Weekend Fun

      Did you have a good weekend?  We did! On Saturday we had Cady's birthday party here at home. She invited six of her little kindergarten friends and of course there was cake and ice cream and presents. She had a good time but was a little overwhelmed ( it was her first party with friends, we usually have a party with all our family and relatives before they are in school.) so thankfully I had planned on it only being two hours long. They had a great time, Nyla helped out a lot and Gabe, well Gabe didn't quite understand the concept that all the presents were Cady's and he wanted to open them all! He was quite upset and would go into a corner and cry pitifully, it broke my heart! We had a nice long snuggle after the party, he and I, while the girls played littlest pet shops for a bit.









     Then daddy had the idea to go down to the park close to our house and check out if the lake was frozen. So, we bundled up, hopped in the truck and went down there to check it out, little realizing how freaking cold it was out! It wasn't so bad on most of the trail that was in the trees and bushes, but as soon as we were in the open and especially down by the water, it was super windy and FREEZING! Seriously, I think it was about -26 out. It was pretty neat seeing how much everything was frozen (our lake doesn't actually freeze over, as there are a few dams further down.) there was a good portion that was frozen solid close to the shore as you can see in the right side of the picture below.








    On Sunday, Pat took the girls up skiing while Gabe and I had a quiet day at home, which was really nice. I had one of those days where I could think of a million things I COULD do, but alas got nothing done. Well, not really nothing, I did a few loads of laundry and read a few chapters of my current book ( I'm reading A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon) That is definitely my favorite part about winter, snowflakes falling outside, nice warm fire inside, curled up in a cozy blanket, drinking a cup of tea (or hot chocolate if you prefer) and reading a good book. What's your favorite part of winter? Do you have fresh snow too?

Operation DD Part 3

Whew! What a job this is turning out to be! But it feels good to get things done and organized. The last week or so I've been working on our paperwork system and where to store our craft stuff. Here is a picture of my "storage albums" I think I mentioned awhile ago about doing the Library of Memories, well this is a part of it and I've actually been working on my system for quite a few months. Anyways, this is all of our printed pictures for the last ten years, yes I said ALL and I said ten years! Amazing isn't it? Well it is to me, although, I have been quite lax in printing pictures for the last few years  (there are maybe twenty pictures in each of 2008-2010, but hey no body's perfect right?) So, since January I've been organizing and printing off all our digital pictures, which has been a challenge to say the least! 

Top shelf has a couple storage binders, my category drawers and my cold storage box. Second shelf has all my storage binders from 2002 to 2008. Bottom shelf has some of my cardstock, my scrapbook magazines and a few other crafty books.

Ever since I stopped doing daycare in our home, I've been trying to figure out where to store our kids' craft stuff. Well this is a cupboard in our kitchen, right close to our dining table where they now do most of their crafts and colouring.

The top shelf has (L to R) box of our tea party cups (we like tea parties :) pencil crayons, crayons, and markers in labeled bins ( I LOVE my label maker!) and the bottom shelf has our work books and craft idea books, big bin has colouring books, to the right of that is bins with the girls beads, then next is paper. The very front has a container with foam stickers and a bin with other miscellaneous craft stuff like glue sticks, glitter, scissors, hole punch.

The only problem is that although this cupboard is great, this is only the basics and only about a third of all the craft supplies we have collected :) the rest are in boxes in the basement that I still need to go through and probably give half away to Cady's kindergarten class.

Then last but not least is all our grown up paperwork. In the fall, I found the Power of Moms website and it has been great, they have a system for organizing all your paperwork and it sounds fantastic enough that I gathered all the various boxes full of paperwork stuff and started organizing. I'm still in the process of organizing it all ( I used to be really organized with this kind of stuff and I'm not quite sure when I lost control of it, maybe sometime during the 3 moves in 2 1/2 yrs tee hee) so I shall post some pics when I have sorted it all out.

Well, that is all for now, I hope you all are well and maybe I've inspired you to start "spring cleaning" a little early this year. :)

Happy Valentines Day!

Ten things I love about You!

(in no particular order)

1.  You always make me laugh (even when I don't necessarily want to!)

2. You are always there for me (and our kids) steady as a rock.

3. You are my best friend.

4. You always listen to my crazy ideas and you bring me back down to earth from the more wild and crazy ones.(even though sometimes it drives me crazy trying to get you to take a chance)

5. You are so patient both with me and with our kids

6. You always have some kind of story or nugget of gossip information or a funny/raunchy joke to tell me at the end of the day.

7. Your smile ( although the one above is a little overboard :)

8.Your ability to get along with just about anybody.

9. The fact that together we produced three of the most wonderful kids in the world!

10. Your love of animals

Happy Valentines Day Honey and to all the rest of you out there too!!

Happy Birthday Pat!

Last week we celebrated Pats 30th birthday. Happy Birthday honey!  I keep teasing him that he's my old man but I'll catch up in a couple months :) That cake looks pretty pathetic but rest assured we loaded it up with whipped cream on top. It was a chocolate oatmeal cake and it was yummy!

Here's our sick Nyla, she was sick all last week and now Gabe and Cady are feeling it too.

Last week the younger two were feeling fine and they enjoyed all the fresh new snow we got :)

And they were so cute snuggled up reading "Brown Bear" together.

While I got some more organizing and scrapbooking done. Here is one of the four pages I did, it's about making cookies with Nyla in 2005!! Now, some might say that is pretty far behind, but last year I took an online course called Library of Memories with Stacy Julian and it was fantastic! I will have to do a post about that soon, but the basic idea is, you are not behind and you don't have to "catch up" with scrapbooking if you are organized properly.

How is your winter going? Are you enjoying some new snow? Or are you (like me) enjoying the excuse to be indoors and get some crafty things done? Do tell!

Organizing, weight loss, and a sick kid :)

    Been busy still doing the organizing and stuff, as well as, I started a weight loss program and so far so good! I haven't been posting much as we've been busy and I've been being a good mommy to Nyla as she's been sick since saturday. The doctor even thought she might have pneumonia, so we had to get her chest xrayed as that's the only way to tell for sure. But all is well and she is feeling much better today and no pneumonia so we're all good. Can't do a really good post yet as I have to go make dinner but will catch up later this week. Hope you all have been able to dodge the sickness bullet so far this winter!