catching up & organizing….

seems like that’s what I’m doing all the time yet, I’m still not finished nor  can’t seem to find anything!

I have gotten back on track with my cooking thanks to my friend Alicia and  encouraging bloggers, especially  Kelly @Faithful Prov and @crystalpaine aka Money Saving Mom.  Reading these two bloggers got me on the move again and the house smells yummy!  I was fairly successful at my attempt at bread making this time.  You know it’s always a surprise to see what the same ingredients, cooked in the same manner, will turn out to be!  It wasn’t pretty, but it is good.  A delicious meat loaf is in the oven, (recipe from moneysavingmom.com) and waiting for supper, now. 

In an effort to continue to improve our diets and health, I went to the Franklin Farmer’s Market.  I know it was a HAUL… but I was part of the way there anyway picking  up consignment clothes.  I found some great organic producers. They were all so nice, to explain things. The only drawback is no one is this way!!  Don’t they know folk in this area want to be healthy too??  I got some milk & cream from Hatcher Family Dairy.  Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise, there is a difference in fresh milk.  It is delicious!!  I am now on the search for someone reasonably close.  It just isn’t feasible to drive that far for  a gallon of milk.  I made fresh butter from the cream and it is so sweet and good on the toast and I put a bit in our corn last night and WOW was that good.

I also got a Shiitake Mushroom log while I was at the Farmers Market.  Yeah, I didn’t know they made these either??  But basically it’s a live cut log, with holes bored in it & covered with beeswax.  You put the log in the shade & wait.  Gather the few mushrooms it produced and then soak the log in the pond for a day, wait and more mushrooms will grow.  I figure $20 was cheap, if it produced only a few ‘shrooms.  We like them here, cooked especially.  The fella was telling me about drying them too… 

I also found a great planner  “The Well Planned Day” to try to use to keep our school days on track and focused.  It has other resources in it like meal planning as well.  Funny how that keeps coming up?? So day one (today) I actually used the planner and planned a meal.  Put a smiley face on my chart!

I have also moved my blog to WordPress.  That’s no small feat & I’m still trying to figure out how to get some of the sidebar items on here. (a long with a few other tweaks)  I’ll keep my Blogspot up for a bit longer.  So if you’re a WordPress user and have that figured out along with how to edit autosave feature, please let me in on it.

I also finally followed thru on my committment to build the Celtic Quilt Trail its own site.  I have had a link for it on the Chamber’s site for quite a while, but had told Debbie, the Quilt Trail founder, I would ‘fix’ her, her own site.  So take a second and check that out.  www.celticquilttrail.com   This is a great tourism tool for our county and Debbie has done yeoman work on it.

I think that has me up to date??

Lunch at Loveless Cafe

 Paxton and I got off the beaten path today. ( don’t ask…), but landed in the parking lot of THE Loveless Cafe.  One of Paxton’s favorite things to do is to eat “in” a restaurant.  So we stopped.  Yes, that is my plate of fried livers….NO, I did not manage to eat them all, but they will make for a great lunch again tomorrow. I was smart enough to ask for extra gravy to take home too!  The food was delicious, I can see why their reputation goes far and wide.

Not sure Paxton ever really understood what the Loveless used to be, but she loved all the pictures on the wall and the little shops.  Maybe one day we will make it back when there is entertainment going on.

Valentines Party

Valentines is another FUN holiday and this one has been no different.  But not unlike the rest of the holidays in recent years, it didn’t get celebrated on the actual day.  Ours was celebrated today on the 13th.  Paxton had a party at church with the youth group. Our Youth Leaders do a great job and work hard at it.  The older set of the group went bowling, while the younger set stayed at the church building and made a craft, watched UP and played games.  I didn’t get as many pictures as usual, I was too busy playing and eating too!!

In the middle of all the other things going on the older youth were in the building working on their service project. They made cupcakes and cards for the widows.  Allison,  Laurie and Hannah are working hard on their icing technique.

One of the games we played was to see who could stack the most conversation hearts in a timed race.  The boys got creative and smart and made platforms and built stable towers.

This one is Emily’s.  Hers was pretty and stable and had a LOT of hearts in it, which was the goal.  The boys were also upset, because she beat them at bowling.  They claimed she cheated because she had the bumpers up.  We just figured she was smarter for taking that option!

Wish I had taken a picture of the young ones making their craft.  They made paper heart wreaths.  I also introduced them to a cake walk.  What fun that was!  We actually made it a ‘prize’ walk.  I had a basket of ‘happy meal’ toys and we used those for prizes instead of cakes.

In the evening, Paxton went with Mims and Paps to the Renaissance Center to see the Mandy Barnet Show. They had a wonderful evening.  Paxton and Mims are big Mandy fans.  Paxton got Mandy’s autograph and gave her a special Valentine.  Terry and I had an equally wonderful time here in the Big City.  We went to see the Houston County Community Theatre’s production of Some Enchanted Evening.  It was a dinner and musical show.  It is some of the best entertainment and it’s here in our back yard!

Tea Party

We just have absolutely the BEST Library & Staff of anywhere.  Today they hosted a Valentine Tea Party for the storytime kids.  It was complete with fancy decorations, fancy food, tea cups and tea served from tea pots.

Olivia & Paxton using Pinky Etiquette.

Preparations began last week with the making of the Valentine boxes. Mrs. Kaye had a variety of decorations and the mayhem and gluing began.  The results were beautiful!

