Spring Break Remo Day 2

Today, moving a little slower because those doors got me using muscles "I taint never used before!"  Just kidding, but I haven't used them in a long time, that's for sure! On the slate for today, a trailer full of stuff to storage an hour away where we plan to move!  Simon was waiting in the car, and just like all the other little foxes, he got in to mommy's make-up bag!!! Naughty little fox!!

So i did a quick search for the other's pics, i couldn't find O's and J's mascara pics, but I'm positive we have one! But' here's A's, I'll try to post the others when i find them, it's funny!

So here are the ovens.  Years ago, I took the door off and painted it a nice bisque, but upon putting it back in, I scratched it up so bad, I decided it wasn't worth all the trouble to do the lower oven, yes, so we've been living with this for years now...BUT NO MORE, HA HA HA! (evil laugh)

That thing is heavy!

The empty hole is the wrong size for the new one, of course, i really wasn't expecting it to be the right size!  More to come tomorrow!

Spring Break Remo Day 1

Ahhh, Spring Break!  Sipping coffee in your robe outside in the lovely weather, making pancakes for the kiddos, enjoying the fam, nice easy pace.  EHHHHHHHHHHHH, nope, not this spring break, time to knock out some work.
Today on the slate, about 7 trips to Lowes with the trailer!  Just kidding, only two! The key is, involve everybody, ALL Work!!! HA HA HA, yeah right!

 Here's my little love, she is large and in charge let me tell ya, bossing anyone around that comes near her on this get up, definitely the captain of the ship!!!  What a doll!

 Here is the sliding and i use the word sliding loosely, because this door didn't slide much, more like grind to the left, grind to the right!  You should see O's biceps!

 Here it is from the outside!!  With my lovely mirrored tint i put on a few years ago, and my wife promptly (the same week) taped a note to it and when the note came off, so did the tint, you can actually see it if you look closely in the picture above. It was funny....a while after!  We joked that it was our little peep hole thru the tint!

 Yikes it looks like I'm wearing a dress in this picture, what gives!

 Poof, the doors are gone!

Where's my hammer!!!!

 Daddy, can you just leave it like this? No one actually said that, but i thought they might!

Poof the doors are in, YEAH RIGHT, after much positioning and repositioning and repositioning

 Some more adjustment.

 Installing the locks things for the non-handled door.

 A's putting in those annoying little covers for the screws, OMG!!

Don't look close though, lots of trimming needed, but I foresee some more adjusting!  It rained today and of course the doors absorbed all that humidity and it made them not shut quite right!

I like for my doors to just click shut, and latch and lock without any major effort!  I want my three year old to be able to shut the door and lock it.  Anyway!

After all is said and done, made some chicken and rice, provisions for the rest of the week!  Kept me up way too late!!

Pre Spring Break Remo!

Didn't I become a teacher so I could spend spring break with my kids?  Well this spring break we are getting out house ready to sell! WOO HOO. Yeah right!  The thing about owning an older home is you never know what is underneath when you pry something off, or take something out! On the Friday before Spring break we pryed away our "built in" desk and what did we find behind it, a few photos, sorry trashed them.  And of course a water bill from like the first few years our house was in existence, coolness!!!!

Wish my water bill was only around 8$ now!!!

We found another one from 1989 but i don't have a picture!

This was friday night after work!

Saturday is somewhat of a blur but i know that sometime during the day we took up the rest of the kitchen floor.  I'm sure there was something in the glue that's affecting my memory from that day, the glue or the fumes.  I started chipping away at the floor, which is how i removed the first half or so of it, but my brother mentioned a heat gun to me for another job I'm doing and so i pull that sucker out and low and behold it makes vinyl flimsy enough to just pull right up and whatever was under the vinyl too.  But again, the fumes, yeesh!

What a mess! And no we aren't trying out blue as a cabinet color, that's peeling paint, that is also on the slate for Spring break but I'm not sure I'm going to get to it!!  Anyway, now that the floor is up it "paves" the way for laying laminate.  Anyone else worry about putting laminate in their kitchen, OMG, I'm a nervous wreck about it.  When i wash dishes I get water everywhere (as my wife likes to point out) and when we get ice, we are used to not worrying about the little pieces that break off and fly about when we drop one on the floor but now we'll have to be for sure!!!!  Monday, we'll be tackling the front door!

Carrot Juice and Gluten Free Carrot Muffins

Do you like juicing ?  Sometimes the left over pulp from juicing can be used for muffins or ingredients for other things.  I LOVE carrot juice!  Since carrots are used in carrot cake and carrot muffins I used the pulp from my juicing for my muffins!  First the recipe for the juice.

