A Merry Joyschool Christmas

Sammy has had a wonderful last few months with her Joyschool group! We have done a lot of fun things, including last week when we had the opportunity for the kids to serve the elderly their lunch at the Art's center up the street! It was so cute, and they did such a great job! They all got to wear their cute caps, gloves, and aprons and after they served the old people their salads, they went up on stage and sang a bunch of their Joyschool Christmas songs, which of course the old folks thoroughly enjoyed. One lady even came up and gave me $20 to give to the kids!! I really tried not to take it but she was insistent. But we put the $20 to good use where we bought gifts for the kids to exchange at our Christmas party, as well as use it for a gift we bought for a less fortunate kid that we were getting a Christmas present for, so we felt good about that!

Our Christmas party was really fun too! The kids got to dress up and put on the Nativity, which they loved doing, and then of course they had to sing all the songs we've learned from Joyschool. It was a really fun party spending time with friends, and seeing how much fun all those kids have together! Looking forward to good times next year.

Is anybody there??

Hello fellow bloggers! So I took a little break over the summer and it extended a bit into the Fall. What a fun summer it was! So much to post but I think I'll just start with Halloween.
I was a little too ambitious for my sewing skill level in my attempt to make homemade Halloween costumes. Sammy wanted to be Ariel and we already had a costume, so that became the theme for our family. So I had her costume taken care of, I bought a lobster costume online for Taylor so she could be Sebastian, and then I thought I could make mine and Dave's costumes. I was going to be Ursula the seawitch and Dave was King Triton!

It ended up turning out okay! I was happy and I think if there was an award for best dressed family, I think we would have won! It was fun dressing up together. I don't know if I'll do it again next year, or ever again. It was hard because again, my craftiness only extends so far until it's very hard and stressful to try and make something from reading instructions from another blog. At least it turned out okay, because if it hadn't, and I'd spent all that time in making them, I would have been mad!! I have had plenty of unsuccessful attempts of making other projects, and I didn't want this one to go the same way.
The same week of Halloween I was in charge of Joyschool and had to put on a Halloween party with all the kids. It was really fun and we had a costume parade with all the kids. Sammy loves being in Joyschool with all her friends!
Hope you all had a great Halloween this year!

4th of July!

It's always nice to have a beautiful sunny day for the 4th of July in Oregon! It doesn't always happen but yesterday it did! The whole weekend was quite nice weather wise. We spent a lot of time downtown hanging out at different water fountains and Saturday's Market. Yesterday for the 4th we went hiking in the morning at Silver Creek Falls. What a beautiful place to be. It was only the second time I had ever been there. Because we had two kids hiking we didn't go too far but enjoyed the waterfalls and playing in the water for a couple of hours.
Afterwards we went to the Bell's house and celebrated the rest of the day with birthday cake, delicious food, water fights, motorcycle rides, fireworks, and good friends and family. Happy 4th to Everyone! God Bless America!

Preschool Performace

This last year Sammy got to attend the Westside Academy Dance Preschool which she loved. She was so happy to go to Preschool where she did Gymnastics and Tap Dance two days a week. It was so fun for me to have her there just as much as she loved it. At the end of the year they do a dance performance, and yesterday it was at the Newmark Theater downtown. Sam was all dressed up in her dance outfit and her Preschool group did a dance during the performance. It was such a proud moment for Dave and me, and we loved watching her up there dancing and singing! So proud of our Sammy!

catching up

Well usually I'm good at posting a bunch of pictures when a lot is happening, and lazy when I don't have much to post, but lately I have been lazy in both respects. So instead of recapping all the pictures from Easter, and Mother's Day, I think I will just start from this last weekend, which was so much fun for us!
Dave participated in his first ever 100 mile bike ride from Beaverton to Pacific City on Saturday. Luckily for us, our friends have an aunt who let us stay at their beach house which was literally down the street from the finish line! So Sam, Taylor and I drove to the beach on Friday with our friends the Montgomery's and the Cinquinni's came later that night. We were there waiting for Dave when he crossed the finish line! We spent two nights hanging out playing on the beach a lot where it DID NOT rain on us at all (pretty unbelievable for Oregon weather) and we had sooooo much fun. Dave finished his race in about 6 1/2 hours and was pretty tired afterward. He even shaved his legs, arms, head, and face for the event. I have never seen him so hairless!
It was a very enjoyable weekend with good food and great friends! So much fun for us.

Great Minds Think Alike!

So I was talking to my sister the other day complaining about how I wish I had more Gospel resources to use to teach my kids with, especially for Family Home Evening. Buying church materials is expensive!! I remember growing up my mom had a felt board with felt stories she would use, and I really liked that. So I looked online to see about buying some felt stories, and if you buy them as a set they are $150!! So I had to scrap that idea, way too expensive, and started looking for tutorials and such, and I found this ladies website where she downloaded all this LDS clipart, colored the pictures using her computer program, put them together in a printable format, and put them on her blog to share with everyone! I got so excited and was telling my sister all about it, thinking I'm amazing for finding her website, and she was like "that's funny, I found the same site and am working on doing the same thing for our ward!" It was funny that we would both be working on the same project from something we found online without talking about it first....except she is doing it for her ward, and I am just doing it for myself!
I thought it was a great idea for Family Home Evenings to get Sammy interested in Scripture stories, and making it easy to understand. A short story with pictures..perfect! She put up stories from the Book of Mormon, Old and New Testament, and Church history stuff! I am almost done with my stories, I just have to find a cute way to make my felt board! The other great thing....Joann's has all their felt on sale this week too! It's my first project of the year! Finally!
You can find this ladies blog here
Here are just a couple of my stories that I've already finished! The Stripling Warriors, and Daniel and King Nebuchadnezzar

Extreme Couponing!

