so thankful for my family

i was just going through a friend's family photo albums online and thinking that she has such fun times with her family...they really love each other...and also thinking about all the dysfunction out there...and it just makes me really thankful for my own family.

we really are very happy together, all of us.

i have a wonderful wonderful (albeit, goofy) husband:

2 absolutely adorable children:

and we are just one really happy family!

how could life be any better?

i mean, really!

blueberry milk

so i'm on a bit of a healthier food kick right now...and while talking about healthy food at the table the other day, maeven asked for blueberry milk. well, i just happened to have blueberries and milk, so what the hey?

so i popped some in the blender and voila!!



it was a little chunky at the bottom cuz my blender sucks...so today i tried again, but this time with my food processor...much better! no chunks! and they love the foam it produces in the process.

happy kids

tree cozy--all i can say is... wow

check out more info and more links to more info, here.

random thoughts, killing time

tyren is behind me on the couch, watching "little einsteins", hopefully getting sleepy. this is our night time routine for him...he falls asleep on the couch while i work/play on the computer. tonight has been hard to get either one of the kids asleep though. i just had to do the "heavy game" with maeven...she's been in bed for awhile and can't sleep...so she likes me to do this game where i start at her toes and touch toes, shins, thighs, hips, etc...all the way up to her head...while telling her that part is getting very very heavy...she really likes it, i've been doing it with her for years. hopefully it worked to help her get to sleep.

our schedules are all out of wack with the change in time (daylight savings) and just in general we've been sleeping later lately, which means we are up later...and so on. vicious cycle.

tyren, incidentally...is not only mostly potty trained now (woohoo!) , but he's been waking up DRY most mornings! not sure how that happened at the same time...i didn't expect it yet. pretty dang cool. potty treats is what worked for him (for potty training, not the night time thing)...giving him a (non-sweet) treat every time he would go pee or poop...not only that but maeven got a treat for encouraging him to go. so its just worked like magic!

i have always had the theory that if they are later learning something, that they will learn it more quickly...and that's almost always proven to be true with my kids. so i guess i just have to keep reminding myself to relax and things will happen when they happen. i just didn't want to have a 4 or 5yr old in diapers. wouldn't have been the end of the world...but i really wanted him to be done with diapers. i'm so ready to be past the baby phase completely. although i will miss his cute toddler-ness. he's just so darn cute the way he says things and the way he dances around when excited and oh so many things!

and check out the curls again!!

i just can't get over them! LOL! and neither can anyone else, since he gets comments about them still everywhere we go. :) i do hope he gets some length to his hair eventually, though...i have always wanted to have a little boy with long hair...just like daddy's.

anyhoo, here's some recent pics of maeven too:

maeve and one of her best friends, brooke.

hangin' in the hammock

now there's a child on my lap, so i guess my blogging is over.

would you let your wife out like this??

well MINE DID!! HA!

i put maeven's halloween cat ears on at some point today when i was cleaning...and forgot i had them on when i went out tonite to return movies at blockbuster and get some food at trader joe's.

first i went to blockbuster for a good 20min or more. then i went to trader joe's...about halfway through my 20 or 30 min there a really sweet older couple said to me, as i was passing them in the aisle... "we really like your ears"...i was aghast! i was like "oh my! i totally forgot i had those on!" and ripped them off. they said "oh no!! don't take them off!!! they are so cute!!!" and they sincerely meant it! (they were very sweet) so i put them back on and mumbled something about how i must look ready to go to a club, LOL!! got to the end of the aisle and sereptitiously ripped them off again.

got home and said "thanks HON for letting me know i still had these things on!!!" to which my ever kind hubby proceeded to laugh his ass off. great. very nice.

LOL! it WAS funny though! i had a friend years ago that taught preschool with me that once went to the bank with a yarn pony tail on...now i guess i've joined her silly ranks. LOL!

the "real" xmas

i just realized i talked about the stress of xmas, the prep and the roof caving in...but didn't really detail how our actual family time went...

so here goes...

let's see...normally we do xmas eve at adam's dad's house (his parents are divorced), and then to church with my family....then xmas day usually is here at our home for the morning, then off to my parents for a few hours then off to his sister's or mom's house to celebrate the rest with the majority of his family (where all his siblings and families usually are).

