Valentine Review

I kind of went overboard on the printables for Valentines Day.  Pinterest is an amazing invention :)

 Since Ben takes popcorn to school for his snack every day I thought this one would be perfect for his teachers.

 These are just right for sewing friends :)

 I also printed off a bunch that I wanted to frame or use as decorations in some way.

 I loved filling these "Ten things I love about..." cards for Andy and the kids.

 I filled some mason jars with festive sewing stuff and attached the tags with some baker's twine and the cute tags.

These were super fun!

 You might know I'm a bee fan... so how could I not love this cute printable?  These I gave to my Visiting Teaching ladies.

 Baker's twine again.  I kind of really like it :)

 It's been somewhat of a fun challenge to come up with gift ideas for Josh's male teacher.

This was the perfect printable for teachers.  I paired it with some "21st century chalk".

 For the female teachers I stuffed some tissue paper down into the bottom of some large...wait for it...Mason Jars!  I kind of really like them too.  Then I topped them off with lots of chocolate.  I also added a vinyl chalkboard label to the front of the jars with their names for a personal touch.

 

 I gave the kids a choice of doing home made valentines or regular old store valentines.  The boys both chose the Phineas and Ferb and Angry Bird valentines that I had purchased just in case and Abby said she wanted to do home made.  I gave her several choices from Pinterest and she thought these were pretty cute.  (That's a tootsie pop in the black tissue paper).

 Valentine Boxes:

I asked the kids if they needed to make boxes for their valentines.  In the past some teachers have made receptacles (the best word I could think of) in their classrooms.  I remember the making of the valentine box as pretty much the best part of Valentines Day and so I wanted to make sure my kids enjoyed the same experience.  Josh said he didn't know if he was supposed to bring something and Abby said that her teacher told them they could just bring a plastic bag if they wanted to.  WHAT?!?  A plastic bag?  This would never do...back to Pinterest.
(I later learned that this elaborate V. box ordeal is probably a Utah tradition.  Who would have known?)

These are some variations of some ideas we found online.

We kind of went the fowl route.

Abby helped quite a bit with hers and was quite particular about the eyes.

Josh didn't touch his until it was all done.  That's okay...it was pretty fun and easy :)

Tissue paper ended up being a good medium to cover the boxes...I'll have to remember this.
 

 A whole slew of valentines!

 Valentines Day Andy surprised me with breakfast in bed...on Ben's bedroom floor.

 I went and helped with the room mother party in Matt's class later that day.

I was in charge of a game - "Draw a Love Bug" (another Pintereset printable). 

When the kids got home from school I asked them about their boxes.  Abby said there was only one other girl in her class that made a box.  

I made some Valentine pancakes for dinner.  We have found a new favorite pancake recipe.  They're so hearty and good.  I'll have to post the recipe some time.

 After dinner we tried out our new Velata chocolate warmer that I won from a give away on a blog.  It was pretty tasty...but admittedly, that was the last thing we needed after a day full of chocolates and sweets.

 Andy went non traditional and brought home a gorgeous bouquet of gerbers instead of the usual orchid plant.  This was okay since I still have two that have continued to live from years past.

Now that heart holiday is past, onward to the next big project...

I'm helping plan and decorate for my cousin's baby shower. 

I'm excited to see if the ideas in my head turn out the way I envision them.

February Fluff

I can't believe I haven't posted in February yet!

I have a small excuse, but not a very good one.  For a little while there were several keys on my laptop that were not working.  We were planning on getting a new computer anyway so that just sped up our search.  However, before we could make a decision on which one to buy, Andy some how got things working on this old one.  I guess we'll hold on to it a little bit longer :)

p.s. 2 of the keys that were not working were the colon and right parenthesis (spell check gave me that word).  Therefore, I was not able to do my smiley face which if you read my blog even a little, you know I can't do a post without several smileys :)

So, now I'm going to throw the first 3/4 of the month at you, probably all in one post.

I love cross country skiing!  My first experience ever with the sport was on a first time date in college.
I could hardly stay up on the things.  I was so embarrassed and uncoordinated.
Fast forward  7 or 8 years...my friends invite me to go with them.  I don't know why I agreed, maybe I just felt safe among friends.  I had such a blast!  I did fall a lot but I didn't seem to care this time.
I ended up buying some used skis later on and have been enjoying them ever since (4 or 5 years).

I got out for the first real time this year a couple of weeks ago with a good friend.

The snow was super sparkly!  I wish you could see it better in this picture.

Matt learned about germs in school...

Pizza night in February = heart shaped pizza

Did you try the new raspberry hugs?  Oh how I wish they weren't seasonal!
YUM!

