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For Unto Us Religious Christmas Card

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Littlest A

So, Littlest A has started crawling!  It's wonderful, but now I have to break out the baby gates and locks and baby proof the house, again.  

Also, I don't mean to brag, but I think we have bred another genius!

I just love and enjoy this little man sooooo much!

Organizing

I LOVE organization!  I wish I were more organized.  I love to look at tips and pictures on pinterest of ways to organize your home and I like reading my MomPom's book, "Sidetracked Home Executives", and dream about implementing all their ideas.  I know, I have little kids now and they take a lot of work, which is a good excuse, but I don't want an excuse.  I want to be organized!  Organization feels warm and happy to me.  So, I am attempting to get more organized, one project at a time.

This week, I was tired of my aluminum foil, cling wrap, sandwich bags, etc. all rolling around whenever I opened my cabinet.  So, I took an over-the-door shoe organizer that I wasn't using anymore, cut it, sewed on some loops and hung it up in my kitchen to store the rolls in.  I made two, so I hung another one on the side of the fridge, but I haven't figured out what I will use it for, yet.

Next, I decided to re-organize my kitchen cabinets.  I told my mom, "I wish the builder would leave instructions on what he intended each cabinet to be used for so that I could have a guide on where to put everything."  Nevertheless, I feel things are getting better organized and I am liking what I'm seeing.  I wanted to move all my spices out of the cabinet and do something creative with them.  Originally, I planned to re-purpose some of littlest A's baby food jars by putting magnets on the bottoms, labeling the lids and sticking them on the side of the fridge with spices in them.  Fortunately, my magnets weren't strong enough and the jars kept falling down.  This failure led me to my success of sticking magnet tape on the back of my existing spice tins, which are already in cute, nicely sized containers, and just sticking them on the side of the fridge.  Now, when I run out, I can just refill the tins!  Love it!

As my Grandma says, "A place for everything and everything in it's place!"

Get Your Gobble On!

We hosted our annual college Thanksgiving dinner at our house this past Thursday for the college students in our church.  There were about 15 guests and they were, as usual, very fun and gracious.  My potatoes were way too garlicky and my gravy was more like mayonnaise in consistency, but nobody said anything or drew attention to them.

The "Fruit Gobbler" joined us again, this year!  I believe he is now a Thanksgiving tradition around our house.

I simplified the meal a little this year because we had a lot of leftovers last year.  This year's feast consisted of a turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, rolls, mashed potatoes and stuffing.

For dessert, Ruth, from church, made us an apple and a pumpkin pie (delicious!) and I made a chocolate chip walnut pie.  Yum!

We didn't have as many leftovers, this year, but enough to save for our actual Thanksgiving so that I don't have to cook a whole other feast.  The kids even liked the food! Woo-hoo!

I am thankful that the Lord has blessed us with these wonderful people! Happy Thanksgiving!

6th birthday!

Even though activities have happened between my last post and now, I feel the need to make this very important and special post.  Hopefully, I will find the time, later, to catch up on all those other activities.

So, without further ado, I present my brand new 6 year old!  Isn't she fabulous?!  I sure think so.

F and Little A spent the night at my parent's house, so we got to focus all of our attention on C (and littlest A) for her birthday.  She chose to go to Pizza Hut for her birthday dinner and then we went to Old C's in Old Town (that's a lot of "Old".  Fitting, since she's getting older.:)) for a big cookie with ice cream.

The next day, C celebrated with three of her girl cousins, all about the same age, with a Hello Kitty party.  Her cousins, and their moms, were so nice to drive all the way up here.  C was thrilled and had such a great time with her cousins.

First, we started with a dizzying game of "Pin the bow on the Kitty".  Please ignore my misspelled poster.  I didn't notice it until B pointed it out.  How embarrassing.  I'm sure the girls were all laughing at me.:)  Aren't you impressed with their bow aim, while blind-folded?  Me too!  I asked each of them if they could see, and they all said no and then promptly placed the bow in the exact right spot.  After the game finished, they admitted that they could see.  Shocker!  So, everyone won on that game!  Woo-hoo!

Next, we moved on to the classic "Drop the clothespin in the jar" game.  C has had some practice at this when playing it at my parent's house.  I was prepared with three different size containers to drop the clothespins in, to get more challenging each round, but the first container proved to be enough of a challenge.  So, we stuck with the one size.  We did a few rounds of this game and, would you guess it...everyone was a winner!  Yeah!

After those rousing games, everyone worked up an appetite, so we sat down for an elegant lunch of homemade pizza, strawberries and strawberry milk.  To quote B, "Pink food is yummy!".  We also had strawberry oreos, pink wafer cookies, pink and white striped wafer cookie straws and rainbow twizzlers (I know, I could have gone with red twizzlers, but I like the rainbow colors).

To work off lunch, we beat up a cat!  I mean, the girls hit the Hello Kitty pinata.  They did a great job!  It was sad, though, to see the pummeled Hello Kitty head all over the floor.  Still, the point of a pinata is  total destruction, so...success!

Finally, we topped the party off with a Hello Kitty ice cream cake.  I was trying to make it taste like a DQ ice cream cake, and it was pretty good.  DQ's is much better, but I was happy with the end result of this one.  I put a layer of hazelnut spread, then crushed up oreos and then Birthday Bash ice cream.  Yummy!  I like the convenience of ice cream cakes because it is all in one.

The girls were very thoughtful with their birthday gifts, too.  Bug and Bear gave her a new outfit for her American Girl doll as well as a hair brush for her doll.  C said that she is going to dress her doll in the new winter outfit when it is snowing and in her other dress when it is warmer.  Iz gave her a drawing kit (it shows her the steps to draw different animals and pictures), a Barbie and Hello Kitty pj's (which C put on after everyone left and wore the rest of the day).

Everyone got a Hello Kitty party bag and Hello Kitty tissue paper flowers to take home.

So, happy 6th birthday to Cb's and happy 6th parenting birthday to B & A!