Then they were stuffed with colorful sentiments of fond friendship.

     Everyone came dressed in their finest and waited patiently for the delicacy to be served.

Isn’t this a great looking group!

Snow Day

We now have what I would consider a “good” snow. The grass & leaves are completely covered. You can walk in the snow and make deep tracks. The roads are pretty rough, even though they got them salted before the snow fell. We’ll be here till at least Tuesday I figure. Glad it came on the weekend.

Paxton claimed it as the “Best day of my life.” yesterday. We had enough snow to make a snowman and to sled and to make snow cream. Our snowman was the equivalent of a dwarf, but we both got tired of the process before he got too tall.

We don’t have a sled. Do we really need one for no more snow than we get each year? It would just take up space in the barn and collect dirt daubers. But this is a pretty good snow….. so being the Southern Rednecks we are ….. we made do with what we had. A feed sack and a rope. You’d be surprised… these are not the feed sacks from your grandpa’s day. It was a ball…. well except for the part where I had to do the pulling!

The snow cream was delicious!! I made sure it was white snow, clean untrodden & I hope it had snowed long enough to get all the “global warming” pollutants ou t of the sky. : ) Now that was a great treat. We may have to have some more today.

By the time we came back in the mittens were crusty with snow, the cheeks a rosy glow and the toes and fingers tingly!

90 Day Plan

Well is it a failure or success?? I am behind again in my reading plan. Been too busy to be on Twitter and forgot to check in on the session last Monday….
BUT I have read some amount each night….
SO I am not counting it as a failure. I am much further ahead in a daily reading goal than I have ever been.
I got my new Bible and I love the layout and the NIV version. It has definitely made it much easier reading.

Pretzels

Today we made pretzels. It’s cold outside and with the snow on the ground, seems like all we want to do is GRAZE. What better to graze on than some BREAD!!

I found the recipe on another blog, Frugal Upstate, seemed easy enough and it was!! We wouldn’t win any awards for ‘Pretty’. They didn’t pretzel out very well. The last batch we just ended up making sticks. (it didn’t affect the taste!) We tried both the salty and the cinnamon versions. It was a hard call to say which was best. If we had just had some cheese to dip a few in too!!

90 Days update

well… I am still doing my challenge to read the Bible in 90 Days, however I never thought that I’d be behind in the first week…

I knew realistically over the course of 90 days, I’d probably get behind at some time, just didn’t think it’d be so soon. There is a great group on Twitter to follow and get support from. On Monday’s there is TwitChat about the previous week’s reading. I bought the Bible in 90 Days version. It is a nice, hardback, Bible with the reading marked on the pages. It makes it nice to follow. Supposedly the success rate increases when you are using this version. I hope this is true!

I hope my next post can say… “I’m ahead”

Tooth Fairy stopping at Harris house tonight!

This morning was a BIG day in the Harris family. Pea lost her first tooth. This is such a landmark in growing up in her eyes. She had questioned the dentist at her last check up about when would this happen. He told her it was early yet and would probably be another year. (so momma thought too!)

I surely didn’t know anything was loose and Pea only said this morning AFTER pulling it that she “told me yesterday” that her tooth hurt eating her Subway sandwich. Did she really tell me that???

Anyway… first thing this morning she stops in her tracks leaving her bedroom and says, “Wait Momma, I feel something.” Next thing I know she’s holding out her tooth to me!! I am sure my jaw dropped! Of course we had to wake Daddy & show him.

She was quite proud of herself and had lots of questions about how things would work now, how’s she gonna eat, will it hurt, does she have to use her toothbrush, does she even have to brush, when’s the new tooth coming, what’s it gonna look like, will it bleed anymore, when’s the tooth fairy coming, do we have to write her a letter??????

So at church today she shows everyone and you could even tell by her carriage, she felt older. She went home with her friend Lyrin as planned. She barely said goodbye in her excitement to go with Lyrin.

On the way home….. I cried! What a bummer day for me!

Ringing in the New Years

Even though all the holidays we celebrate are one day events on the calendar, it seems as though it takes several days to celebrate them. So like Christmas and all the others, it took more than one day to celebrate the New Year.

Paxton and I spent New Year’s Eve with Mims & Paps and then she & I took an impromptu trip to the movies. We left planning to just see Alvin & the Chipmunks, but then I remembered our Q for the Princess and the Frog, so we decided, since it was a holiday, we’d celebrate big and see TWO movies in one night (can’t let a good Q go to waste!)!! What a night of indulgence it was!! We had TWO Big Buckets of popcorn and TWO Big Sprites, a LARGE Maggie Moo Waffle Cone and a LARGE Hot dog. I just knew one of us would get sick before the night was over. We just had a ball together. I love times spent like that. We both liked Alvin & the Chipmunks, it had funny scenes and good music. The Princess and the Frog I was a little disappointed in. I had been under the impression it was a ‘different’ princess tale, where hard work pays off…. but in the end, the gal got her dream because she married into money! But other than that it was a great Disney movie.

New Year’s Day was spent with the Harris family. We got filled with great food and fellowship. Paxton got the opportunity to spend some more time with her cousins. We probably stayed longer than expected because instead of taking leftovers home for dinner….. we were still there at dinnertime and we just ate again there.

I hope each of you have a wonderful new year and achieve all your goals.