This is our home teacher.  He's great!  Every time he comes the kids gather around him on the floor and he tells them a story...a story with a lesson.  (Ben was up in his high chair finishing his lunch or he would have been right down there with them).

Good news!  Our new monitor works!  We received a replacement in the mail a couple of weeks ago and we have not had any false alarms and it has alerted us to a seizure.
Ben had a day last week that he had 5 tonic clonics.
The next day he fell asleep on the couch while he was playing with his toys.  The poor guy was just plain tuckered out!

Spiritual Thought...
Andy and I had the opportunity to go to a meeting for the Seminary and Institute employees recently.  Elder Oaks spoke via broadcast.  He said something that I really struck a chord with me.  He was talking about how people use their agency to make poor choices which affect others...Newtown, CT. came to mind.  Some may ask why God lets terrible things like that occur. Why doesn't He stop those things from happening?  Because that would be opposing the law of agency.  He will not take away our gift to choose.  However, while God does not prevent those choices (or the consequences of those choices), He will bless us to endure the consequences of others' choices.
I've been thinking about that a lot lately...I don't know why.  Probably because of Sandy Hook.


Well, I think I'm done for the night.  I'll write a separate post soon dedicated to all the Valentine excitement:)

Randomness (in no particular order)

I have a whole bunch of stuff to mention briefly...

First of all, we are 1/12 of the way through the year.

I like to take the opportunity at the beginning of each new month to evaluate how I'm doing with my goals...kind of recommit.

I think I need to do a whole lot more work in the eating and exercising department :)

We've made progress with Ben's monitor.  I've been in touch with the company.  At first, the woman I spoke with was kind of defensive and told me that their system never false alarms and that it's the best in the world and that she'd never heard about any problems like this from any other customers.

She was accommodating though and offered to send us a new system if that was what we wanted.  She also offered some suggestions as to what we could change with the one we had and see if they made any difference.  She said they would do whatever we wanted...she just didn't want us to give up on the monitor yet.  I told her we'd make the changes and get back to her.

She had asked us to change the response time to 13 seconds, secure the cord to the bed so there was no chance of it moving, and to move the monitor off the floor.

Within the next couple of days after making the changes we had more false alarms and another seizure without an alarm.  Arrrrrrgh!

I called the company again and the woman said she believed we had a faulty sensor and asked us to send it back (luckily I had kept the box, otherwise it would have been a very awkward thing to ship) and they would send a new one out immediately.

Sounded good to me.

My heart kind of sank a little when I removed the sensor from Ben's bed.

A couple of the thin, plastic "prongs" on the sensor were bent...a little bit wrinkled if you will.

Ben must have wiggled around a bunch and slept on it funny.

Was this what was causing the problems?

Another call to Texas...

I told my friend what I had found and she assured me that whatever the problem they were happy to replace it and not to worry about it at all.

Phew!

Very good...hopefully we'll receive the new one soon and it will work :)

I love it when I open the refrigerator and see this...

...not the mess, but a fully stocked keto shelf.  21 meals here.  Most of them require additional ingredients that will be measured out at the time of consumption but the main part is there and ready to go.  It makes meal time much more slick.

Here is Ben posing (with his eyes closed as usual), happy as a lark eating his favorite snack, popcorn, with Dad.

 Parent day in orchestra with Josh.  I'm so glad he's still enjoying the cello!

 On a recent trip visiting Andy's parents, his mom gave us one of his old vests.

When we got home I just stuck it in Ben's dresser and forgot about it.

The other day Ben was pretty adamant that he be able to choose his own clothes.

He REALLY wanted to wear the vest :)

I started snapping some pictures...

 I can't believe I caught him cross-eyed :)

 

This is something he does when he knows he's got an audience...he rolls his eyes back (eventually closing them), sticks out his tongue and lets his head go limp.  Silly guy!

He always wants to see the pictures after he poses.

It was kind of hilarious because immediately after he looked at these he started tugging on the vest and wanted me to take it off.  Maybe he thought it made him look fat :)

Lots and lots of snow the last little while.  The kids enjoy going out and helping Andy shovel.

It might seem kind of silly to post this but it was a bright spot in my day this week...

I really enjoy a state wide show called Studio 5.  They have all kinds of stuff on it; crafts, recipes, fashion, fitness plus much more.  If I'm home at 11:00 a.m. on weekdays I usually am watching it.

Tuesday I had it on and left the room for a second.  When I came back I saw a familiar face.

My cousin's wife was talking about decorating your home beautifully and child friendly.

Fun to see her there.  She's a sweetheart.

