Christmas

I hope eveyone out there had a wonderful Christmas. We did. A little warm, but wonderful!

My son read one of the prayers of the faithful at Christmas Eve mass.

He did really well!

My daughter was an angel at mass. She did really well too!

Texas Christmas (Part 3 of 3)

Here is the last installment...

Festive, Lighted Houses...

Ornaments on Tree Branches...

Texans are ready for Santa

from our neighborhoods

To Our Ranches!

Merry Christmas from Texas!!

Texas Christmas (Part 2 of 3)

Here's part 2 of a Texas Christmas...

A Texas Snowman.

A Reindeer? Could it be?

Of course we have Santa and...

An oilwell Christmas Tree!

Come back tomorrow for part 3!

Texas Christmas (Part 1 of 3)

Welcome to everyone on the Bloggyland tour of the North Pole!

I thought I'd let the North Pole elves and reindeer take a break from

making toys and playing reindeer games to see how we celebrate

Christmas down South....

We, too, have snow covered houses and...

here is Santa's big sleigh!

Look! Texas Snowflakes!

And a snowless, December day!

Come back tomorrow to see part 2!

Kids are funny

Today we went out for lunch and my daughter found a french fry on her plate that looked like a cresent moon. She immediately became "attached" to this french fry! She named it "Frenchie" and refused to eat it. She also insisted on bringing it home and tried to keep it in her closet. Then, poor Frenchie broke so she wanted to tape it. I explained that you can't tape a french fry so we compromised on putting it in the freezer and "freezing it back together"!

So, now I have "Frenchie" the French Fry in my freezer. I Wonder how long I'll have to keep that!

My husband just keeps shaking his head and telling me, "That's your child!"

Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day!

I love the book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst. Today is my Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad day!

It's just been one of those weeks! It seems that everything we own has decided to break at the same time. First of all, we went 4-5 days with very short showers because our hot water kept running out. We tried ignoring the problem, but that didn't seem to work. My husband drained the water heater, but that didn't work either so we ignored the problem for another day or two. When, that still didn't work we called a plumber. He came out on Wednesday and replaced one element in it. On Thursday the problem still wasn't fixed so he came out again yesterday evening and replaced the other element. The really annoying thing is that it had a six year warranty that ran out only 6 months ago! But at least now it works.

However, I had to back my car out of the garage so they could get to the water heater yesterday. When I started it, it made a really weird noise and acted like it didn't want to start. But it did, so I backed it out onto the driveway. It stayed there until 5 'til 7 when I needed to leave to go to Bunco. (I just love bunco!) Anyway, it wouldn't start. Since Bunco was at 7 I just took my hubby's car and left the minivan with him so he could magically fix it while I was gone. I mean it is the Christmas season afterall! Was I wrong to expect a miracle? Well, no christmas miracle for me! (Probably haven't been nice enough this year!)

So here I sit on Friday, errand running day, not running errands. Not delivering all the cookies and banana bread I baked for the librarians at our local library. Not buying the groceries that we are out of. Not getting our haircut. Not delivering the car load of baby items we collected for charity at our Christmas party. Nope, just sitting here blogging.

Hopefully my husband will get off work a little early (his commute is an hour so early usually isn't very early no matter what time he leaves). Maybe he can replace the battery in my van so we can drive it to the mechanic instead of paying to have it towed. I'm not holding my breath though. It has other problems that need to be fixed so the battery might not help. I was planning to take it in Monday all along.

To top it all off my watch won't keep time and our garage light only turns on when it wants to.

I think I'll move to Australia!

Bloggyland Tour of the North Pole

If you'd like to take a bloggyland tour of the North Pole click on the link below. Thanks, Linda for hosting this!

http://lifesacallingwhoisthis.blogspot.com/2008/12/your-invited.html

Random Holiday Pics

This is our cat. She loves sitting under the tree. She has scooted all of the presents around so she can have her own cozy little spot in the back!