BUT...this year was different.

this year, his dad recently broke up with his girlfriend and moved (fairly recently), and didn't have us over because he has a tiny little place now. (usually his dad and girlfriend, our 4, and adam's sister and her 3 kids and husband, so its not a tiny gathering...not enough room, even without the girlfriend). so that was one less place to have to go because instead, fred (adam's dad) came to his daughter (alisa, adam's sister)'s house. alisa decided it would work best to do the whole family thing (adam's side) at her place on xmas eve, because her husband's daughter (alisa's stepdaughter) was only there on xmas eve day, til 8pm. so we went to alisa's for xmas eve...made it there sometime after 5pm. (we were really late because of a bunch of things...including adam having to work later than planned, and my homemade gifts taking longer than planned, our son being impossible to get moving, tantrums galore, and...the roof caving in at just the right moment....ahhh, xmas!) canceled church with my family at the last minute...i explained it in that same roof caving in post....so we were at alisa's for like 3hours or so. opened lots of gifts and had a wonderful time! lots of joy and love and happiness abounded! let's see how many people were there?
adam, me, tyren, maeven, andrew (adam's younger brother/my kids' uncle), ian (andrew's son/my kids' cousin), jack (andrew's son/my kids' cousin), kat (jack's mom/andrew's girlfriend), alisa (adam's sister/my kids' aunt), rob (alisa's husband/my kids' uncle), maddy (rob's daughter/my kids' step cousin), mando/monique/amanda (alisa's 3 kids/my kids' cousins), eloise (adam's mom/my kids' gramma), fred (adam's dad/my kids' grampa), then all of rob's family...don't know any of their names but i know his dad and mom and his dad's wife and his brother and sister and brother's girlfriend were all there....and i may have missed some people...have to check the pics later when adam gives them to me to upload to my computer (i keep buggin him about it and he's not given them to me yet!)

then home again...kids sleepy but of course tyr didn't actually fall asleep in the car as i had hoped. luckily there were cookies to snag at auntie's house, so i didn't have to stay up late to bake cookies for santa...because i was already up LATE for other reasons, as you'll see...

maeven got her letter to santa and tyren's letter to santa ready with the milk and cookies...set on a tray near the tree...quickly into her pjs and off to bed where she read us the story "twas the night before christmas" entirely herself with NO help! she's quite the reader now! she didn't even stumble! (can you say "proud mama"!!) lots of interruptions from tyren, but still a special moment and adam got it on video...which i'll have to ask him for that video later too....have him edit me a short version of it.

then off to bed...well, maeven...and tyren continued to drive me NUTS since he was WIRED until he FINALLY fell asleep at 12:30AM!!!! oh i was PISSED, lemme tell ya! i had still ALL my wrapping and stocking stuffing and such to do and that darn child WOULDN'T GO TO SLEEP!! but finally he did. oh and i put out the kids' shoes with dry oats (oatmeal) and carrots, for the reindeers...because maeven asked me to cuz she needed to get to bed...took pictures of it too! just don't have those pics yet. but here's the after pics:

those reindeer are always QUITE messy! :)
plus it got quite windy on xmas day! hence, the leaves.

so then after i got tyren off to bed, i was FINALLY able to get all MY work done (couldn't do any of it while tyr was still up! and adam kept falling asleep on the couch, so i couldn't just disappear in the office to wrap gifts, cuz he wasn't supervising the munchkin who always needs serious supervision cuz he gets into EVERYTHING!) so i think i was finally in bed after like 1:30am or something like that...and it rained hard all night! so that really was a nice sound to sleep to! :)

woke up xmas morning to maeven...not til like 8:30am...my kids just don't wake up early for nuthin, i tell ya! LOL! just read a blog where the kids woke them up at 5am...i cannot even imagine either of my kids being alive at that time!! LOL! and tyren had to be woken up! he fought it too!! we kept telling him that santa had come but he was like "noooo, i hate christmas!!!" LOL! that's his word for everything he doesn't feel like doing these days...he will "hate" it, or its "stupid". he kept telling us that nana and bompa's house was "stupid" and he "hated" gifts...because he didn't want to go. same thing for auntie alisa's house. ah, such fun. he got over it, thankfully. he usually does eventually. he's just stubborn these days when he doesn't want to do something...and he doesn't want to leave the house these days, even for christmas gifts!

