Oops...

Wow, I'm a horrible blogger.  It's been 8 months since my last post.  That's almost an entire pregnancy.  Not that I'm pregnant. (Sorry, that one's not gonna happen again!)  Life has been somewhat chaotic, I suppose.  Since I last blogged, I have given up my job working outside of the home to try my hand at staying home full time.  It's been 3 weeks so far, and I'm enjoying it.  I am documenting this now so that I can look back fondly later to say, "What was I thinking??"  The lack of a second income is somewhat daunting, but I have visions of grandeur with meal planning and saving money on groceries.  I'll let you know how that works out for me.  Perhaps even post some of the recipes that I love most from time to time.  Most of all, I must say that I am enjoying the quality time with my children that I have missed out on so long.  I may have missed some of their more important milestones, but I must say that assisting with a cow eye dissection with my 10 year old's class today was quite memorable!  Definitely not an experience one typically encounters in the working world.  Unless you're a biologist, or the teacher conducting the dissection. 

In case you were wondering, Princess has only gotten more and more precocious in the past few months.  She's preparing to enter Kindergarten in the fall, and please make sure you only say Kindergarten to her, because she is NOT going to "school", for that's not what it is in her mind.  She is eager to carry a backpack and a lunchbox because that's what big girls do.  I will enjoy the next few months with my last baby and soak up all I can before sending her off into the "big girl" world. 

My son just recently got stitches out this past weekend from a nasty slice he obtained from his Swiss Army knife.  He is very adamant that he wasn't playing with it.  At 1 in the morning.  In front of the computer.  Cause that's what everyone does at that time of the night.  Don't you?  Just a few more days and we'll be thrown back into the chaotic world of gymnastics, baseball, and scouts.  Not to mention Princess' t-ball games.  How did I ever manage to fit all this stuff into a career woman's schedule? 

I must admit that it's much nicer to be able to make many more home-cooked meals now that I'm home, and none of this, "Oooh, we have a game tonight, and I'll be home with 10 minutes to spare before we have to scurry off, quick throw a pizza in the oven."  I do think we need to invest in a chest freezer though, as I'm quickly running out of room in our tiny fridge/freezer for all the meal planning I'm trying to do.  Well, as it's nearly midnight, I will close this post with a recipe for some really good brownies I made last night.  I got this recipe from http://www.allrecipes.com/:

MMMMM.....Brownies

Ingredients:

1/2 c. white sugar
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp water
1 1/2 c. semisweet chocolate chips
2 eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2/3 c. all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt


1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and grease an 8x8 inch square pan.
2. In a medium saucepanm combine the sugar, butter and water.  Cook over medium heat until boiling.  Remove from heat and stir in chocolate chips until melted and smooth,  Mix in the eggs and vanilla.  Combine the flour, baking soda and salt; stir into the chocolate mixture.  Spread evenly into the prepared pan.
3. Bake for 25-30 minutes in the preheated oven until brownies set up. Do not overbake! Cool in pan and cut into squares.


Enjoy!!  These are sinfully delicious, didn't last more than a day in my house.  Diet, what?

Arizona Trip 2011 - Part A (let's try it this way!)

Blonde moment

Get used to this, I have lots of them. I guess it's helpful when I actually set the permissions on the pictures I post to SHARE..... ok, well they should be viewable now. Please let me know if I didn't fix it. 

New pics added

Ok my many fans.... (all 3 of you!) C'mon guys, would it kill more of you to follow me? I know you're reading.... I see you on my stats. Hahaha....

Anyway.... I finally managed to get up off my tush and upload some pics from vacay. I got as far as Dodge City and that's only 1/4 of the pics I took. Ugh. The link to the Picasa album is on the left side of my blog, incidentally titled, "Arizona Trip 2011". If some of the pics bore you, imagine what they did to me while I was there! Enjoy! I will upload more when I've had like 5 energy shots and all night to hang out on the computer. So there.

We survived vacay!

Sorry that I've negelcted my blog, but I was kinda driving across the country and back for the past couple of weeks.  Well, not the entire time, but a good chunk anyway.  The fact that I'm making this new post shows that hubby didn't end up ditching me on the side of the road, but I'm sure he was tempted a time or two.  The children were actually pretty decent aside from the little Princess wanting to stop at EVERY rest stop, yet refusing to wash her hands.  Thank the Lord for hand sanitizer!! 

So we started late at night on a Friday, drove all the way through to Saturday evening where we stopped just a few hundred miles shy of Dodge City.  After that long in the car, we all needed some unwinding time, not to mention that wonderfully underrated sleep thing.  Here's the kids looking adorable in the hotel room....

After some much needed rest and relaxation, we hit the road the next morning with the intent on stopping in Dodge City, due to the fact that hubby and I are such huge Wyatt Earp and Wild West fanatics.

  We're such nutjobs our son is even named after him.....