So I promise that I'm not sitting around watching tv all the time, but when I saw the previews for this show I knew I HAD to watch it! In the last couple of years I have been trying to get into clipping coupons and saving money. I think I was motivated by two things: One, well of course it was out of necessity. Food is expensive (even more so today) and not having a lot of money forced me to try and save money on food. And lets be honest, I don't think a rich person would automatically say "hmmm I think I'll start couponing today" because it is a lot of work. My second motivation was my sister in law Hilary. I almost think that she should be on this show because she is amazing at finding a great deal. She could probably come out of Target with two carts full of toys and clothes and spend $20! which is exactly what these women on TLC's Extreme Couponing do!! Man they have it down to a science! One lady's grocery total was over $1000 and she ended up paying like $2!! Okay I could NOT spend 4-5 hours a day on the computer looking for coupons, going dumpster diving for coupons with my young child, or spend 5-6 hours in the supermarket gathering all my deals and stacking my coupons! What?? It was fascinating to watch, and I felt like I related to some of these women (and 1 man) because it does give you a high to go grocery shopping and saving 87% on your bill! Yes that is my highest amount ever!
In recent months I haven't been as diligent with couponing, but after watching this show I feel a bit re-motivated about it all, not to go to the extent that they do, but to get what a need, and maybe a LITTLE extra. Because the biggest thing that I HATE HATE HATE about couponing is when you go to allll the work of putting all your coupons together and matching up sales with coupons, which takes a lot of time, and you finally get to the store at the time of day when your kids are the most happy, and you're ready to get all your stuff, and it's alllll gone because the other crazy coupon lady decided she need the entire shelf of bathroom tissue, soap, crackers, etc. leaving nothing for the rest of us! I guess I'm just not the early bird, because there are too many times where I have not gotten the worm and I just get frustrated That's my biggest hang up, but maybe if I get a little crazy about it too, I might get more lucky!

Confession

People who know me, know that I love the Musicals. I have also occasionally watched and episode of Grey's Anatomy here and there (mostly the older episodes). But I heard they were doing a musical episode and figured I would watch, not expecting much because seriously, a drama medical tv show singing over dead bodies? The only medical show to ever pull off a great musical episode was let me hear it...The "Scrubs" musical episode. Funny...."Everything comes down to poo! From the top of your head, to the sole of your shoe...our number one test is your number 2!"....even my Dad enjoyed that one.
The Grey's Anatomy musical extravaganza was a bit weird to watch as I expected. The main reason I wanted to see it was that Sara Ramirez who plays one of the doctors on the show played the lady of the Lake in the original broadway play "Spamalot" and she has an amazing voice, so I wanted to hear her. The very last song of the show she sang was amazing. It was worth sitting through the whole show to listen to her sing that song. So good! Listen...

Taylor's 1st Birthday!

Has it been a year already? (at least it feels that long since the last time I did any blogging). Getting through January (and February for that matter) was a big struggle, and I know that it's due mostly to the weather. But it is finally April and things are looking up!
Taylor's 1st birthday was this week on March 29th!! The year has definitely gone by pretty fast. She has grown rapidly, although she was pretty huge to begin with. At a year old she is a spunky, fun kid, but a little timid. She still refuses to fully walk but she has been perfectly capable since at least 10 months old. She doesn't even like to ride in the swing at the park, and yet Sammy is on the big slide going down backwards head first! But she is very sweet and loves attention! She loves to put things on her head, yet she won't wear a headband and her hair is still so short people think she looks like a boy. oh well, I think this year will be a big one for her hair.
Last weekend we went down to Salem and had a birthday party for her with the Demcaks. She got her very own mini cake from Nana that was delicious. She took the huge frosting flower and stuffed it right in her face.






On Tuesday for her birthday, we ended up going to the new Pizza place in town that has an all you can eat buffet of pizza, salads, pasta, soup, desserts, and you can choose from a bunch of different themed rooms to eat in. Then there is another area for playing games, riding rides, and winning tickets for prizes. It was nice to go there and not have to worry about making food and a cake at home. Low stress for me! It's a really fun place to go, and it's now the second time we've gone! Mark and Tracee and Doreen came to our party too which was nice to celebrate with friends and family. Taylor made a big mess of herself by taking the plate of food, most of which was covered in chocolate cake and put it on her head smearing the chocolate and mandarin oranges all through her hair. Whaddya do, it was her birthday and she loved it! The only hard part was that she was sick and so she was a bit cranky. I found out the next day that she had a viral infection and got red spots all over her body. Poor kid to be sick on her birthday.
Happy birthday to our funny Tebow!