My neighbor is organizing/decorating her sewing room.  I fell in love with these colorful boxes that she found at Home Depot or Lowe's (can't remember which).  There are 8 or 9 colors and she has organized all her fabric scraps into a color coordinating box.  Genius!

I would love to do the same but there's just not room in my craft corner.

Maybe down the road when my fabric stash has taken over the whole downstairs family room I will remember to do this.  Ha!

Josh had a report (paper and presentation) due today.  He's had the assignment for a couple of months but somewhere along the line I missed a memo or two :)

Last week I ended up emailing his teacher and finding out all the details.  Details such as it was due in less than two weeks, needing a certain amount of sources, a paper and a bibliography and a visual aid for his presentation.  Josh really wanted to do a PowerPoint.  Andy helped him out with that part and I helped him with his paper.  Boy did I learn all about how a car engine works :)

I love how Josh's mind works.  He comes up with the cutest way of saying things.  We had a few late nights earlier this week but we got everything taken care of.  He was a trooper and I was so proud of him when he presented today.  He was a bit shy and uncomfortable right at first but he warmed up and seemed to enjoy himself.  The kids responded well to him and at the end he was grinning from ear to ear.

Way to go Josh!

(Though I must say, we're all a bit relieved it's over :)

I went to brunch with my mom and a friend today.  I had to get a picture of Mom's Mega Pancake!  It was a good thing the waitress warned Mom about the size or else she would have ended up with two of these!

Not only was it impressive size wise but it had a fantastic flavor too!

Ben is so attached to his Bapas.  Sunday evening, about 20-30 minutes before he was due, we told Ben that Bapa was coming.  He ran to the window and stood there watching and waiting until he arrived.

So darling!

This is another one of those posts where if you're not a very close relative, you probably didn't make it through.  I don't blame you...just a lot of randomness that is mostly just meaningful to me.

It's good for me to write about it though and record those little moments in life.

Blue, Glue Scarf

So an idea came to me for another knit scarf.

I cut two pieces of knit to the length and width that I wanted.

Then I took one of the pieces and folded the end over on top of itself and cut (at the fold) half of a flower...much like the way you cut out hearts in elementary school. 

Next I just took pieces of doilies that I had cut up and hot glued them to the back of the top layer of the scarf.  I repeated this a few times on both ends and then added some lace to the edges.

I glued the second layer of the scarf to the first to cover up the messy back and then last minute decided to glue on the flowers I had cut out to give it some dimension and more texture.

Whoops...I thought I had taken more pictures but I guess I didn't.  Use your imagination to envision the whole thing :)

Merry Christmas to Me!

I absolutely love our home but one thing that it lacks is a mudroom to put all the kids' STUFF.  It's always just been dumped in our front room right where anyone that came to our door could see it.

It's been driving me crazy...especially in the winter when there's so much more STUFF.

For years I've wanted to do something about it.  I love entryway organization furniture but our entryway is small and would not allow for much of anything.  I've looked for really skinny benches but nothing was thin enough.  Finally I decided that I should have one of our neighbors (who is a master wood worker) to build something for us.  For a couple of months before December I had it on my to do list to talk to Bill about it.

I was justifying it as a Christmas present to myself :)

I mentioned it to his wife once but never got around to talking to him about it.

One night Andy approached me and said that he couldn't keep it a secret any longer...Bill had told him to get together with me on the project.  Andy had talked to Bill about building something for me long before but Bill couldn't really move forward with it since Andy wasn't quite sure what I wanted.

(I don't know if that made sense :)

Anyway, I was thrilled but Andy was disappointed to have to spoil the surprise.  I didn't care...I was just so excited to finally be getting something to solve this problem.

We decided it might be better to put it around the corner in the front room.  There was more space for it there and it would hide the STUFF from view of the front door.  {The only problem with this is that no one can easily see Bill's beautiful handy work.}

Bill wasn't sure if he could get it done before Christmas, and he didn't but that's okay, it was well worth the wait.

It was delivered yesterday and I couldn't be more happy with it!

 

 I have some ideas about how to decorate the shelf.  I want to take my time and do it just right...so it might take a while.

 

My plan is to get some baskets for the bottom for all the shoes and STUFF to go in.  The really short shelf will come in handy for library books, papers etc...

I had the kids pledge to never put their coats, hats, gloves, boots, shoes, books, or backpacks on the floor, couch, or table again.  There is absolutely no excuse now!

Ben was pretty cute.  He raised his hand during the pledge and while the kids were repeating all the things they wouldn't leave hanging around anymore, he would sign the ones he knew...hat, book, shoes.  He loves being a part of everything that goes on around him.

Thank you Bill!  Thank you Andy!

Now my Christmas is complete :)