Christmas Week Recap

I think I've totally lost my blogging mojo. My brain isn't giving me many words.

The pictures are blurry because children, especially excited ones, never sit still, haha. We had a very nice Christmas and I think everyone enjoyed their presents. It's been off and on drizzly, which made it even nicer. But now Christmas is over, so I'm ready for spring!

Ben was able to finagle the week off from work, and it was blissfully wonderful. We spent the whole week finishing the garage (ok, he did most of it, but I helped paint), and it looks so nice now. He installed four more lights, so now I have tons of light to do laundry by!

I really didn't want to give him up. But life has to return to normal. Unfortunately, he started overtime again today, and it is supposed to last until at least April. Bleh.

Over the holiday we found out that my mother has a very large tumor/cyst/mass in her stomach. She'll be having surgery to remove it on the 9th. They aren't sure what it is exactly, where it originates from, or if it's cancerous, but they'll find that out with the surgery. Thoughts and prayers would be appreciated.

Happy Monday all, I'll be sharing my goals for 2013 later in the week!
~Meg

Busy, Busy, And More Busy

by Rachel Wolf Photography

I haven't posted since the week after Thanksgiving!

We've so busy! Even if we aren't doing particular events, we've just been busy enjoying each other, and our time off school, and the cold and drizzly weather. Since moving into the closet, I haven't been on the computer as much since it's too far away from the kiddos for me to keep an eye on them. It's been wonderful! My brains has felt so much more relaxed without being as wired into the web. But that is why I've been lax in posting and commenting.

by Rachel Wolf Photography

Let's see, what have we been up to?

I hosted a Christmas Cookie Exchange on the 7th. It went really well and was a lot of fun! There were SO MANY cookies, I had to send a whole box to work with Ben because we couldn't eat that many.

by Rachel Wolf Photography

I started two things that need feeding: Sourdough starter and a compost pile. The former is going nicely. I've been feeding it daily to make it more sour. The latter, we won't find out how it went until spring/summer, but at least it's started. I wish I could show you pictures of my amazing, productive winter garden, but it doesn't exist. all that has been coming up is radishes and peas. Everything else gets chomped by slugs as soon as it sprouts. I've ordered Sluggo. Their days are numbered.

The company party for work was this last Saturday, and it was hosted in the same place my sister had her wedding, which I thought was funny.

Even funnier: We played a Guess-the-name-of-the-Christmas-songs-based-on-the-clues game, and since I got 19 out of 25 (with help from the rest of the table), I got to take home the centerpiece. Notice how their are two centerpieces in the above picture? Another game was seeing who had the sticker on the bottom of their dessert plate.... And that would be Ben! So we got to take home a second one as well. Even though it was funny, and I was a bit embarrassed by all the attention, they are really pretty and smell very nice.

by Rachel Wolf Photography

 I have all of the presents wrapped for Ben & the kids. I am ready for our Christmas! We just have the extended family presents we need to finish wrapping, and then we are all set. I can't wait for next week and our stay-cation that we will be enjoying!

Just another reason our neighbors are wonderful: The elderly, but very energetic, neighbor on our right side was on a job and the man he was doing work for was looking to get rid of this tether ball. He thought of our boys and brought it to us. The kids have been loving it. They were out there first thing this morning playing with it. He is the same neighbor who has given us bags of potatoes, beans and rice. He brought us more beans and rice yesterday, as well as a box of different wines and some home brews, in addition to the tether ball. He is so sweet and kind, and we are so blessed to have such wonderful, amazing neighbors.

by Rachel Wolf Photography

This week is the week of making caramels and cinnamon rolls. Everyone at work has been harassing Ben about when they are getting them this year. It makes me laugh that now they have decided it's tradition. So I will be very busy this week supplying them with goodies.

I've been working on a few pairs of fingerless mittens for an order. Just a pair of man mitts, and a pair of heart mitts. Once they are done I will be done with orders for the rest of the year so I can focus on family activities. We will be so busy these next two weeks with all the family events we have going on. I'm excited, but already exhausted from just the thought of how busy we will be!

I'm also thinking about changing my business name to something less specific, in order to incorporate some other things like handmade soaps.... What do y'all think? Would you be interested in soaps and things, or should I stick to the knits?

Well, that's what we've been up to.

What are your plans for the holidays?
Meg

All the snow pictures are from a trip we took to the mountains about a month ago and were taken by my beautiful sister who does amazing photography. Anyone local looking for a photographer can email me for her info!

Thanksgiving Weekend

We ate three Thanksgiving dinners over the long weekend.

I feel like I'm going to explode.

But it was a wonderful weekend! Aside from a brief intermission in which Ben had to go into work for an hour to fix something on Saturday night, I had him for all four days. It was wonderful! Ben is calling it our test run for Christmas, which he is taking the whole week off for.

This is the only picture I took all weekend. This is the bird we did Friday night for ourselves (because it's not a real Thanksgiving unless you have leftovers). Ben smoked it for about 8 hours and oh my was it good.