Blue Carrot Juice

1 cup spinach-put in your magic bullet cup
1/4 cup blueberries
1 packet stevia
prepare for your juicer, raw carrots and 1 apple, juice the apple first and then add carrots until the bullet cup is almost full covering the spinach and blueberries, blend well, this is super yum!

 

Carrot Muffins (made from the pulp)

These are gluten free as we have gluten sensitivity in our house so, alter according to your taste, i suppose you could use whatever flour you want.

1/2 cup corn meal

1 cup soy flour

1/2 cup flax seed meal

2 cups carrot/apple pulp (roughly)

1-1/2 cup loose brown sugar

3/4 teas. baking soda

2 teas. baking powder

 1 heaping teas. cinnamon

1/2 cup finely ground coconut

1/2 cup finely ground almonds

3/4 cup coconut oil

1 teas. vanilla

1 cap of pure almond flavoring

3 eggs

1 cup almond or rice milk

Bake 350 degrees around 30 minutes

Here is what the pulp looks like, i scrape it out of the top cover of my juiceman as well. 

I pick out the big chunks and chop them up and throw them back in.

The batter is really thick.  I added sugar crystals to the top, hey, we're not allergic to sugar!  Anyway, so they kind of keep their shape that you put them in as.  I'm definitely going to play with this recipe, i might try to add more almond or rice milk and switch out some of the soy flour for oat flour.  Enjoy, we like them, the girls haven't tried yet, but they'll be served in the morning, so we'll see.

Trying out mobile blogging...

Sent from my iPhone

Catching Up

Wow, over a year since the last post, you can tell that we are busy being parents and have little time to blog. I do have another funny story to share, I have shared it on FB, but I will here too.

Again with the Kitchen Antics! This time J was the one involved and S helping.
Mom busy in front room, dad on the phone in the bedroom.  J decides that she wants some Cinnamon Toast like she occasionally has for breakfast.  She gets her bread, puts it on a plate, sets it on the floor and puts (alot) of cinnamon on top.  She takes a couple of bites out of the bread and realizes that something is missing (sugar).  Ha Ha, but she doesn't know that it is sugar she wants and heads for the salt.  Meanwhile, S has come in to help, in his helping he somehow ends up sitting on the bread covered in cinnamon and has the perfect shape of bread stamped with cinnamon on his diaper.  Mom comes in to find a cinnamon bootie and J up on the cabinet.

I must say S did smell quite good with that cinnamon diaper....  :)

O, Oh my goodness

O always keeps us on the move.  Never a dull moment. Last night at dinner she was wincing and wining about a pain in her finger.  "Mommy, I have an owie."  Cry cry, wine wine, boo hoo hoo.  Holding up her finger she appeared to have some redness on her finger, so mommy approached for a closer examination. "O, that is just a mark from the markers you were coloring with earlier."  "Oh" said O, and went right back to her normal self.  How quickly we return from the clutches of pain and suffering, HA HA HA.  What a girl.

2009 in Review

Wow, lots of things have happened for us in 2009, we'd love to share some highs and lows.

Highs

K Got a new job

S began homeschooling

J turned 1

A started reading

Gr. Grams turned 80 we all went for a visit

K Lost 50 lbs

Grams retired...WOO HOO

Took out the wall between the kitchen and the living area and like it.

A completed her first year of Ballet and had a smashing recital

All S's siblings got together at Thanksgiving, it was fun.

Our small group multiplied and we are leading one of the groups.

NEW COUCHES (whoot whoot)

We did a serious purging of our closets. HA HA should i put this...

ALL OUR CHILDREN are OUT of OUR room!!!!! (Huge)

K-Made some awesome new friends at work.

Had a great Christmas with family.

Got to be in a blizzard and build snowmen for Christmas.

Celebrated NINE YRS of MARRIAGE!!

Found out we are expecting a baby.

S-got to spend more time with some other stay at home moms.

Girls went to Co-op.

K-ran first ever 5K and completed it without dying.

Made our little display shelf of gramas antique fiesta that you don't want to eat off of.

S-has books arranged by color in the living room.

Did Love and Respect series, ya'll should check it out.

Experienced more freedom in several areas.

Lows

Termite invasion

Ant invasion

An invasion from something I refuse to name

Plumbing issues (chuckle...not)

Said goodbye to our three chickens Lucy, Lexi and Lu Lu Leghorn

Accidentally ripped apart the garage door.

I'm sure there's more but who wants to dwell right?!! :-)

So...on to a new year, a new decade, and many other news I hope.

Happy New Year from this familyoffoxes to yours...

Good will to all...

