A muddy search for a tree

Well, the rain finally let up today so we headed out after church in search of our Christmas tree. I absolutely love having a real tree in the house. But thanks to the rain that fell down for 2 days straight we got super muddy. And since Ben still has his cast on and can't walk, we had to push him in a stroller through the mud. And get stuck. And push. And get stuck. Fun times! lol

This is it!
(yeah, and my daughter wore crocks ~ SO not good when walking in the mud!)

My son was less than thrilled to smile for the camera since the sun was in his eyes. I was lucky to even get this picture. Poor kid, I think he's getting pretty tired of that dang cast.

Me and my twin...as we've been called :) She'll probably hate that when she gets older!

But we ended up finding a tree. Not a big one. But one that was just perfect. I don't have it decorated yet. While putting the lights on it I discovered that my bubble lights have bit the dust. They work but there's all kinds of floaties inside the bulbs. Not sure what that is other than maybe they've just had enough Christmases and are ready to be retired. So, I'm off tomorrow in search of new bubble lights. I don't even remember where I bought the ones I have since I've had them for so many years.

Til then, my tree awaits some decorations...

"Mark" the Herald Angels Sing!

Ok, I know the quality of this video is bad and you can't see a thing. But with this one, it's more about what you're hearing than what you're seeing. Here's a picture so you can get a visual

My kids were playing with the Little People nativity set under my son's Christmas tree singing "Hark the Herald Angels Sing". Only, my daughter was sing "Mark the Herald Angels Sing"! I mean, that in addition to singing the lyrics wrong had us cracking up standing outside in the hallway. Too cute! Don't you love sneaking up on them doing something cute?! Just when I think she's grown out of those cute kind of things (cause she's almost 7) she'll come up with something like this.

Enjoy and happy holidays :)

(BTW, be sure to turn off the music on the right first)

turkey leftovers

I thought I'd share with you a couple recipes that I made over the last 2 days using our yummy turkey leftovers. Last night I made mini turkey pot pies. You can find the recipe on Pillsbury's website here. I tweaked the recipe a little by adding canned mixed veggies instead of frozen and I used frozen potatoes. But make sure if you use the frozen kind you simmer longer before putting it in the oven so that the potatoes are cooked. I also added more milk to make it creamier and sprinkled garlic & herb spices on top instead of thyme. They were so yummy!

Tonight I made turkey potato casserole from a recipe I found on allrecipes.com. Great resource for recipes if you haven't gone there before. You can find the original recipe here. I tweaked this one a bit more. I didn't add the onion (yuck) or green beans (that's just weird to me). I also used cream of chicken instead of mushroom and added some milk to make it creamier. I didn't have any cubed chicken so I only used shredded. This one was another hit.

So if you're looking for some recipes to use with your leftovers, give those a whirl!

Happy eating :)

It's beginning to look a lot like...Christmas?

Yeah, it's kinda hard to get in the Christmas spirit with the gloomy weather outside. It started yesterday when we came out of the movies and it's been raining all night and so far all day today. We had planned on going out to get our tree today but that's not looking too promising. Just when you think it's starting to lighten up, more rain comes down. And the idea of trecking through the mud with 2 kids, one of which has a cast and has to be in a stroller, isn't such a fun idea! Oh well, if it doesn't let up today we'll just decorate the house and the kids' trees and hopefully we'll get our family tree tomorrow! Let's hope!

I can't wait for Monday to start filling this up with photos:

It's a daily December album with a page for each day. I got the inspiration for this from Ali Edwards' blog. I can't wait to start filling it with memories!

I'll be sharing more pages as I start filling them up! I'm also making a similar one for ebay.

Well, I can hear my hubby bringing boxes down from the attic so I'm off to decorate the house :)

Cute movie

We don't take part in the shopping craziness of black Friday. Well, last year my hubby went out at 5am to get me a new printer cause mine had died. But we're not usually (ok, never) in the market for a big screen tv, or new video camera, or some expensive electronic gadget like that. And I catch a lot of good sales between October and December. So there's no sense in battling all the craziness to save $5.

Instead I took the kids out to see "Bolt". What a cute movie this was! I was laughing out loud numerous times during the movie. As with a lot of cartoons these days, some of the humor was lost on the kids. But my kids enjoyed it anyway. I especially loved the pigeons...there were New York pigeons, California pigeons and southern pigeons. And the hamster Rhino, he was great (and my favorite!)