anyway....did the stocking and gifts here at the house...kids were happy, mommy and daddy were happy...we had a nice time...and then we got a little food in the kids and i started working on finishing presents for MY family (which i hadn't had a time to work on the day before because i was so busy working on adam's family's)...spent HOURS finishing those up...then rushed to get ready and everything wrapped and packed and out the door...were supposed to be to my parents by 2, made it there closer to 3 i think...still not too bad. spent the rest of the afternoon, into the evening there. i think it was around 8 or so when we left.

nice time with my parents and brother...and i DO have some pics of that time (cuz it was still on the camera, and i was able to download those myself! the others are already on adam's computer and he has to burn a disk for me to get those)...

here's a few...

opening presents

playing on the stairs (while watching a movie my bro projected onto the living room wall...hence, what my kids were looking at in that second pic.)

blowing bubbles (hey! i didn't even realize he got these!!)

working hard at adding antivirus/spyware programs to my dad's laptop...no really, that's what we were doing!! or maybe that was when i was showing tim my online photo album...something like that...LOL

we had a really nice time!! ate salami and cheese and crackers and just chilled the rest of the day away. very nice. :)

it was a good christmas, overall! and today we got up and busted butt cleaning our house! woohoo! got a good start on taking down the mess!! more tomorrow!!

digital photo printing

today i'm doing some serious research on the cost of printing my digital prints. i know i spent WAY more than i needed to, to print it myself (and just a lot of work!)...so i'm going to do some research right now and put it all here, for future reference, and in case anyone else is interested...ok so here goes...i'll calculate 100, 4X6 prints at all the places i check into, to get a good comparison...

shutterfly
free, unlimited photo storage
cost per print=.15 (.10 if you prepay)
shipping per print=.05 ($4.99, 76 - 100 prints, shipping goes up for less pics, down for more)
total cost per print: .20

snapfish
free, unlimited photo storage
cost per print=.09 (.08 if you prepay)
shipping per print=.05 (6-195 prints, .49 per 10, price goes down for more prints)
total cost per print=.14

walgreens
free, unlimited photo storage
cost per print=.12 (for shipped photos, .19 for in-store pickup)
shipping per print=.06
total cost per print=.18

walmart
cost per print=.09 (home delivery, more for in-store and 1hr)
shipping per print=.14 (approx...15% of total)
total cost per print=.23

wow! i had thought that walmart was much cheaper...but it appears now that snapfish is!! that's cool! i liked snapfish. i bought a photo book of maeven's first year of life there awhile ago. meant to do one for each year of her life, but never got around to it. maybe i'll look into that next. :) those photo books are really nice!!

made it through another xmas!

and had a good time! i just hate all the stress surrounding this holiday. all the money stress leading up to it and all the stress over getting gifts and for me, this year, all the stress of finishing planned homemade gifts!

this always happens...i always think things are going to take less time then they actually take. *sigh*

from the time i got up yesterday morning...i worked on the homemade gifts...amid children fighting and me freaking on them to PLEASE stop fighting so Mommy can get all these projects done by the time Daddy gets home from work (which was supposed to be sometime after noon)...maeven spread her projects out over more time (she has been busy making up her own things for people for literally WEEKS! wrapping them all and carefully putting them all on her dresser...she was SO grown up about the whole thing!! and SOOOO proud!!! and i was proud of HER!) but the photo gifts i had to do most of the work for and i procrastinated...it was really that i was having a really hard figuring out exactly how to do it. i procrastinated getting the photos to walmart...which would have been cheaper then printing them myself, which i ended up doing (printing them myself). but really, it ended up that i really couldn't have picked the photos and the sizes ahead of time. it was all trial and error. i figured it out, finally...by printing one sheet at a time (4X6 size) and seeing what worked where. i edited the hell outta my family's pics and got some damn cute gifts to give, FINALLY, though.

i made photo bookmarks using this print:

which i printed on a 4X6 sheet of photo paper and cut in half. one half for one side, one half for the other...cut out strips of construction paper a bit longer than the photo strip (about the same width)...so maeven could personalize each bookmark...and laminated the whole thing! mighty nice looking bookmarks, if i do say so myself!!