This is the gingerbread house my kids made yesterday. It was part of my daughter's Hansel & Gretel Unit for school. If you want to read more about that unit check out my homeschool blog. (the link is in the sidebar)

These are some of the cookies I made yesterday. I made over 4 1/2 doz. each of snickerdoodles and oatmeal chocolate chip, 1 1/2 doz. coconut snowballs (yum!), about 4 doz. sugar cookies, and about 3 1/2 doz. merangue cookies. That was pretty much all I did yesterday! I still have one recipe I want to make, but I was missing an ingredient so that will have to wait for another day. Today, I'm making banana bread. I've seen enough cookies for a while!

free shipping codes

Evidently today is the first annual free shipping day...this site has tons of free shipping offers and codes for lots of stores. http://www.freeshipping.org/?

You're afraid of what??

My son was playing the Roller Coaster Tycoon game today and he was looking for names for some of his rides. He wanted to know what the word was for fear of heights so I googled it and found a site that lists all kinds of phobias. A couple made just shake my head and wonder who is actually afraid of that?

Here are some of my favorites:

amathophobia: fear of dust You better stay away from my house then! Things can get quite dusty around here!

anglophobia: Fear of the English or England. Really? What's so scary about them?

anthrophobia: Fear of humans Who do you go to if you want to discuss this fear???

arachibutyrophobia: Fear of peanutbutter sticking to the roof of mouth.
That's right, someone has actually come up with a name for this! I'm thinking why don't you just not eat peanutbutter?

ecophobia: Fear of home Where do you live if you have a fear of home???

geniophobia: Fear of Chins That's right, chins. Those scary little chins!

And my favorite...
lyssophobia: Fear of hydrophobia

Hydrophobia is the fear of water so if you have lyssophobia are you not actually afraid of water? You are just afraid of being afraid of water??

Well, these are just my ramblings on this topic. I never knew there were so many phobias out there. Anyone have any fears they'd like to share? If so, post a comment.

I, for one, have hydrophobia. Not really a fear of water in general, just of drowning in it! I also have arachnophobia...fear of spiders-mostly those big, brown, evil ones that stare you down with their evil, little eyes right before they jump toward you!

Ornament Cupcakes

Merry Christmas to everyone taking the Bloggyland Tour! Sorry, I didn't post earlier. I've been making ornament cupcakes all morning. These are for our homeschool Christmas party tomorrow. I saw this idea in a magazine a couple months ago so I thought I'd try it. They turned out really cute. They are a little time consuming though!

I sugared the top of the cupcake and put a stripe on it with flattened gum drops. (that's the time consuming part...very sticky!) Then I poked twizzlers into gumdrops to make the hanger. At last, the gumdrops are attached to the cupcake by a pretzel stick.

This Wednesday is my cookie making day so come back to view the dozens of cookies I'll be making that day!

Christmas Cookies

Every year I bake TONS of cookies right before Christmas. We couldn't possibley eat all of them (well, maybe) so we give them away to friends, my husband takes them to work, we take them to parties and use them as gifts. Everyone in the family gets to pick their favorite cookie and I make them in addition to my other christmas cookies. Today was Gingerbread men...my daughter's favorite. Tomorrow I will be baking cupcakes for our homeschool Christmas party on Tuesday. I'm trying something new with decorating them so I'll post pictures if they turn out cute. Wednesday will be the big baking day. That's probably all I'll do that day! My daughter's school this week is a unit on Hansel and Gretel so we will be making a gingerbread house too! I cheated and bought a kit for that though.

And I'm happy to say all my Christmas Shopping is officially done! I picked up the last gifts for the kids today. All I have to do is take my daughter to go buy a gift for her brother.

Claire's Santa Picture

Here is the picture of Claire with Santa. It didn't make it on the last post. We also ran into Ranger's Captain as we were leaving. Claire LOVES captain so we stopped and took a picture with him in his santa suit.

Rangers Event

This evening I took the kids to the Texas Rangers Stadium for their Toys for Tots drive. We had never been to this event before. It was great! They had players signing autographs, games, activities, and even Santa. The kids had a blast! Early on they were interviewed by the local fox station for their live at five news. That was pretty cool. Too bad Chris wasn't home yet to see them on TV.

Then, someone from the Rangers organization came up to me and asked if he could borrow my kids for a photo shoot with Ian Kinsler (Rangers 2nd baseman) and Chris Davis (Rangers 1st baseman). Of course I said yes! Nathan was so excited he almost couldn't speak! They used them for some promotional photos or something. The kids posed with the players and acted like they were giving them some of the toys from the toys for tots drive. It was really cool!