My only complaint? Holy cow ~ the PRICE!!! I mean, in my opinion movie theater prices are a bit out of control anyway. But then you add the extra $2.50 charger per person for the 3-D glasses and holy cow, you're up to $27!!! And that was for a matinee ~ for 1 adult and 2 kids!! Does anyone else think this is absolutely ridiculous??!! Well, I can tell you that we won't be going to see another movie any time soon. Who can afford it! This is why we wait til most movies come out on DVD and we either rent them or if we think it's going to be a good movie I'll just buy it. I'm so glad it was a good movie. Cause if I would have paid nearly $40 (with popcorn) for a bad movie I'd be a wee bit irritated. I mean, for $27 I could have bought the movie twice!

But seriously, whether you go to the movies, rent or buy, this movie is very cute :)

Thanksgiving

We ate. We counted our blessings. And we ate again!

Our Thanksgiving was very laid back as usual. It was just the 4 of us. We watched the parade. Did you see Buzz Lightyear and Horton?? My kids were excited about that! We were tortured for hours while the turkey cooked, filling the house with that most awesome aroma. Then we finally got to sit down and have a yummy meal of turkey, mashed potatoes & gravy, green bean casserole, rolls, and all of those yummy foods that go along with turkey day.

And I made sure to cook a big turkey so that we have lots of leftovers! As we at dinner, we went through our ABC's saying things we were thankful for with each letter.

I am, of course, most thankful for these guys

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Christmas cuteness

Every year I buy my kids new Christmas pj's. You may remember this layout I had posted a little while back


I take that back, a year or 2 I didn't buy my daughter pjs cause hers fit from the year before. Usually I leave them wrapped under their trees on Christmas Eve right before we go out for church. And when they come home they have a present to open that night.

And yes, each of my kids has their own Christmas tree :) This idea started years ago when I was little, probably around 8 or 10 years old. My step-mom might remember how old I was. Anyway, one day we went to her brother's house and I was amazed at the fact that they had a Christmas tree in every room. And each one was a different theme. I can still picture them in my head. I can sense a layout idea coming.... Anyway, I thought that was just the coolest thing EVER! So, ever since then I said that when I had my own house that I would do the same thing. Well, we don't do ever year but we usually have at least 3 or 4 full sized trees in our house. It's crazy, it's time consuming, and I absolutely dread putting it all away after the holidays but I LOVE it while they're all up.

Anyway, back to Christmas pj's. Normally I buy my kids the traditional red plaid pjs. But take a look at the cute pjs I just found at The Children's Place:













Aren't these adorable?? And, they were on sale. Even better!! I wanted to get the matching slippers since I was going to get my son some for Christmas anyway, but they didn't have both sizes I needed. Oh well, no biggie.

And check out some of the other cute Etsy Christmas stuff I found. I ordered these cute holiday tags from everyjotandtittle











And how cute are these soaps???









I just love the milk & cookies soap! Too cute!!! You can find those here.


And how about these coffee sleeves? Now I don't drink coffee but I still think these are too cute! You can find those here.

The thing I love about Etsy is that everything is so unique. And best of all ~ handmade!

Oh, and I've also been working on a few Christmas things including lots of tags for Etsy and myself. I'm absolutely in love with the Winter Post stamp set from Stampin' Up and I'm going to package up everything with these tags this year!


So that's just a few Christmas goodies! I'll be back with more soon. Hope you enjoyed :)

P.S. If you're looking for some holiday tags, I have some in my Etsy shop. Click the logo on the right -->

thankful

Yes, I'm thankful despite the comedy of errors that happened here this morning. I've been saying for the last few months that my van is possessed. Because things work and don't work whenever they feel like it. There's no rhyme or reason. Little things. Annoying things. But things that don't affect driving it...til today. Well, my air vents decided that they didn't want to work. Well, let me rephrase that. They work, but only on the floorboards. Great. So when I woke up to frost on my car windows ~ and NO defrost ~ that was a lot of fun. Then, when I went to open the sliding door, the side my son with the broken leg sits on of course, it was frozen shut. To add to all of that, when I turned on my windshield wipers, the one side broke off. GREAT!!! Ahhh, cars are so much fun, aren't they?

But I'm still thankful. Thankful that even though my defroster doesn't work, the van still has heat. Thankful that I have an extended warranty on it that will hopefully cover to fix that and the many other things that are going wrong (the van is 4 yrs old so who knows what will be covered). And I'm thankful for so many other things like a great family, a house to live in, our health such as it is. So many things.

BTW ~ we talked to the dealership today and they said this stuff would be covered if the mileage on the van was under 48,000...we're at 47,150! Keep your fingers crossed that we don't have to pay much...pretty please!

