Celebrating lOvE!

To end our sEveN day's of love we celebrated Valentine's Day with a yummy valentine themed candle light dinner!
The menu:

Brazilian Lemonade, cheesy garlic bread swirls, marble jello, Pasta bar with your choice of pesto, marinara, or alfredo sauce, Green salad tossed with italian dressing (from Olive Garden!) and for desert Krispy ice cream in heart shapes w/ raspberry sauce!

It was a full day of baking and preparing but it turned out super nice! I loved all the new recipes I tried! (from Our Best Bites) It was lots of fun! Here's some photo's!

Brazilian Lemonade

Cheesy Garlic Bread Swirls

Glass Block Jello hearts! and here

Alfredo Sauce

Krispy Ice Cream

Some sweethearts!

Some sweet treats! (and a sweet girl!)

Food GLORIOUS Food!

I found this AMAZING blog called Our Best Bites and I'm in love!

This blog has some of the most amazing recipes and the instructions are awesome!

If you are in a rut, like I have been OR just want to try some fun new recipes, check out this site!

It is awe-inspiring!

This morning I made blueberry pancakes and buttermilk caramel syrup! The syrup was divine. It was all I could do to not LICK the plate clean. I may or may not have used my finger to scrape off every last bit of gooey sweetness that was left on my plate, but you'll never really know! It was seriously delicious! And simple!

(my lame attempt at Heart pancakes! LOL! But really it was ALL about the syrup!)

Right now I have started the glass block jello with strawberry and blackberry jello. It takes a lot of refrigerator time, so I wanted to get it started for our valentine dinner tomorrow!

If you like to eat or just look at good food then check it out! I think I gained 5 lbs reading their blog yesterday! ha ha ha ha! But it was worth it!

Next up: Cookie Pie, Cheesy Garlic Bread Swirls, Black Bean soup, Homemade Marshmallows and Guiltless Alfredo Sauce!

Where's Heather???

I took this picture the other night of Heather doing TWO of her favorite things -
Eating ice cream and using her Iphone.

Heather is usually in her room in the same position with her phone and ice cream.

This was a **special** evening because she was actually among us!
So I couldn't resist documenting it!
I love you Hesher Anne!

SNoW mUch FuN!

Last weekend we took a little trip to Forest Lakes to my parents cabin. There was LOTS of snow and the girls had fun sledding and playing.


Our trip wasn't without it troubles! When we got there the pipes were all frozen - so NO water, No toilets, No showers! Yikes! And of course it was FREEZING!



Luckily, my parents were also there and we started working on getting the pipes cleared of ice. We hauled water in the house from a pump in the front yard. Every burner on the stove had a pot with water on it - trying to get it hot! The fire place was blazing and the stove was burning!

The men finally got water to flow out of the cabin. So that meant we could use the kitchen sink to dump water. We had to put water in the toilet to flush it. It was a pain - but an improvement.

By the next day, it started thawing some. We finally started getting water from the faucets and pretty soon the toilets! But there was a leak and so my Dad had to do some fixing of that! I think my Dad worked the whole weekend just fixing leaks! Poor Dad!


When we discovered the showers were working we were all SO excited... however, then we discovered the hot water tank wasn't heating the water enough! I didn't get a shower until Sunday - AT HOME!

Despite our water problems it was still fun! We got to host the ward youth for a few hours Saturday. They seemed to have fun.

Hillary and James came along with their friends the Fowlers and their three CUTE kids! Caden, Jackson and Hallie! They are triplets and are 3 1/2! They added much entertainment to the weekend! We also had my niece Brooke!


The best part was Sunday. Because the snow had melted a lot on Saturday it had froze to ice on Sunday. My kids went out to sled and discovered they didn't need tubes, but could just slide down on their rear ends or tummy's! They looked like a bunch of seals and penguins sliding down the hill! Cutest thing ever!



We celebrated James' birthday on Saturday with homemade Costa Vida Chicken, beans, rice and salsa! It was delish!

We came home Sunday, very smelly, tired and glad to be warm again! Seriously, how do people live where there is snow 24/7? I'm definitely a desert rat! The worst part of the trip - the clean up! I've been doing laundry ALL week! I've had to wash pretty much everything we took up there, just to get the smell of campfire smoke out of the house!

Ha ha ha ha! Nothing like bringing home great memories!

A LoVeLY Time of Year!

I really do love FeBRuArY! It's fun. It's full of LOVE!

And it's a great time to focus on how I feel about my family!

(Valentine'd hot chocolate station! Complete with heart cookies and marshmallows!)

One of the ways I like to show love to my family is putting up

little hints of valentine's day around the house!

Here are some of MY favorites!Tree branches in my pitcher with some clearanced beads and some heart ornaments I already had! My crepe paper rose topiary and glitter heart in a white frame! (I recycled a foam ball to make the topiary. I used a bucket and the beads are more of the clearanced beads I got after christmas! The glitter heart I made myself and I had a frame I painted white! So FREE!)