Anyhow, we had some great times in Dodge City, checking out the sites, looking through the museum, experiencing an authentic "chuck wagon" dinner, and watching a variety show at the Long Branch Saloon, complete with dancing girls.  Princess got to do her version earlier that day.... see below:



The best part was after the pianist stopped playing, and Princess walks to the edge of the stage, looks squarely at her, crosses her arms and says, "Ahem?"  What kind of monster have I created??  After the show, she desperately wanted to be up front with the dancing girls, so I let her go.  They fell in love with her immediately, and even went so far as to put a can-can skirt on her,

 

and show her how to properly lift it. 












She also managed to purchase a souvenir garter off of one of the girls who then insisted that they get their chance to put it on her:

Such a ham I have....

There was supposed to also be a gunfight re-enactment, but unfortunately at the time they were supposed to do it, a freak thunderstorm rolled through, cancelling the gunfight.  My ever-optimistic son was saying repeatedly, "Maybe it's a tornado!"  Hmmm.... it IS Kansas.....

We survived the "tornado" and took our spoils and left Dodge City to head off to AZ....

Got to AZ less than a day later, and then the good luck with the vehicle started.  Sigh.
The following morning, we go to start my truck, and..... it doesn't.  Come to find out, my fuel pump went bad.  Hmmm.... guess I could be grateful it didn't occur in the middle of nowhere USA, but I'd rather stew. 
Several hundred dollars later, we were enjoying the wonderful weather with my wonderful parents and sisters and nieces and nephews :

But it's a dry heat!!!  It's still hot....



Towards the end of our stay in AZ, my brakes start grinding.  Ugh.  They're not supposed to do that.... especially prior to a cross country drive!  Several hundred more dollars, and we have new front brakes and rotors.  This vehicle is not allowed to have any more problems for the rest of its life. 

We begin our trip home with a new fuel pump and new brakes and rotors and everything was smooth sailing.  Until we reached a border checkpoint in El Paso and my children pick that precise time to start muttering in what sounds like Swedish.  My hubby says, "I've never been to jail....".  I find myself telling the children to speak English before we reach the border patrol guard.  Wow.  How often have you imagined yourself saying that one?? 

I took nearly a thousand pictures of the trip, and I will try to upload them to photobucket or something along those lines, but for now I need to get some sleep since I didn't get much on the road.

Countdown to Vacay!

So the time has come for the Douglas clan to venture on our annual cross-country trip to the desert to visit my family...

 I'm excited... and freaked out. It always happens the week before a trip anywhere. Panic mode. What will I forget?? No matter how many lists I make, no matter how beserk I drive that wonderful husband of mine asking if I'm forgetting things, no matter how organized I get, I am bound to forget something.  Hopefully it won't be something too important.....

Now if you thought that I was insinuating that I'd forget my kids.... you were right.  Could I possibly?  No.  My daughter doesn't let me out of her sight, much less let me forget that she's not with me. 

For those that are thinking I just let the whole world know my house is going to be empty for a couple weeks, not so!  There will be someone staying at my house along with my huge, obnoxious, ravenous German Shepherd.  Did I mention ravenous?

So let the countdown begin, and as the end draws nearer, I may have a few hairs missing off my head, my kids will be a nervous wreck from my snapping at them left and right, and my hubby just may be tempted to leave me on the side of the road.

DIY mini chalkboard

As promised in my previous post, I created little chalkboards to include in the goody bags I gave to the party guests.  They came out really good, and were easy and cheap!!

I was at AC Moore the other day perusing for the decorations for the minion cupcakes when I saw a jar of chalkboard paint and the little hamster wheel in my head started turning. The jar ran about $7....

The next aisle over, I found these little wooden "tavern boards" for $1 each. Lightbulb! 

I thought to myself, "I could make little chalkboard slates for the kids", knowing how much Princess loves to draw on stuff.   It took about 4 coats of the chalkboard paint to get a decent coverage on the wood.  Princess wanted to paint the ends hot pink, so I picked up some acrylic paints.  I painted the ends, and then decided to use the white acrylic paint I had picked up to paint Princess's dollhouse Adirondak chairs to paint the opposite side of the board. 

The little bottles of acrylic paint were about $1 each.  I used those sponge applicators on a stick to apply the paint.  We already had a stash of them, but I saw they were about $1 for four of those.  After getting to this point, I thought the backs were awfully plain.  Once again, I ventured out and got more acrylic paint and some stencils.  I saw these really cute rose stencils and an alphabet stencil.  I believe those were about $5 each, but you can re-use those things for like, ever!  I attempted to stencil the names using the finest brush I had with black acrylic paint, but the wood kept soaking it up, making it look splotchy.  So I had to settle for using a felt tip pen.  I then used a sealant on all surfaces except the chalkboard section.

This is what the finished product looked like, front and back.  I also gave each child a few pieces of chalk.  Your kids could even help you paint.... mine did!