i should note that this was my final version of the bookmark...initially i printed up sheets with tiny pics of my kids like this, (although i used a lot of the same pic over and over):

thought you'd prefer to see one that had all different pics, though, :) actually this print is the one i printed up for the cover of each of the grandma's photo calendars. purchased "my grandchildren" photo calendars that had space on each month, and the cover, for a 4X6 photo. maeven and i picked out our favorite pics of tyren and maeven together and i printed them all up and maeven taped them into the calendars. i made the cover by cropping around each of my kids' heads in each picture that is in the calendar and putting them all together randomly in one image. really fun!! i think it looks really cute, don't you? god i have a LOT of great pics of my kids!!

woops, got off topic...so initially i printed up pages of little pics of my kids cut them all out by hand, also some larger pics, mixed them all together, glued them with a glue stick onto the strip of paper i had cut out for the base of the bookmark...can you say TIME CONSUMING??

then i realized i could save myself a HELLUVA a lot of work if i just photoshop'd the damn pics together to fit on one 4X6 piece of photo paper!! wow, the rest of the bookmarks were WAY EASIER to put together, LOL!

here's the final product, being held by my kid brother, aka "uncle tim":

then i made photo pencil cups out of food cans:

which ended up being a lot of work because i didn't learn my lesson from the bookmarks. odd, but i didn't figure out til i was partway into the 3rd and final photo pencil cup that i could have again photoshop'd the pics in a way to just glue the whole damn 4X6 (and part of another, because a 4X6 doesn't fill the whole can...hey, i think i'll buy 8X10 photo paper next time and measure the right size to fit the can completely and make a photoshop template that will perfectly wrap around the can!! VOILA!!)...anyway that's not the way *I* did it though....NOOOOOO....i cut each pic out individually and glued them all by hand onto the cup.

did you know that photo paper immediately curls up once you put white glue on it? yup, and my 8yr old very quickly got so frustrated with the project (which i had assumed she'd do herself) and i quickly figured out that it was not within her patience level or manual dexterity to figure out how to get the photos glued onto the can with rubber bands to hold them down while the glue dried (without damaging the pics)...use a blow dryer to speed up the process and constantly press (VERY CAREFULLY so as not to smear the photo ink, which incidentally, maeven found out the hard way smears with too much glue on it) on the photo and smear (CAREFULLY) the glue around the edges to train the pics to lay flat against the can...anyway........ it ended up being a big job. one which i thoroughly enjoyed doing, i might add...but a big job.

but they turned out GREAT! lookee!!:

in fact i think i'll make some more! gotta go get bigger photo paper. they looked really cool!! i used these pics for my father-in-law's, because he has more family than my parents:

top half of the pic is my husband and me and our 2 kids, and the bottom half is adam's sister (father-in-law's younger child) and her husband, her 3 kids from previous marriage and the extra little cutie in the far right pic is the daughter of sis-in-law's husband (previous relationship). so, aunt/uncle and cousins/cousin-in-law to my kids.

oh, and i made magnets too. forgot about those...i made them from this template:

i used photoshop to make these too....didn't have the patience to get the circles just right...shoulda tweaked them more but they were good enough, and i just cut off the parts of the circles that stuck out a little...next time i'll tweak it better.

i printed them on a 4X6 photo page and cut the circles out and glued them on a frozen juice lid, and glued a strong magnet to the back. i don't know if the glue will hold though, because i couldn't find our glue gun (which would have saved me a LOT of time and energy if i could have glue gunned it on!!!) so i had to use white glue. i'm not sure its strong enough, so next time i'm going to find the glue gun first. anyway i made those for family members too.

now, each one of these gifts probably doesn't seem like much...although everyone seemed to like them...but i made a LOT of these things!! (to be precise, 3 photo cans, 6 magnets, and i think 8 bookmarks...within the span of like 36 hours) so i spent ALLLLLL day on xmas eve day working on those things (specifically the ones for adam's family) til we ran out the door about 5pm, hours late, i might add, to sis-in-law's to celebrate the day with hubby's family for a few hours. amidst much stress and turmoil mostly caused by my kids, some caused by a house falling down around us and some friction between adam and i (more on these in another post). and then again today after we opened stockings and gifts...i spent the rest of the afternoon finishing MY family's gifts...until we ran out the door (hours late, again) to go celebrate with MY family for a few hours.

