eat my delicious eggplant and goat cheese pizza. He is pretty sensitive these days to things being scary ("hairy"), especially dinosaurs, so without really thinking about it, when he started to take off again, giggling hysterically, I just casually said, "Well, watch out for the dinosaurs." Screeeech. I've never seen him stop so fast and stand so still. "Dinosaurs?" I didn't even say anything else, but immediately he was back and asking to sit in my lap. A few minutes later when I asked him to move, he said something about the dinosaurs coming for him. I told him that I was just teasing about the dinosaurs, but he still seemed a little nervous. I did feel sort of bad about it, but not bad enough to keep me from enjoying myself for those few peaceful moments!

Our last week was really a drag, due to a sick baby. Allie was sick pretty much all week and I was up with her what seemed like all night, every night. When she gets sick her temperature gets so high and it kind of freaks me out a little bit. One night she was all the way up to 104.7 and I found myself wondering at what point I should take her to the hospital. Luckily, she seems to be a lot better now, which means a much happier baby and a much more well-rested mommy. I'm sure everyone in my family is thankful for that!
This weekend we raked leaves in the yard, just so we could have the opportunity to jump in them. Emma and Noah loved it. I've never seen two people more thrilled about having yard waste thrown at them.I thought Allie might like it too, so I put her in the leaf pile. I don't know if it was because she wasn't feeling well or if she just isn't into playing in leaves, but she apparently didn't enjoy it nearly as much as her brother and sister!