My Favorite Picture From Lydia's Birthday

If you read my previous post about combining birthdays, I stated I would post some pictures "later". Well, welcome to "later"!!!! This was taken with my husband's camera phone which is really crummy but better than nothing. Miracle of all miracles, everyone was looking at the camera. Here is my happy brood!

Money and Food Stretching Tips

Here is a recent food stretching technique I've started using to try and make my meat last longer. One of our local grocery stores will periodically run a sale where ground beef is actually cheaper than ground turkey as long as you purchase packages of 3 (or 5) pounds or more. I try to catch this sale and take advantage of it. When I get home, we will take our 5 pounds of beef and divide it into 6 units making the meat that SHOULD last for 5 meals into enough meat for 6 meals.

Try it. I bet your family doesn't notice the absence of that quarter pound of ground meat and you get an extra meal from it.

You Can't Make Me - I'm Not Gonna Do It - At Least Not Right Now

Lydia's birthday is today. My "Miss Thing" is now 3. Abigail's birthday was 9 days ago. I had planned on a very small family birthday party here at the house for Abi. No big deal. Just a cake, drinks, and whatever gifts the aunts, uncles and grandparents might want to bring. I was asked a couple of times if we were going to combine Abi and Lydia's birthday "parties" because my nephew's birthday (same side of the family) is 2 days after Lydia's. So, for them, its 3 birthdays in about 10 days. I didn't want to but Daniel decided we would combine and that was okay. I wasn't for it but it wasn't worth fussing over.

WRONG.

We had the birthday celebration last Saturday and it was nice. But I had bought a brownie mix and some frosting to make for Lydia's birthday today. I wanted her to have SOMETHING special just for her on her day. Well, today just wasn't a good day.

It was 3:00 before I realized I hadn't sat anything out for supper. I kept trying to make the brownies all day but stuff just kept coming up. So as I was trying to make brownies around 3:00, I got a call from Abi's school letting me know that she didn't have a ride home. In the process of trying to figure that out, I skip the eggs in the brownie mix!!! DO NOT FORGET THE EGGS!!! I put them in the oven and they just weren't baking correctly! I couldn't figure it out! I kept looking at the box trying to figure out if I had the oven set wrong or maybe they hadn't baked long enough. 45 minutes into what SHOULD have been a 30 minute process, I realized I had forgotten the eggs. So I had this rubbery, greasy, bubbling mess!!! NOW WHAT?! I HAD to have SOMETHING for her birthday because I had tried to sing her "happy birthday" that morning and she told me it wasn't her birthday yet because her birthday wasn't on the table!! (no cake - no gifts) GRRRRRRRR! The three year old had no clue about combining birthday celebrations!! I knew she wouldn't.

Plan B - make a home made birthday cake. This I can do. She wants a pink cake. Ok. STINK! No red food coloring. Plan Bb - ask her to pick either a yellow cake or a green cake. She selects green. No problem.

Now on to dinner! Thaw the ground turkey for spaghetti. Set the water on the stove to boil for the spaghetti noodles - um . . . . . noodles . . . . . where ARE the noodles? No noodles. We had bought everything to make the spaghetti EXCEPT the noodles. Plan B - egg noodles. Crisis diverted yet again.

Dinner goes fine. Not really enough spaghetti sauce. Mental note to self to purchase an additional jar of sauce at Aldi when planning next spaghetti meal. Cake is done. Did not over bake. Allow cake to cool and on to the home made frosting. No real butter. Stink. Must use margarine. Not the end of the world. Mixing the frosting with the mixer when my beaters start clunking and rubbing. I stop the machine. No apparent problems. Start it back up and they started clunking together so loudly it scared me!! Mixer is now officially dead. Had to finish mixing the frosting by hand. Now need a new mixer.

Deep sigh.

I'm so glad she is only 3. I had asked Daniel to stop by the Dollar Tree to get her 2 small $1 gifts so she would have something to open, as AGAIN, she had no clue we had already celebrated her birthday the previous weekend. She was thrilled with her green cake. She was thrilled with her new coloring book, fairy doll, and Dora spinning tops. She was even happy with the birthday card Abigail had made for her.

Lesson learned through all of this - Never Never Never combine birthdays for children. It is their special day celebrating their unique entrance into this world and should remain as such.

Second lesson learned - always keep a spare cake mix in the house around birthday time.

Thank you, Lord, that my children are still so small that they are unaware of the things that are missing in their little lives.

Thank you, Lord, that today is almost over!

Thank you, Lord, for my precocious little three year old who is so appreciative of mommy's efforts.

Thank you, Lord, for all those sacrifices made by my own parents that I never saw or recognized.

(Hoping to have some pictures to add tomorrow if they aren't forever stuck on hubby's phone.)

Frustration On The Homefront And Why I Don't Homeschool

Elijah will be 5 in December. The boy is just a smartie and he is bored at home. I don't blame him. I wish we had a fenced in yard where I could send him outside to play. But we don't. So we try and work with it.

Monday I decided I would teach him the alphabet and figured I might as well teach Lydia (almost 3) at the same time. So I find an "alphabet book" online that I could print off. They color the "A" and then glue an upper case and lower case "Aa" onto the picture. When they complete all the pages, they color the title page, assemble the book, and voila, their very own alphabet book. I intentionally chose to do this while Abigail was home on Monday evening because I thought she would enjoy helping me teach the other children. It went over fabulously! They loved it. We learned "A stands for apple A, A, A" and they had loads of fun.

Tuesday I was so sick and we didn't do our letter.

Yesterday, both were bored so I decided we would now learn the letter "B". Well Elijah did not WANT to learn the letter "B". He fought me the whole time. While Lydia was learning "B is for boat", Elijah was doing his level best to destroy his coloring page and fight me every step of the way.

So our "school session" yesterday ended with Elijah's "B" paper being thrown into the garbage and an affirmation in my heart that if I had to home school my children they would be idiots!!

Today, Lydia will learn that "C is for cat - C, C, C".