all in all i think it all worked out fine. but DAMMIT, will i EVER learn to get these things done AHEAD OF TIME??? probably not. i also don't know that i'll go homemade every year. LOL! did it this year mainly because we were mostly broke most of the time prior to xmas. (things picked up just a few days ago! but i was already in for the long haul with the already planned homemade stuff.)

anyway, MERRY CHRISTMAS!! i am SOOOOOOOOO glad i'm done with all that but it was really a very merry christmas despite all the stress.

now adam has the next 10 days off (he's maxed out on vacation time and we have a ton of stuff to do around the house so it was a good time for him to take off). and we have a house to clean the hell outta cuz it is WRECKED (in more ways than one) beyond belief right now...i couldn't even think about keeping up with housework, not that i ever do, i just let it all go to get stuff DONE!

tomorrow, the shoveling begins!!

curly top

check out my boy's curls:
everywhere we go EVERYONE comments on his curls! everyone says how cute they are, how they love them, call him "curly" and other such nicknames...so funny! i mean EVERYONE! its insane how much people notice his curls and have to comment on them! actually its very similar to how many people used to always comment on maeven's blue eyes. they don't seem to comment as much these days, but maybe its just cuz she's older now...not an adorable toddler anymore. i suppose the same thing will happen when tyren gets older...the comments on the curls will drop off.

anyway its amazing to me how much hair he has now! considering how not that long ago he had a LOT less hair!
here's how the progression of tyren's hair has gone:

apr '06--

The Great Baldini, 9mos

Oct '07--

2yrs

may '08--

2 and 1/2 yrs

Nov '08--

3yrs

pretty amazing how its just exploded lately!!

he got his first haitcut from my mom on thanksgiving:


before that he had these little clumps of hair that were his birth hairs that were super long compared to the rest of his hair...so long we often put his hair in a ponytail:


now his hair is more consistent though, and so i doubt we could get it in a ponytail again at this point. but it will grow! i really want his hair to grow long like his daddy's. he used to ask to have his hair in a ponytail "just like daddy", LOL! looking forward to being able to do it again. it looked really cute!

anyway, my little baldini's hair is finally exploding with growth...so i suspect he'll be a "long haired freaky people" just like daddy in no time. :)

my sexy husband

i've been working on getting photos ready to have printed for making some xmas gifts, and i just had to post these 2 great pics of my gorgeous hubby. :) ain't he just a hottie??? :)

the first on shows how cute he is:
too bad the flash didn't go off, cuz its kinda dark...i'll have to fiddle with that in photoshop later.

and the second one shows how his silly look:
darn flash worked that time!!

anyway, i just had to share. cuz i think he's pretty cute. :)

*sigh*

ok, things could be worse. i KNOW that people have it worse out there...but i have found that i tend to feel better about bad situations once i vent about them...so here goes...

*sigh*
DEEP BREATH

ok so i mentioned before how adam got a 10% pay cut, right? well, now here's the thing...its kinda confusing, so bear with me here...

he's maxed out on vacation time...he never uses it! so he's got 3weeks paid vacation on the books which now he cannot use because, guess what? business is SLAMMED at his work right now...which is good, right? that they are making money again? well its still going to take awhile before they are back in the positive...they have been keeping the biz alive using credit for awhile, so its good that business is hopping, but that doesn't mean adam will go back to normal pay anytime soon...

and in the meantime...we CAN'T GET FRIGGIN WIC BECAUSE OF THAT VACATION PAY ON THE BOOKS!!! they don't go by what he's making NOW, they go by the past year, which is on the paystub, including that chunk of unused vacation time!

so, without that vacation pay, we'd totally qualify for WIC...we qualified before his pay cut!! but that damned vacation pay, which he cannot get anytime soon, is stopping us from getting free food from WIC!!! food we could definitely use.