Our family frequents the local re-sale store that is a nationwide retailer.  Can you tell I'm trying to not say their name.  We have no beefs with our local store, we love it, we go there often, as any store they do have issues with getting sizes in the right places and mens vs. womens clothing, at least from the mans point of view.

Anyway, we love to visit this store in other cities when we are visiting or passing through.  So since we're visiting my in-laws in the big big city, we thought we would check out a couple of theirs.  YACK, these are under a different management, and they have decided to organize their clothing by color, so instead of organizing by size, its by color.  So if i want a blue long sleeve shirt, i have to look through 37 different shirts to see if they have my size.  Not cool.  The other thing is they wanted 19.99 for a no name pair of black dress shoes.  What is up with the prices?  Ok, I used to sell mens shoes and womens shoes, this was years ago, but I'm pretty sure that most of the top brands are still up at the top.  I don't want to drop names on here, anyway...

Nonetheless I have to say that I was very frustrated and disappointed and just sharing.  So i appreciate our local hmm hmm "re-saler" should we call them...even more now, i guess i'll have to talk to the manager the next time we go in.

I did finally find a pair of shoes, not for 19.99, they were 6.99, and a brand that i sold at the high end department store i used to work at.  There is one more store I think we might give it a try, I'll just have to brace myself for the worst.

A funny thing that we noticed at one of the stores, in the housewares section they had 7 George Foreman grills sitting on the shelf, side by side, different sizes, shapes and colors, I almost took a picture to share, we thought it was so funny...

Merry Christmas!!!

Wow, we headed to my parents house and for the first time in 40 years there was a blizzard. Nice, so the girls had so much fun in the snow, it was awesome, cold... but awesome. Here are some pics to share.

So of course we didn't plan for snow, or in this case a blizzard, and had to run to walmart, in the blizzard I might add, and grab some "snow" gear, thank goodness for walmart, there goes this month's budget...

We did try the local Goodwill and found some boots for S, but she was the only one that benefited from that store.


I decided to shovel the driveway because we had to push the car to get it in and I wasn't sure when the snow was going to melt and I didn't want my parentals to have to face that by themselves...so at first we were just clearing, but when we came accross the 2inch thick slabs of ice I just couldn't cast them off, we had to do something with them.




 So it started as a small little igloo for one person maybe...then it expanded in to a princess ice castle, just about 4X8 ish.  Cousin C and Papa even got in on the building.  Anyway, it was fun and we got the driveway cleared which made for easy loading the next morning.





The thought did cross my mind that we could shape the snow on the outside of the walls to look like stones, and had it been at our house, I might have actually gone there, but it wasn't and we were leaving the next morning so...

Settting Up the Christmas Tree

Christmas is one of my FAVORITE TIMES of the year. We've had this tree since before we were married (we both worked at Dillards) so we got it for a real deal and the ornaments too. The ornaments you see are really glass and most have survived even with three children, they have a fun story.

One of our dearest friends had an adopted grandfather that gave her a bunch of his wifes glass ornaments that she had collected from over the years.  One Christmas, she re-gifted a bunch of them to us, they were mostly glass hearts with a few other things represented in the bunch. 

Then sometime later I found the same glass hearts at a garage sale, still wrapped up in the box, fun times, so we ended up with a bunch of hearts and we have just added to them over several years.  We have a family friend that sends us an ornament every year from Mikasa, Waterford or Lenox, it is usually a cross.  We love them, they are so beautiful, I tried to capture my favorite one up close. 

Then we decided it need some color, so the balls and icicles came.  I'm rethinking the icicles this year though.

We usually enjoy our Christmas Tree well in to the new year.

Thankfulness

Ok, so if you read this blog at all, and I'm not counting that anyone is, yes, I'm cheating, I am working on past blog posts, that I wanted to do at the time but I didn't, so confession...this is one of those.

We have a tradition at our house, it started when we were getting married, we put up the Christmas Tree on November 1st.  Then every day we wrote down something we were thankful for on an index card and placed it on the tree.  Sometimes we would do more than one.  And if any guests came over we invited them to write what they were thankful for on the tree as well.  Since we were getting married that first year, we had lots of guests come through and lots of them took us up on our offer to write down something they were thankful for.  What fun that was.  We may still have the cards in one of the Christmas boxes, we did save them for a while.  When our first child, "A" came into our lives that next year, i don't think the thankful tree made it up and it has taken on different forms over the years, but this year i think we found a happy mix, a thankful tree that doesn't take up a lot of space, has room for writing down what you're thankful for and makes for a nice display, what do you think?

"O" caught me taking pics and decided she needed to be in them.  :-)