I am also thankful for teachers that have taken care of my son so well with his broken leg. I can't imagine how he would be doing if he were in the Pre-K at the public school. I take that back, he'd be staying home until his cast came off I just know it. I normally don't make teacher gifts for Thanksgiving because they get gifts from me for Halloween, Christmas, Valentines, Teacher Appreciation Week, & End of year. But because Ben's teachers have been so good to him I thought I do a little something for them. I love these candles from Michaels because 1) at 3/$10 they're a great deal and 2) the pumpkin spice one smells so good! I've decorated candles for gifts before but then I saw that Virginia had done some similar ones and they were so cute so I wanted to do some myself. So I picked up a couple yesterday and decorated them up :)

personalized note cards

Every holiday I'm looking for nice (but inexpensive) gifts for teachers, coaches, etc. Even though I only have 2 kids, I have a lot of people to buy for ~ 2 teachers, 2 parapros/teachers aids, preschool director, gymnastics coach, 3 Sunday School teachers, art teacher, music teacher, nurse at school (who my daughter visits several times a year!), and on and on. I don't like to just go out and buy stuff at the store because it seems so impersonal. Plus, I can usually save money while giving a nicer gift if it's handmade.

One of the easiest things to make are personalized note cards. You can make them as fancy or simple as you want. And who wouldn't want to get a set of personalized note cards? The great about these is that the recipient can use these cards for anything...birthday card, sympathy, thinking of you, etc.

Here's a few simple ones I came up with today:

Excuse the lighting, it's pretty dreary out today. The alphabet stamp was a fun stamp set I found in the clearance section at Hobby Lobby. The dotted circle is from the Think Happy Thoughts set. Colors are real red, always artichoke and elegant eggplant. Punches used were the scallop punch & 1 1/4" circle. Add that to a strip of cardstock and voila! Card is standard size.

Oh, and don't forget to personalize your envelopes. No naked envelopes!!

I've given these to teachers for Christmas and they always seem to enjoy them. I'm thinking this year they may be end-of-year gifts, not sure yet.

Holiday Turkey

lizards, cleaning, & lots of Tylenol (and a little scrapbooking thrown in)

Yep, that about sums up my week. Trying to do some catch up from last week. My house is a wreck. The dogs are shedding like CRAZY which means daily vacuuming. Yuck! I swear, I've brushed enough fur off my golden retriever to make a few very warm coats ;-)

Thursday I had a friend in my scrap room

Yeah, this little critter somehow made its way in there. I think it was God's way of saying "hey Michelle, your room's a mess, clean it up!!" I was very proud of myself that I managed to catch him all by myself.

Message to all critters, insects & bugs ~ I realize that my house is nice and warm and there is the occasional crumb on the floor to munch up. But the hotel is CLOSED! Seek shelter elsewhere please!!

I swear, this is the 2nd lizard in the last month that has made it into my house. The last one my dog tried to catch and, well, he lost his tail. Hey, come into a house with 2 big dogs and something's bound to happen! Oh, and did I mention I've also found 2 scorpions in the last month. They were dead, but still!!

Sleeping through the night was short lived. It only lasted one night :( And Friday my son came down with a fever. Great. A broken leg and a fever. Isn't that fun?? He seems to be doing a bit better right now so I'm hoping it was just some little bug that will be gone soon. I really should own stock in Tylenol (or whatever company owns it). Between his broken leg and being sick we're on our 3rd bottle of Tylenol. Sheesh!!

Oh and I'm pretty much finished with my holiday planner. I'll have this one up on ebay tomorrow night.

sleep, wonderful sleep

Last night I actually got to sleep through the night :) Ben didn't wake up once which made me so happy. Not just because I got to sleep but because I'm hoping that means his leg is getting better. Plus, he's been so tired between his leg and lack of sleep.

He didn't want to go to school this morning and was on the verge of tears. I hate that. I know he just wanted to stay home with mommy. But honestly, all he's going to do at home is sit and color and watch tv. And he doesn't have school tomorrow so he can make it through one more morning.

And how could he not want to go to school when he gets carted around in his own personal chariot?

This is how his teachers get him around at school. Problem is, when they pulled out the wagon all the other kids wanted to ride in it, too. Hopefully we won't have a bunch of 4 year olds breaking bones to get rides in the wagon!

As I was doing some errands yesterday, I was SO happy to see this:

Did anyone actually believe it would go this low?? I sure didn't. Hard to believe that just a few months ago it was up to $3.89. Ugh, that made me sick. Hopefully it stays under the $2 for a while...pretty please??

I started working on a Christmas planner yesterday. I've had so many ideas in my head the last few weeks that I haven't had the chance to work on. I'm hoping to finish up some stuff for ebay this weekend and then start working on some Christmas presents for the grandparents. Here's a couple sneaky peeks of the planner I'm working on:


I'm finally dipping into the Basic Grey fruitcake papers....that I bought last year!!! The bird die is a Stampin' Up! Sizzix die. Isn't it cute?!