LoVe this garland! It makes me smile EVERY time I see it!
All I did was pick up some heart doilies at the dollar store and string them on some baker's string. (Baker's string is much like kite string, maybe a little thinner) This string was red and white. You can't really see it, so I'm sure anything you had would work! i.e. yarn, ribbon, fishing line?
SUPER Easy and fun!


I picked up some of these items at target in the dollar spot. The angel came from Ross. The picture doesn't really do it justice! This is above our tv, so it's nice to have something to look at when I get tired of "kid tv" or what I call "stupid tv" Which is my opinion of most of the shows my kids like to watch. (Is it just me or have they really gotten un-creative in kids shows? i.e. iCarly, Sonny with a chance, and numerous other dumb shows that I can only tolerate for about 10 minutes before I am saying "turn this stuff off". LOL!)

I ordered these prints from GroopDealz! (Love GroopDeals. It is like Groupons.)

Seriously, decorating my house for the holidays/seasons just makes me smile!
Smiling is good you know!

Preparedness - begining our journey.

I bought this dvd at Seagull Book at Christmas time. I have been to Wendy's presentation before and knew this would be good to have. I wasn't wrong. I've watched it so many time this week.

I love her food storage ideas and the idea that we should and can store food we love to eat!

After watching her dvd this weekend I decided we needed to have a Family Home Evening on preparedness.

I don't know if it was the sheer exhaustion from canning 90 lbs of chicken Saturday or not, but I realized that my children needed to take part and learn WHY I do what I do.

The first part of Wendy's preparedness plan is coming up with 7 breakfasts and 7 dinners that your family would like to eat once a week for a year! So if Spaghetti is a family favorite, then plan on having it every week for 52 weeks!

Every time I sit down to do this "homework" I never get very far. SO, tonight after watching this part of the dvd as a family, I passed out sheets of paper to each of the girls and Vaughan and I. I asked everyone to write down what they thought would be yummy foods AND things we could actually store in our food storage.

***LIGHT BULB MOMENT***

I really thought my girls realized what we were "preparing" for. It was so funny as we went around the room listening to their ideas. Here are some of the funny ones:

Breakfast: Cap'n Crunch, Waffles & Sausage (no electricity girls!), Omelets (uh, were we planning on getting live chickens?), Fruit Smoothies (yeah, they aren't getting it are they?), and my favorite - bagels with flavored cream cheese.

OK . . . apparently breakfast ideas are going to need some help. SO, I explained again. Girls, these are foods that we can store without refrigeration. NO electricity, NO grocery stores. If it ain't in our food storage we have to make it ourselves or do with out!

Let's try dinner: taco salad (really? are they not getting it?), hamburgers-hotdogs with chips and soda pop, (what part of NO refrigerator are they not getting?), Enchiladas, (you realize we will have no cheese and we will have to make our own tortillas ourselves, right?), Hawaiian Haystacks (OK, that's better), Pasta, Pasta, and more Pasta. (I'm thinking this will be a GREAT diet plan for me!)

They did a little better on desserts: Brownies, cake, no bake cookies, chocolate chip cookies, ice cream (WHAT?? Can you believe each of them had ice cream down. "But we can make it mom!" "Yeah, where do you plan on getting the ice???" Best answer ever - "Next door from the neighbors!")

Well, we had a good time laughing and as you can see there is a lot of educating that needs to be done!

Upon reflection, I decided it wasn't all bad that they didn't "get it". Maybe it's ok that they are a little naive! Do I really want them to worry and feel concern? Of course, that's why we are preparing, so we aren't worried, but I think a little lack of understanding on their part is ok right now!

I did get some dinner ideas from them and now I'm ready to make my menu cards and start figuring out what ingredients I need!

Here is the link to Wendy's blog. If you want more info you can call or email me. You are welcome to borrow my dvd and see what you think.

I plan on keeping track of our Preparedness Journey this year on this blog. Hopefully, by year end we will have accomplished much and learned much!

We have already planned to do some solar cooking this summer and try our hand at making tortillas and such. We will take each recipe and prepare it how we would under survival conditions!

I'm looking forward to our preparedness journey! I know with my girls it's going to be comedy at it's best! :)

Heart -ie Fun!

I got her done! No-not the office! My heart wreath! Yeah, I know - work before pleasure! But I did it while I watched a movie with the family! And it just got completed first!

It's SO so so so Cute! I love it much! I am going to make a topiary and some balls too! It's going to be cute!

So - back to the organization thing. W E L L L L - I decided to do my bedroom first. When I looked around I realized I am almost done with it anyway. So I'm making pretty good progress and it's starting to look good! It's amazing how nice it feels to de-junk a room!

I hope your de-junking is going well! It just feels good!