Finally, Santa came out. That was who Claire wanted to see! Mrs. Claus scooped her up and talked to her and then she sat on Santa's lap. We haven't had a picture of her with santa since she was 2 because she was always scared of him.

I was planning to leave at 6:00, but Michael Young was signing at 6:30 so we stayed. We all got his autograph. That was cool. His hasn't been the easiest autograph to get.

Anyway, we all had a great time. Here are some pictures.

New blog

I now have a blog devoted to creative homeschooling ideas. You can check it out at http://thecreativehomeschooler.blogspot.com/

Manic Monday

Mondays have to be my least favorite day of the week! I don't know what it is about them, but they always seem to be hectic!

Today's hectic story: I forgot we needed to get up and go to church this morning. It was the Immaculate Conception, a holy day of obligation in the Catholic church. My husband goes at noon to a church near work so I usually take the kids to one of the churches closest to us in the morning so that we don't have to go in the evening when its dinner time. (Our church is a little further away and has an earlier morning mass time I can never make it to.) Anyway, I woke up at 8:00 and remembered we needed to go to church. The latest mass time was 8:45. Only Claire was up so I sent her to wake up her brother. I told them to get themselves a quick breakfast and get dressed, I was going to jump in the shower. I'm proud to say we actually made it there on time!

I also forgot to take my daughter to gymnastics today! Her class is at 4:00 and I remembered at 4:05 when I pulled her leotard out of the laundry I was folding! Oh well, glad they have make ups!

Fabulous K

Check out Fabulous K Creative. http://fabulouskcreative.blogspot.com/

They are having a blog makeover contest. Hope I win. My poor little blog page could use a good makeover!

A little holiday shopping guide for men

Here is a funny little video to help you men out there shop for your wife or girlfriend over the holidays....just a little something to keep you out of the doghouse! Ladies, you might want to copy this link and send it to the man in your life!

http://bewareofthedoghouse.com:80/video.aspx

More Bargains!

Man, today I got some great deals at Albertson's! They had a sale on Blue Bell ice cream-half gallons for 2.99. I printed off the $1 coupon from the Blue Bell website and got it for 1.99/half gallon! Reg. price is 6.49.

They also had frozen Michelina's entrees on sale for .50 each. My son loves the mac and cheese so I bought the last 7 or 8 they had. They also had a 10% off sale of all frozen food so I got an extra 10% off the blue bell and mac & cheese.

They had pillsbury cresent rolls buy one, get one free. The first one was 2.79. I had 3 coupons for .35 off and one coupon for .25 off. They were all tripled. So, I got 4 cans of cresent rolls for .42 a can!

To top it all off, they had lots of free samples of things to taste in the store so my son never even complained about being there! I love a shopping trip with no complaints!

Bargains!

I found a couple of great bargains today!

First of all, I went to the Mrs. Baird's outlet and found the whole wheat white bread that we like for 4/3.50. That one is hard to find. They don't always have it so I was excited that they had 4 loaves. I also found packages of 2 doz. dinner rolls for .89/package. I bought 3 of those! I freeze bread and rolls and thaw them when needed.

After the bread store we walked over to Big Lots. They had cereal on clearance. I got 7.8 oz. boxes of Marshmallow Mateys (store brand lucky charms) for .37 a box. .37 a box! I also got Winnie the Pooh Corn puff cereal (8.4 oz.) for .45 a box! The kids were excited when I started buying all of those!

I just love a good bargain!

Send a Free Message to the Troops

Fun Friday!

We had a fun Friday today! I took the kids to Creative Hands to paint Christmas ornaments today. Its a little paint your own plaster kind of place. We have been painting ornaments there every year since 2001, I think. Anyway, the kids love it and I do too! It's so much fun to look at their ornaments each year when we are decorating the tree. Here are some pics of their masterpieces. Nathan's are on the left on the plate and Claire's are on the right.