That's it for now. I have about an hour an a half til I go pick up Ben from school. Gotta finish this planner and start a few other projects!

a little bit of everything

Today is a new day. I know I've said that before. But today Ben went back to school. I'm sure he wanted to just stay home with mommy, in his comfort zone. Where mommy can rub his toes when they feel "funny" (as he says). Where mommy can take care of him. But it's only for 4 hours. And he needs some time with his friends, some time to get back to our normal routine. They haven't called me so that means that his not hurting too much and he's ok.

But I still worry

Worry someone will accidentally trip, kick or step on his leg

Worry that he might fall, lose his balance, or in some other way hurt his leg

I just worry. And I'm not much of a worrier except for when I'm not in control when it comes to my kids

But I know he's fine. He's in a place where he's truly loved by his teachers. They're so great. I joke with the lady who runs the preschool that she spoiled me and then sent me out into the cruel, cold world when my daughter had to go to "big girl" school! Yep, they're great. I was very lucky to find them.

On another subject, when I posted this turkey card I never had a chance to post the directions. So here's how you make the turkey feathers. It's pretty simple, just a little time consuming at first. If you want to make a bunch of these, I would suggest cutting and punching everything out at one time, setting them in piles, and doing a section at a time. Maybe even break the cards up into a couple "sessions" and it won't seem so tedious. I'm thinking of making some placecards for Thanksgiving using this cute turkey. Since it's just the 4 of us that won't be too time consuming.


A couple tips:
When making the feathers, glue down the ones that you just folded over after you do step 3. Otherwise they'll push up and your turkey will pop off!

You will also need the 1 3/8 circle punch for the body, 3/4 circle punch for the head, 1/4 circles for the buttons, Boho Blossoms punch for the beak & feet, a square punch trimmed down for the hat.

I adhered a pop dot under the body and the hat to make him sit better.

BTW, my card size was 4" x 4" but you could do any size.

If anyone wants me to do a video or give more pics on how to make the feathers just let me know. Once you do it once, it's really pretty easy. I may try and do that anyway when I make the placecards.

I also have another couple projects from Wrapper's Delight. I still haven't taken pics of the classes I took and what my Secret Santa got me. Then again, I haven't even unpacked yet! I lost nearly a week with my son's leg and being sick. I still can't believe Thanksgiving is next week!!! Didn't we just start November?? And have you seen my Countdown to Christmas ticker at the top right?? Yeah, that's scary.

Anyway, on to the pictures. This was one of the contests we did. Our lunch each day came in these cute little cardboard lunchboxes.

The contest? You guessed it ~ to decorate it. Unfortunately I didn't take much ribbon with me that weekend, but this is what I came up with:



Simple, but I like it. I'm thinking some white tulle would look cute on the handle. I also brought home 2 more of these lunchboxes so you'll be seeing more of those here soon, I'm sure!

One other contest was a layout contest from Gretchen. We were given this:


and had to make a layout ONLY using those supplies, nothing else. We could die-cut letters out of the papers we had, but we couldn't add anything to the layout (like flowers, ribbon, etc). So this is what I came up with:

It isn't something I would have done on my own but I kinda like it!

Well, I need to get back to cleaning :( Unfortunately, my sinus medicine hasn't kicked in much but my dining room table is covered with crap. And I hate that. I hate piles of stuff everywhere. And that's exactly what happens when someone is sick or something unexpected happens (like last week).

So wish me luck in cleaning so I can share some more scrappy things tomorrow!

movie gift basket

This is the last gift that I gave to my Secret Santa at Wrapper's Delight. These are so much fun to make. Last year I made these for my son's preschool teachers and they really enjoyed them. The popcorn bucket was from Target's dollar bins and I put some chocolates inside of it. I regretted not buying some a while back but I was so happy when I found them again. So if your Target doesn't have them now, just keep looking! Inside the basket there's movie candy, a wrapped Hershey bar, popcorn holders, a card and a gift card holder. As I was posting these pictures I realized I didn't take a picture of the gift card holder :( You can kinda see it in the basket. I used the scallop circle die with my Sizzix.

I wish I would've had a chance to get better pics of everything but I was so busy packing and getting ready that I just didn't have a chance. Oh well!

Stamp sets ~ It's Snow Time, Winter Post
Paper ~ Always Artichoke, Mellow Moss, Real Red
Other stuff ~ Cuttlebug Snowflakes embossing folder, Stickles