On Sunday we put our tree and decorations up. I'm so, so excited for Christmas. I love Christmas now that I have kids! It's so wonderful to spend a lazy morning waking up and watching them open their presents and having coffee and yummy things.

I am planning on making a truck load of ornaments for our tree this year, seeing as it's a bit sparse. I have a vision of lots of white and red ones, maybe a few gold. I already have the yarn ready to go, I just need to finish this last fingerless mitten.

Happy Monday,
Meg

P.S. - I feel like the grammar in this post is terrible. Forgive me. We had so much fun I didn't get much sleep this weekend.

The Big Move

Motherhood is a funny thing.

At the same time I am so terribly proud of my boys and how big they are getting, it hurts my heart that they aren't my "little" guys anymore - even the baby is a big boy now.

This weekend we bit the bullet and moved everyone around. We bought the twins new bedroom furniture and what used to be our office is now their room. Our office is now in our master closet.

In addition to that, Munchie moved out of the bassinet in our room to a crib in Duder's room.

Those first few nights of the baby moving out are the hardest for me. I can't hear his little breathing anymore, can't reach over and feel him. I was up a lot running in the other room to check on him. Ben keeps saying I'll get more sleep because now I won't hear him fussing.

Well, I still heard him fussing and I kept wanting to go get him, but I tried to be a big girl a let him fall back asleep. He would, and I was only up with him twice last night, but was awake anytime he made a peep. I think he will get used to it fairly quickly though. It's time he learned to be on his own a bit.

I think the person who took it the hardest was Duder. On Sunday morning when we were getting ready to leave for the furniture store
we were telling the boys what we were going to do and reminding them that they were getting their own room, while Munchie was moving in with Duder... And it nearly crushed Duder's heart. He's been one of the boys for so long he's practically a triplet. He was very upset, crying and telling me over and over that he didn't want to sleep with Munchie, he wanted to sleep with his bubbas and he didn't want them to move.

Soothing words and telling him he would have fun with Munchie, and by the time we got back with the furniture he was starting to feel better. Once everything was set up and moved and he realized he could play on the bunk beds with his bubbas, and seeing Munchie move in with him seemed to make it all better. It even made him step into his Big Brother pants, as he would say, when he heard Munch crying after I put him down, "Me can be with Munchie and make him not scared."

When I came in at 2 to check on the baby, Brett had moved his pillow and blanket to the floor next to the crib, to keep the baby company. It is so sweet to see that he has such a compassionate and caring heart, especially after days where he has been tearing up everything in sight and being a turd.

 The boys are having a ball with their new beds. They spend all their time in there now, climbing up and down and around. In fact, in the middle of school this morning Ty asked if he could go play on his bunk bed yet. They were very excited to sleep in their "new room" last night, and this morning they were both telling me how they had fun last night.

And with this we move into the next phase of our life.

It's kind of weird.

Happy Monday,
Meg

Catch Up

I wish the weather was like this (from last year), but we did get some sprinkles last night.

This started out as a Woe Is Me post about how I'm behind in everything and I feel like I'm losing it but... Well I started annoying myself with the self pity, so let's change tracks!

Thank you to everyone who had such sweet comments about our Halloween picture. They have been wearing those costumers nearly every day since that night. Pirates at heart, apparently. It's all pirates, all the time.

I am indeed behind (or feel like I'm behind) in lots of things, but I'm slowly catching up. Blogging being one of those things, and knitting another.

I would love to show you the knitting of the large order I just finished but... I forgot to take pictures. *Gasp* So sorry! Just know they turned out nicely. ;)

I had to replant a ton of stuff that either wasn't coming up, or got munched by snails. I fear I'm a little too late in the season for planting stuff, but we'll see. This year has kind of been an experiment anyways. I am saving toilet paper and paper towel tubes for starting seeds in the spring.

I'm a little frustrated with the position of our garden. Two years of growing with not great results and I think part of the problem might be that the whole thing is in a corner that doesn't get as much sun as it probably needs. But I can't convince Ben to let me move it to the middle of the lawn, hehe.

I'm not sure if I've told you this already, but we might (possibly, maybe) be getting rabbits in the spring. Ben doesn't want chickens here, but he says we could probably do rabbits - well a single rabbit. We want something for soil building/compost and while chickens would be ideal (to me, for eggs as well as manure) rabbits will get the job done and on the up side, their pellets don't need to "cook" like chicken manure does.  I am bound and determined to get a decent garden going, one way or another.

We had our first sit-by fire of the year last night. We just light it in the smoker's burn box and leave the door open to enjoy. It was so nice and I'm so excited for this year's fires to come. One of my favorite things is sitting out there with Ben, no TV, no computers, no nothing.

I am greatly enjoy Folks, This Ain't Normal!  His sense of humor is wonderful, his arguments and points are well thought out and thought provoking, and his view of life and how things should work and be just make perfect sense. I'm only about half way through the book, but I would already recommend it.

The season of baking is upon us! I want to bake absolutely everything, how about you?

Happy Friday my dears!
Meg