While the ornaments were baking and drying we went down the street to Fabulous 50s to eat lunch. I like it but we hardly ever go there. It's a little 50s style hamburger place. They were playing Elvis and showing It's a Wonderful Life on the TVs. Its so cute and the atmosphere is so much better than McDonald's! I had a 1.99 kids meal coupon so it even cost us less than it would to eat at McDonald's.

We also went shopping for gifts for the angels we got off the angel tree. That's always a lot of fun. My kids get to pick their own angel and buy the gift themselves. They look forward to this every year. I got so caught up in helping them find stuff that I forgot I wanted to get something else for mine. Oh well, I guess I'll do that this weekend.

Advent Activity

This is something we have been doing for 3-4 years now. The kids earn cotton balls by doing good deeds. (going to church, picking an angel from the angel tree, using extra good manners, sharing, helping, etc.) They put the cotton balls in a manger that Chris and Nathan built to make a soft bed for baby Jesus on Christmas morning. The better they are, the softer baby Jesus' bed will be.

We use different color cotton balls for each child because if they do something really bad we remove one of their cotton balls. This has worked well. My children are always so well behaved this time of year! On Christmas morning, Claire gets to put the Baby Jesus in his manger on the soft bed they have made for him. (Baby Jesus is one of Claire's dolls wrapped in swaddling clothes.)

This is a picture of our manger...5 days into advent. They have started out nicely!

Custom Wrapping Paper

A long time ago, before Claire was born and before I homeschooled Nathan, we used to paint our own wrapping paper for Christmas. Claire really enjoys that kind of thing so I got out the supplies today and we did a few sheets. She had a blast. Nathan even took a break from school to make a sheet. Most of them we wrapped into gifts already. Here are some pictures of our handy work! It's easy to do and turns out looking really cute!

It's Hard to Be Honest!

There are so many things that are not honest in today's world. Well, I like to think I still am. How's this for honest...my credit card company gave me an extra $3000 and I told them about it!

Let me start from the beginning. A couple weeks ago my credit card number was stolen, not the card-just the number. The credit card company caught the fraud and didn't let the theif get away with their $400 charge at Target in New Jersey. However, my account had to be closed and they opened another one for me. Well, this was on a Saturday and my credit card payment was due on Monday. I had already set it up to be paid online on the due date. Well, the payment ended up going through finally to the old account. They credited the old account with the payment. Then, they transferred the credit to the new account, basically giving me $3000. On top of that there was a $39 late fee because with all of the fraud stuff and closing the account the payment went through a day late. Well, they refunded me the $39....three times!

(This is actually the 3rd time in 6 years that I have had my credit card or credit card info stolen so we charge everything on a major credit card. Better protection that way. The time it happened with our debit card was a real headache because the money came directly out of our checking account.)

I noticed all of this and that I had a credit and not a balance on my account so I let it go for a few days hoping they'd catch it and fix it. They didn't. So, being the honest person that I am, I called them. The first time I was on hold for 5 minutes and hung up and called another number. The next number was the general number so I had to go through multiple menus of stuff I didn't want to do. I had to listen to 3 sets of menus before I got the option of talking to a person. Then, I was on hold again waiting for the person to answer. When he finally did, the poor guy was very confused and couldn't figure out what happened. I tried explaining it, but he put me on hold again so he could talk to someone else to try to figure it out. Finally he comes back on and says I need to call another number because it was a mistake with the online billing department and he didn't have their number! I told him you sure make it hard to give your money back! He could tell I was a little irritated so he started rambling on about various things I could do, one of which was to go down to my bank and ask them if 2 payments were subtracted from my checking account! I told him I already looked at my statement and that was not a problem. Finally, I said "so do I have to do anything else?" He said no, we should be able to fix the problem.

Well, they still haven't fixed it. I still have a credit on my account. And after my 40 min. phone call I decided that being honest sure was a lot of trouble! While I was on the phone my daughter provoked our cat into attacking her so I had to go referee that little wrestling match while talking to the guy. Then, she ended up in the bathroom with her play dishes and LOTS of water because she was making "alphabet soup"! My son was suppose to be doing his math assignment but was chasing the cat instead. My dishwasher did not get unloaded and lunch was not getting made....all because I was trying to do the right thing. Sometimes that's just really hard! Hopefully I scored a few days off from purgatory for this!