and to top things off...we still have a house in chaos because its taking FOREVER to remodel our "big room"... i've blogged about it before...the room had all kinds of stuff...it was our playroom/school room so there was a TON of stuff in there...stuff i have really wanted access to ever since, but haven't for going on a year and a half now! stuff that is piled up in garbage bags because it still is covered in toxic mold spores, so i cannot take them out of bags until its been cleaned with mold killer...but i cannot do that yet until i have A PLACE TO PUT ALL THE STUFF! and the room still looks like this:


and this:


so obviously unusable. so the stuff is still piled up next to my side of the bed in the bedroom and packed into the shed (i have a really hard time getting in there to get anything since its all full of garbage bags of stuff). and of course my kids keep asking for stuff that we cannot access cuz its in a garbage bag somewhere (god knows which one!)

anyway, the person that was helping us fix up the room did a bang up job and got all the major jobs done. despite how it looks...its come a LONG way...the new windows are all in, the walls for adam's office are up (the frames at least)...oh did i mention that while we were remodeling we figured it was time for tyren to have his own bedroom? so we have 3 bedrooms but one of the rooms is adam's office...full of his video equipment which bring us in a little extra cash here and there, so are very important...

tyren doesn't yet have a space of his own...so we figured while we were working on the big room, we'd use part of it for a new office for adam so that tyr could have his own room finally. (not that he'll sleep in it anytime soon, but he does need his own space...especially since he's banned from maeven's room). hence, the new walls.

anyway....so we are VERY grateful for all the work that has been already done. but its not done yet. nothing's livable yet. and now we just found out he won't be able to help us anymore. *sigh* ok, adam panicked big time but i actually remained pretty calm...i mean all the big stuff has already been done...if he just helps to install the door to adam's office (which he mentioned he might be able to still do for us) and maybe finish the stucco on the outside of the house, we might be able to handle the rest ourselves. hopefully. i think we can. it will all be a learning experience for us since we've never put up drywall and such. but it has been getting harder and harder for our helper to find time to help us anyway...weeks going by with no word, and we don't really like to impose on his life (even though he does owe us money, we never wanted to make the situation unpleasant). so maybe now we can get the job done faster, who knows? i'm just trying to think positively under tremendous amounts of bad situation all around us.

god this post is getting long...but it feels good writing it all out...

ok, so one of the reasons we were having this person do our room for us is that they owe us a chunk of money. so he was working it off...also he's a kind person to offer to help us! so by his no longer working for us, they still owe us a chunk...some was paid off with the work he did, but not all...and since WE had to borrow money to purchase supplies to finish the room (all our money is now gone...various things kept popping up...and the original money we loaned out to a couple family members over a year ago was the money that we had for fixing up the big room in the first place!!) and that borrowed money was only to cover the supplies, not the labor because we thought we had the labor covered...we were initially pretty upset (ok so it still is not a happy situation, but all will be fine)...anyway...we still don't know if we'll have enough to complete the job...but i have high hopes that all will be well eventually...if i can just convince my stress-prone, negative thinking husband!

here's the sort of amusing part...we are a one income family...who makes less than one income of many of the 2-income families out there. seriously, i mean we would qualify for WIC and medi-cal, if it weren't for that unaccessable vacation money! so income-wise, we are poor by government standards (but don't think that we really feel poor, because i know we still have things much better than many people out there...just going by the numbers). and we are not a super thrifty/frugal family!

i think the only reason we are doing ok is because my parents let us use their van (no payments there, yet)...our other car is paid off....we have no credit card debt (we never had a huge amount, because we've always tried not to use them much, but we did have some that was paid off when we re-mortgaged our house and took a chunk of cash out to buy adam's business equipment and pay off all our debt except the mortgage)...we don't have lots of extras...no cable tv (but we do have cell phones and dsl for our computers...but the bare minimum available)...we don't spend a lot on things like clothes or things for our house...we rarely spend money on anything other than actual NEEDS actually...all of my kids clothes are hand-me-downs or purchased by family. i can't remember the last time i bought my kids any clothes.

and so we're actually doing pretty ok. we definitely don't live outside our means...we do eat out far too much, but that's like taco bell and such...we try to eat cheap when we do...and its been cut back greatly lately (hoping to cut it out completely soon...but we still HATE to cook and HATE to go grocery shopping, so that makes it hard...)

i mean, we are definitely not "well off"...my son is still wearing his 3T winter coat (way too small) because i cannot afford to buy him a new one right now (actually the next thing i'm going to do is post to my mommy group and see if anyone has one they can spare to give up for him...we are all about hand-me-downs, i tell ya!) the only shoes my kids own are because of nana (she's a bit shoe-happy)...and actually many of them are going to good will because they've outgrown so many. maeven has drawers FULL of clothes because of hand-me-downs (thank god!) and tyren is doing ok because of my mom buying things for him when he needs them...although the coat and long sleeved shirts are next on our list of things he needs...he's doing ok. could be worse.

and adam and i get clothes frequently for birthdays/xmas so we are doing mostly fine in that dept. hell, adam has a closet JAMMED FULL OF SHIRTS because he always gets shirts for gifts! but that's a good thing cuz he does wear them out fast.

and i made about $250 for our xmas this year since we know that besides adam's pay cut we won't be getting his bonus (usually about $1000 and more than covers xmas and all the current bills) so i ran an event and have been trying to do all i can with my websites so that i can make money for xmas...and now we are down to just $130 left of that xmas money cuz of various expenses, the biggest of which was our $75 car registration which i had to use xmas money to pay cuz we didn't have it elsewhere. so xmas is going to be tight this year. we're trying to keep all gifts under $20...and are making as much as we can to save further money.

*sigh* anyway...i think i've vented enough...you get the gist. we have had bad situations come up recently, but it's all going to be ok. it always is. i know this. and i feel better now that i've gotten it all out.

if you made it this far, thanks for "listening". :)

when all else fails, i have to remind myself that i know of people that have things worse, this mom, for example. :(

its amazing what you can get done in an hour

my kitchen is always a wreck. i mean really bad. i'm not so great at housework in any part of the house but the kitchen just really gets trashed. and many times i just can't handle even thinking about it so i just let it go and of course that makes it worse.

the reason i'm thinking of all this right now is that i was reading a blog post elsewhere (don't remember where right now) and it was all about how happy she is that her house is in order and how good they are about picking things up and all that blah blah blah whatever. sickening really. LOL! i just can't handle reading how perfect someone else's house is when my own house is just not anything i can keep up with. ok so i know its my own fault and yes i could probably change things if i put my mind to it but my mind is always going 20 different directions at once and my house tends to be lower on the priority list than so many other things...so i've never been particularly neat to begin with and with kids...its just magnified. and i suck and enforcing rules about picking up after themselves because i myself am not all that great at it.

yes, i hate it, but i'm also soooooo tired of beating myself up about it so i'm learning to just live with life as it is and how we are and trying to let it go and do what i can when i can. i get this burst of energy from time to time and it makes me do whirlwing cleaning and then i'm seriously happy for a day or two til it gets destroyed.

so last nite it was the kitchen. for some reason i decided i really had to get a grip on it. so since the kids were buy with a christmas special on tv, and adam was working so no guilt for not spending time with the family...here's what i started with:


and just an hour later, here's what i was able to get done:
yeah there was still plenty to do but i did a LOT of dishes! i hand washed most of them and even dried and put a bunch away! the junk all over the counter is mostly peanut hulls from like a week ago when we were eating a big bag of peanuts and somehow a bunch ended up on the counter. adam was like "did we get more peanuts?" and i was like "no, those are from the bag before, but were buried under all the dirty dishes!!" yikes!

and notice the pitcher of tea that i brewed? that's the best purchase i've made in years! while i was cleaning i even got some ice tea made! :) and the things still in the sink are soaking in hot water, and i cleaned them later. now the counters are even cleaned, i just haven't taken pics yet.

i didn't take a lot of pictures that time around because i wasn't done yet...did more later and then more this morning...and i plan to finish it up this evening, but right now i have a migraine and so the pics will have to wait for my vicodin to kick in. :) vicodin good! :)

anyway the gist is that i was quite proud of myself for getting so much done in a relatively short amount of time. go me!

but isn't this a better post than the ones where everything is just perfect and their houses are in order and their kids are all well behaved and their marriage is perfect and everything is hunky dory? i hate those people. LOL! doesn't it feel better knowing i'm a slob? LOL!

and don't worry, the kitchen will probably only stay clean like a day.